Never Say Never

 

I have a rather beautiful dining room table. It opens out and leaves can be added to suit the number of diners. At full stretch, with two leaves in it, it seats ten. Because the wood is so pretty, I cherish it. I put on a ‘silencer’, a pad that fits, under a tablecloth if I have guests. And so I have acquired three sizes of tablecloths and underpads, for the closed size, seating four, the single leaf, seating six, and the full size, seating ten or twelve. The photo shows the table at full length but with only three chairs to the side. Four people on each side is quite comfortable, with two smaller chairs added to what you see.

I have hardly ever needed, over the thirty years we have had this table, to seat ten, and for many years I only had one tablecloth to fit the full size, a dark green that worked for Christmas but was okay all year. A few years ago I bought a lovely silver one for Christmas and decided that I would only need it. I gave the underpad to the YD to protect her beautiful centre counter and did something, I have now no idea what, with the green tablecloth.

This last weekend we were visited by two of JG’s nieces, with spouses and one daughter, to visit with our daughters and with us. My wonderful and highly skilled YD volunteered to cater for this visit. If you follow the count, there were ten people to feed. And so we dug the second leaf for the table out from under the bed where it lives, collecting dust and lint, cleaned it, and installed it. I messaged the YD to ask for a loan back of the underpad. But, where was the green tablecloth? The silver Christmas cloth would not do.  I had no idea about the location of the green one. No memory of what happened to it at all. It is quite possible that in a fit of tidying, I gave it away.

I spent a fruitless time searching every drawer and shelf where I thought it might have gone. No green tablecloth. Muttering, I dug out the next biggest one I own and found that it covered the table with no drape at the ends but would have to do. I have cutlery for twelve and plates for that many, so no problem there, and it was not very noticeable that the cloth did not quite cover. Except to me.

My wonderful YD planned, sourced and cooked the meal in my kitchen, with some help from the daughter of the younger niece. This lovely young woman is studying at Queen’s and is on a placement in Ottawa, staying with the YD. It seemed to the nieces to be a good time to visit, seeing her and us at the same time. They had a fraught and snowy trip from the Big City, but made it intact. And the YD arrived with a car full of food, soup, fish and all the trimmings, plus ‘starters’.

She and the daughter prepped, cooked and served a delicious meal. I contributed one pie for dessert. After the meal I found the ED in the kitchen. She had loaded the dishwasher right up to its maximum and was handwashing the residue. Other than the pie, I did nothing. I sat and visited with the family while the whole thing was rolled out, perfectly. I don’t think that at my best I could ever have done it, solo, with such panache.

The menu? Squash soup, two kinds of fish – salmon and whitefish – with baby potatoes, vegetables and trimmings, apple pie and ice cream. And a whole pile of shrimp and two kinds of cheese ahead of this feast. All cooked perfectly.

So, the ‘never’? I will not ever, (oops) tell myself that I will never need something again. Because, as sure as paint, an occasion will arise … yeah.

Our Home and Native Land

 

November 16th, 2025 is the date I put up on here last week. It is now the 20th, and I still have not managed to get my head in gear and write. One reason is that I am rereading some of the Barbara Hambly books in the Benjamin January series. A new one came in last week and was a real page turner, causing me to dig half a dozen out of the basement bookcases to reread. Hambly can really write, and although the January series is now almost a classic formula run, the books are still good. In fact, a classic formula can be better than most other stuff you read – Dorothy Sayers, for example, even if she did allow that she would like to kill off Lord Peter. 

I read to escape. I reread because I often don’t remember much about my first run through a work of fiction with a good plot. I will have been speed reading to find out what happened and when you do that, you miss the detail and, often, the best things in the book. When I reread, I take my time and try to pick up on all the detail I may have missed. In a ‘murder mystery’ this can be really interesting. How did the author keep the mystery going until the dénouement? Find the tiny clues.

