Jolicure Cats
In the spring of 1969, Lorne and JoAnne Bell, moved from Montreal to the small farming community of Jolicure, New Brunswick with their seventeen-year-old daughter, Lorrie.
(Read More)
For JoAnne the move meant she could finally get a cat. Lorne, who staunchly maintained that he could never bear the creatures, grudgingly agreed. For Lorrie, that decision launched a life-long series of feline friendships that continues to this day.
With the arrival of two feisty kittens, Alice and Lucy, a new era dawned: the era of the Jolicure cats.
Over the ensuing years many cats and kittens - smug ones, aloof ones, affectionate ones and wild ones - cats of many colours and cats with many toes – came and went. But a few, the ones that even Lorne came to love, stood out from the rest. Jolicure Cats tells their stories.
There was Louie, who slept in a frying pan and willingly wore little horn-rimmed glasses; Elsie who disappeared one day, was gone for several months, and returned home never to roam again; Tigger who, when caught in a snare, telepathically communicated to Lorrie her desperate need for rescue; Molly who thought she was a bird and spent most of her time in the porch vines; Smudge who became a widely-travelled kitty, spending winter ski vacations at Sugarloaf in Maine and demonstrating impeccable behaviour as a guest of inns and B&B's across the Maritimes and northern New England.
Jolicure Cats is at once a deeply personal memoir and a realistic tribute to the emotional journey experienced by those are chosen by cats to be their companions and who accept that choice without reservation. Accompanied by realistic portraits, these twelve stories are mini-biographies of real cats, told with love, humour, tenderness and sometimes heartbreaking sorrow.
It will appeal to animal-lovers of all ages.
(Hide)
Rabbit Dreams
"This is the story about a tiger cat and an old black rabbit." So this short poignant tale begins about the transcending of life from the here and now to the next unknown level.
(Read More)
It is told through the life and death of a rabbit and the cat that “watched over her” and dreamt of her when she was gone.
A story for all ages.
This edition is in limited supply. A revised enhanced edition is in the works.
(Hide)
Nutty Green Beans
While sorting through some mementos, several years after her mother, Jo Anne, passed away, Lorrie opened two rusty tin boxes filled with butter splattered and dog eared recipe cards. Nanny Bell's Ginger Snaps, Fancy Porcupine Meatballs, Beloeil Pudditng.
(Read More)
The family favourites were written in Jo Anne’s unique vague style and Lorrie thought, “These are just so Mom.” She decided to make copies for family members and close friends, one thing led to another, and Nutty Green Beans was born.
This is a collection of sixty-four home-style recipes, many of which came out of the nineteen fifties.
Each recipe is accompanied by a family photo and caption so that one can follow Jo Anne’s life as a young girl in Cleveland, Ohio, a young mother in Quebec, and with her grandchildren in New Brunswick.
Nutty Green Beans is spiral bound for easy use and the cover is made from Tantramar marsh grasses.
Banana Nut Bread Recipe
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup salad oil
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup nuts
2 beaten eggs
1 grated lemon rind
2 cups mashed bananas (about 3 bananas)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup raisins
Mix oil, honey, eggs and mashed bananas. Add salt, baking soda and flour. Mix well.
Then mix in nuts, raisins and lemon rind. Bake in a loaf pan for 50 minutes at 350°.
(Hide)
Moving Poems
This collection of twenty-four poems chronicles eighteen months in the lives of Lorrie, David, Scout and Smudge during the sorting, eliminating and packing up of “a lifetime of accumulated possessions”, and the dislocation while their new home is being built.
(Read More)
Accompanied by simple line drawings the poems reflect a range of emotion from laughing with the gulls off Rutherford Island in South Bristol Maine, to the heartbreak of losing Smudge two months into the new house in Fox Creek.
(Hide)
