I have three folk "communities" or "families" - Mudcat, Ballad-L and the Pacific Northwest, centred in Vancouver. There's some degree of overlap between the first two, less with the third. It's the third that I grew up in. I arrived in Vancouver in 1968, joined the Vancouver Folk Song Society, and never left. I met my wife and partner Rika Ruebsaat at "the Folk", and we raised our children there: a core crowd of about seventy people, I suppose, with older ones leaving or dying, new ones arriving or being born.

I can't imagine life lived any other way. We've moved each other (dozens of times!), ate drank, laughed and cried together. We've been alternate parents for each other and have lived, as it were, in a little village together. To look around a roomful of people, most of whom you've known for forty years or more, is a comfort - even (or perhaps especially)when you've not been best buddies.

Mudcat and Ballad-L provide the same sort of thing, at one remove. We've been grateful so often to both Mudcatters and Ballad-L people who have gone out of their way to help us. It's a real charge to meet them in person!

My 2c

Jon Bartlett