We do not need tiny clues to figure out how the Liberals passed their budget, Green Party fulminations to the contrary. I am pretty sure the Conservatives are not going to want to go to the polls until they get a new and more acceptable leader. And the poor old NDP is struggling for survival. The Liberals may pick up a few of them if they implode. I am quite, quite sure that the Whips of the non-governing parties were counting heads just as avidly as was the Liberal in charge of getting the vote through. Deficit notwithstanding, as they say. 

I do hope that Mr. Banker is correct in his belief that we can rejig our manufacturing to be less dependant on the USA. And I also hope that Mr. Trump has too much on his mind to get back to driving Canada into the arms of America the Unbeautiful. (Let him keep playing around in South America and forget about us, please. Or work on his holiday hotel in Gaza.) Unfortunately, I do not really see how this diversification is going to do much for our dependence on the States. It is just to logical and too easy to trade next door across the longest undefended border in the world. (Yeah, I read all about the increase in border surveillance. Hah.)

I grew up in Windsor, Ontario. It is a manufacturing town (auto industry) south of Detroit. (Yep. Check the map.) The city depends on the auto industry; when the economy is good and people are buying expensive cars, Windsor thrives. Otherwise, not. When I was living there, there was a big Heinz plant in a small town, Leamington, close to Windsor, preparing food grown on the amazingly good crop land that surrounds the city. My grandfather made a good living on less than 100 acres, growing foods that Heinz bought, cucumbers for example. That plant has now, I read, been relocated to the US of A. I suspect a lot of that land is lying fallow. I really don’t want to look it up, lest it is even sadder than I imagine. And all of Canada is vulnerable to whatever the Americans decide. 

When a mouse is sleeping next to an elephant, it is useful for it to watch for twitching, dreaming and stretching. And be prepared to dodge. But we can’t really close down the border, or move away. Bottom line is that we are stuck with whatever they do. And the class bully  is in charge these days. The daily news makes dismal reading. (Stock market went down sharply today, who knows why.) 

Cat tale.

It is the butt end of a grey, cold, damp November day. The kind of day that really calls for you to have a book that you have read before, a soft reclining chair and no demanding tasks on hand. The undemanding tasks, the ones that are always hanging about, can be ignored, the book is amusing but you know the denouement, and the qualities of the chair are self-evident. 

 I have had a lovely nap, yes, thank you and I am now giving some thought to clearing the mess off my desk. I was aiming to find the bills that needed paying (see under ‘demanding’) but goodness knows what else is hiding under the sheaves and piles and notebooks. 

 I wrote that piece some days ago. Now it is the butt end of another November day, a very white one.

While I had my mind on money, I ordered three books from Amazon.. And I may donate the books to our local library once they have been to book club. You see, our book club has come up with what I consider to be a really good idea. We are working our way through John Ralston Saul’s Extraordinary Canadian series, choosing an eminent Canadian’s book from the list and reporting on it to the club. We figure we will use most of this year’s meetings on this as there are quite a few in the series and the library has a lot of them. 

 I chose to do Emily Carr next month and decided to buy the book as it is one of the few the library does not have. I also bought a book that is an overview of her painting, from adolescence on. Both books came today. The delivery was supposed to be yesterday, but we had a dump of snow, about 8 inches (and no, I am not going to do that in centimetres}, and the road was impassable. At noon today, which is the second day of the snowfall, the Township plow came growling along about noon and we were connected to the world once more. Well, by road. Both the internet and the phone were dead this morning and did not come to life until almost supper time. 

 I scanned through the book of paintings and quickly remembered why I do not enjoy Carr’s work. Although it is evocative and a wonderful record and commentary on West Coast tribal totems, her palette and her style do not resonate with me. It is amusing that the book of biography starts out with the author stating that he disliked Carr’s work. I will read on to see why he changed his mind. Maybe there is hope for me yet. I recall telling my mother, who admired and quoted T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is his most cited poem, I think), that I disliked his poetry. “You will enjoy it when you grow up,” she told me, cheerfully. Well, some of it speaks to me now. Since I am now 83, I am not hopeful about the rest. 

