isobelmtl

Writing under a Montreal sky

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about

Isobel Cunningham has published short fiction and poetry. Her book, Northern Compass is available on Amazon. She was born in Wales but Montreal is her adopted home. She speaks French, Modern Greek ( it’s a fun story) and a little Spanish…oh, English too, of course. She welcomes comments on her blog and looks forward to chatting with you over cyber-space.

Category: Blogging 101

  • You can take the boy out of the country…

       This is how a garden is made! Jump over the fence behind the apartment we are renting, scrape with a borrowed rake, run for bags of earth, pepper plants, artichokes, lettuce, onions, broccoli, strawberries(!) hack with a hand pick and add to the pile of stones at the base of a slope bordering this…

  • The price of tomatos

         Hell or purgatory. Choose! I suppose purgatory at least holds out some hope no matter how faint.  These are the shacks of workers who tend vegetables in the plastic greenhouses close to where we are spending some time this winter on the south coast of Spain. Huge swaths of the province of Andalusia have…

  • Hunting almonds, finding citrus

        This is almond blossom time in Andalusia. How beautiful it is to see the pink or white blossoms appear on bare stems. Even before leaves appear the flowers burst forth in a calculated gamble to get fertilized. That’s what it’s all about in nature, after all! Since insects are starving for pollen and…

  • The World is Round, so Brothers Let us Travel

    This is the motto of the guild of two young tradesmen we met today in San Jose. It is a very quiet town in winter but fate seems to put new and fascinating things in our path all the time. Have you ever heard of the German tradition of craftsmen walking around the world for…

  • It Was The Lizard’s Fault

    Friday was a brilliant day here in the South of Spain. It was warm and sunny and we were preparing to host dinner guests. Joe had many delicious dishes planned and preparations were well underway by mid afternoon. We both agreed that the smell of the fish stock  was a bit overpowering and I opened…

  • Old and New

      Yesterday we traveled over a torturous road to a small mountain village, Huebro. We came to hang around in the big hill town of Nijar. We huffed and puffed our way up to the look-out tower that gives a view over the sea of plastic greenhouses that fill the plain. The real sea glitters…

  • Only the Mountains do not Meet

    That is an old Greek expression that means you can expect to meet people with whom you have some sort of connection as you travel around on your journey. That certainly was the case yesterday. We went for a long walk on the sandy beach of Capo de Gata and then settled down for a…

  • I Plunge my Hands

    Dylan Thomas wrote in ” A Child’s Christmas in Wales” ….”I plunge my hands into the snow and bring out what I can find.” And thus he began a memoir, magical and familiar that has been loved by many for long years. Yesterday, I had my own childhood memory awoken by plunging my hands into…

  • Lorca..on the way to the theatre

      Last night, just a few miles from the site of the real-life event that inspires the piece, we attended a performance of “Bodas de Sangre” (Blood Wedding) by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Thank goodness I had read the play in translation last year as, naturally, the performance was in Spanish. Lorca, famous for his collaboration…

  • Sunny Winter Sky

      This may not be your idea of a botanical garden but it is one of my favorites. It is a shot of a rather bare spot in the garden in Rodalquilar in the province of Andalucia in Southern Spain. This pomegranate tree had only a few fruits left and those had been ravaged by the…