COVID-19 Small Business Journal: Week 17 Update

 

To my complete and utter delight, the other day my jasmine plant bloomed. These tiny white flowers that I haven’t seen for years, and the fragrance! After years of neglect, under watering and sitting in the shadows: flowers. Nature is healing.

We are indeed slowly being overtaken by plants, and it has been lovely. I was trying to explain a reference to Caleb about how the front yard of the studio shop is like J.G Ballard’s the Drowned World, and his reference was Poison Ivy so I guess to each his own.

Another week here, and we are as glad to be here as ever. The AC is fixed. The oppressive heat is drying my laundry outside as fast as I can bring it out. I’m filling up my pens with glorious Jentle inks. I’m trying hard to embrace the concept of seasons of life, and perhaps one of them will be the season of life when Jentle inks were abundant.

As we move over into the languid, slow, stultifying summer months, I am embracing the opportunity to get ready to re-open, and to tweak things behind the scenes, and to write letters late into the night.

We are seeing more and more shops we re-open and we are working on it. Another week, and another update that says the same thing. Toronto has instituted a mandatory indoor mask policy, and we are grateful that city leadership has taken this step, although we wonder what enforcing it will look like in a small shop like ours. We are excited to welcome you all back soon, although what that looks like is still sorting itself out.

So there’s not much to update. We’ve gotten lots in, and I’ve been admiring the shelves full of neatly stacked notebooks. Dylan did some re-organizing of some of the shelves in the back and it’s a simple joy in life, to look at warehouse shelves of stationery all neatly sorted into spots. On we go.