 I have to give the man his due, however. This is marvellous. 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, 

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, 

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, 

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, 

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 

And seeing that it was a soft October night, 

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

The Raveled Sleave of Care,

 In my second year of university, I lived in a boarding house with four other female students. We became friends and one of the friendships survived graduation and Moving On and has been a life-long joy to me. I was paging through my yearbook from that year a few days ago, preparing to throw it away (downsizing it are us, in a small way) and I came across this photo.

I wish it were colour as my friend was an accomplished knitter and was in the process of making herself a plaid school scarf in the school’s colours of bright red, bright yellow and deep blue. We were going to go to a football game at another university, and scarves in school colours were ’de rigeur’. She finished it, as I recall, on the train on the way to the game, with my help in weaving in the ends where she had changed colours.

I was not (knot?) an accomplished knitter. I had, up until the time we became friends, only ever knitted one sad uneven square for a Brownie badge. But I decided, and at this remove of time I cannot remember why, to knit a vest for my boyfriend for Christmas. I bought boring brown yarn and a pattern of the simplest possible garment, and worked diligently away at this epic. I vaguely recall finishing it and blocking at home in the days before Christmas and mailing it to the bf. Who did not, to my recollection, acknowledge receipt of it.

I had a scarf. My mother had made it for me and she, while a long-time knitter, did not knit at tension well. The scarf was lovely, of good quality wool, but she had made it in bands in garter stitch and my goodness did it stretch. At a home football game in my third year, I recall my boyfriend (another one) and I both wearing it. At the same time. At some point my mother took two rectangles off the end, lined and sewed them into an envelope into which the rest of the scarf folded, making a pillow.

This scarf lived with us until our YD entered at our alma mater and was given the scarf. It survived four years with her and was passed on, again, to one of my husband’s nieces when she became a student there. I have no idea where it is now; it did not come back from that adventure. And I cannot imagine to what lengths it has gone.

I have become a not-bad knitter since those days. But since I made a scarf and, I think, a hat for the grandkid when she was a small girl, I have not done much. There are partly finished mittens in a knitting basket and a drawer full of patterns, needles and ends of wool. These, I think, can all go to the ‘Reuse Centre’ that runs at one of our waste disposal sites. Along with a lot of other craft items. But, first, green garbage bag time; there is a lot of junk in my sewing and laundry room drawers. A lot of junk.

I wonder what happened to my friend’s amazing technicolour scarf.

A Paddle in My Stream (of Consciousness)

 It has been a long time since I posted anything, I realize. Several reasons. One is that I have become addicted to an online game called ‘Magic Sort’. This is only the second time I have been so, I guess, silly as to play a game for many hours and multiple levels (about 2600 so far). The first time I became hooked was by a game called ‘Lemmings’ and I climbed every level to the very last one. At the time, I had bunged up a knee and was pretty well housebound; playing the game meant that I could forget about the knee throbbing for a while when I played. But really, it was stubbornness. I would solve a level and just have to see what was in the next one. This new addiction is probably even sillier (More silly? Hmm) because the levels are either really easy (solve in under a minute sometimes) or not easy at all and take multiple tries. I refuse to buy extras and so I have to sit through ads, over and over, to be allowed to get back to the start if I take more than one try. I practically have a couple of the ads memorized.

Anyway, it has been very quiet around here. We had a fine Thanksgiving dinner totally sourced and cooked by my wonderful daughters and the ED’s partner, who obsessed about the turkey but did a fine job. All I had to do was one pie ahead of time and it did not run over or burn or come out underdone, so I guess I scored. Oh, and I set the table. While all the chopping and mixing and timing was going on, I was relaxed in my fine new reclining chair, playing my game and having a couple of nice naps. I do love my family.

We were one short, however, as the grandkid is now in England, a few weeks into her Master’s program. She is getting out and about on hikes and runs, and tells her aunt, who was overseas and treated her to a weekend in London, that it is a bit puzzling that she is not having to work harder. My mother was the kind of student who had to have everything down perfectly in case she missed something. She did a second Master’s degree while I was a teenager and I vividly recall her obsessive (to me) revision and the worry that went with it. I think my daughter inherited the gene and she certainly passed it on to grandkid, who adds diligent work to a fine brain. It missed me, for sure.

In a strange sort of reversal, how well you did at formal schooling does not seem to matter, once you have graduated and are out of there. Your proud mother may remember that you won a medal, but the world does not care much, if at all, unlike competitive sports, where placement is everything. Second place should not be a loss of first place, but it frequently is. And if it is the Olympics or World Championships or the like, just getting to go ought to be a point of pride forever.

In the intervals of producing this deathless prose, I am checking the score of the Jays’ and Mariners’ seventh game. At present it is top of the ninth, Jays one run up. My parents would have been glued to the screen, or to the radio before we had a television set. They were both fanatic baseball fans – in their case, the Detroit Tigers since we lived in Windsor. They used to rent a television for a month in the fall and watch the playoffs, whether or not the Tigers made it. The first set we owned was only acquired in 1954 or 1955. I do not know why we didn’t have a set much earlier; we were affluent enough to afford one. But they listened to the games on the radio. I still remember my mother ironing with the radio babbling away. I also remember watching the last game of the Canada/Soviet hockey series on TV while trying to get the laundry done and ironing my hand at one crucial point. I kept the little girls home from school to watch that game, but they say they do not remember that.  It was 1972 (just checked that) and so they would have been six and five respectively.

By golly, the Jays did it. One of my daughter’s stepsons works for the Mariners and he is going to be some sad. By one run in the last game. Talk about squeaking by!

I used to write letters to my mother and father, once a week, regularly. Long, newsy screeds with reports of what their grandkids were doing, what I was doing, the weather, the political scene, the latest scandal, whatever. No spellcheck, a ballpoint pen and, mostly, plain white paper. Sometimes I typed, but I ‘thought’ better with the pen, as it was slower. Now I type everything and this post is not as carefully done as my letters were, but the content is somewhat the same. I do have a ‘review’ function, and so the spelling, at least will be American standard, zeds and all. And I do keep the text for a while and review it. For what that is worth.

And so, the other reason. Finally. This reason is that not much has been happening to write about. However, as you can tell if you have got this far, I do not need much to be happening. I can babble on, regardless. And I should stop this and do the review, already. Goodness. No mistakes.

Silver Spoons and Hot Bathwater

 I have been thinking about money lately. It comes to me that I am and have been extremely lucky. I have never missed as much as a single meal because I did not have the price of food, nor missed a roof over my head, a soft, warm bed, cleanliness and hot water (well, except for the ice storm hiatus), transportation as needed. Child of Canada that I am, my education was freely provided until secondary school graduation. A bequest from my grandfather funded my university, along with help from my parents and savings from summer jobs I held because of training my parents paid for me to get.

Since our marriage, my husband and I have incurred no debt beyond mortgages and have paid off those regularly. We have never bought a car or appliance on time; we never had to do so as we could accumulate the necessary cash without much difficulty. In the one low-income portion of our lives, when my husband invested four years in earning a PhD, his and my parents stepped in with goods and cash whenever they saw a need. As an example, when our babies outgrew their cribs, my in-laws provided suitable beds. The first car I even had of my own was a gift from my mother; she got a new one and I got hers.

I know that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Not that I am prodigal with money. Both my husband and I grew up in households run by people who had weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s. We learned care and economy from them. In fact, if I were to run the kitchen the way I saw my grandmother run hers, modern ecologists would praise me. (But I am addicted to my clingwrap and plastic bags. Sic transit gloria and all that.) The bottom line is that I and mine have never had to worry about money; there has always been enough. More than enough in latter years. We saved money to fund higher education for our daughters who funded their education themselves through scholarships and work. And so those investments continued to accrue funds, augmented by inheritances from several sources. The present total is not a small sum.

It is not all that useful, sadly. We are not Bill Gates, and for those of us safe and far away in the peace and plenty of Canada, reaching out to save a starving child in Gaza or the Sudan is not clearcut. Any money you donate takes a tortuous route to the need. (If the Red Cross sends me one more ‘gift’ of a cheap totebag, I think I may have to cut them off.) It is much more ‘transparent’ to help with a funding effort close to home, where there is some clear need, and you can see where the money goes. A thing that really delighted me some years ago was helping to fund books at our local school that went home with children for their preschool siblings. We are very rural and a library was a hard reach for some families. Now there are preschool programs at that local school, and much needed.

I think of the camel and the needle’s eye from time to time. Not just for myself but for all of us in this favoured land. I read today about the USA funding cuts that will eliminate prenatal clinics in Afghanistan and think about our network of hospitals and ambulances and paramedics. The horror stories of misses are written up in detail, but the steady provision of medical care for all of us is less reported. Not that the USA has such provision; the cuts are coming at home too, as I understand what is happening. But, in fact, since WWII, it has been the United States that is the rich man and they have been funding a lot. Perhaps that funding has been coming from too deep into the purses of people without silver spoons – maybe without any spoon – and so such people have put in an administration that is cutting out a lot of that support. I hope they are not, as the saying goes, tossing the baby with the bathwater. We will see. And hope not to hear the baby screaming in the mud while the bathwater cools in the basin.

Phone icks

 I have just read that President Trump cancelled Kamela Harris’s protection. What a small-minded, nasty person he is. I choose the adjective carefully; I note that it is one he uses about Canadian trade regulations he dislikes – supply management, I believe.  If anything happens to that lovely woman because she is vulnerable to crazy people, it will be the first of the crazy people who caused it, most likely. Nasty does not begin to cover it. Sorry. I do not usually get into political comment here, but this one gets me. It is one thing to pull Bolton’s protection; at least he has some training in defence.  It annoys me more than the British government pulling Prince Harry’s guards when he had very young children. We all know and read about crazy attacks, regularly, and I can only surmise that Trump is so small-minded and vindictive that he actually wants something to happen to those people on his ‘bad’ list.

Anyway. Rant of the day. On to other matters. That also matter. 

I am crouched in my birthday present office chair, more than a little shaky, having just dealt with – well, sort of dealt with – a repair company for our refrigerator’s problem icemaker. It will not turn on. The operation required me to call their call centre, where I reached someone who was not only not IN Canada, she had, pretty obviously, never heard of Canada. Highly accented English in a very high voice. I did get it through to her that we have a refrigerator under warranty. She started looking for a repair facility by postal code and offered me one in Toronto. Um, we live a five hour drive from Toronto. She put me on hold and never came back. After some coffee and headbanging, I started over. This time I got a young man, also accented, who issued me a ‘ticket’. Nothing further ensued.

Ten days went by.

So, today I started over. At least I had the ‘ticket’ number and a phone number that produced a North American voice that I could hear. After a long, long time on hold – with music – I was told I would get an email. Amazingly, it came almost immediately. On receipt of the email, I was instructed to call and get a time for the repair appointment. I was also to email the purchase proof. I did that.

After I did that, I called as instructed and got another call centre. The repair company is Ontario-wide and has hired an incompetent moron for its call desk. We went back and forth a lot and I got more music while she researched the second ticket. She wanted to know where the email came from that asked me for the purchase proof.  Really? I told her. More music. Then she wanted my cell phone number. I use a land line, miss. We sorted that and I promised to stay close to my land line all day tomorrow. I put the phone down, carefully, into its rest. And, finally I got a third email saying that I would get a telephone call tomorrow to schedule the appointment.  

As I write this all out, I am beginning to see the funny side, but only to the gentle smile level. 

You know that trope about ‘what do you do all day, dear’? 

Yeah, for some reason my dear husband tasks me to make these calls. I really considered the adjective in the previous sentence before choosing to use it. 

About Miss G ...

 I have always been somewhat embarrassed over the years to write about my marvellous offspring. It seems like hubris or something, and I am quite sure their level of success and accomplishment is theirs, not mine. But. The next generation is just as marvellous as the previous, and I am going to rejoice here in this space. I just have to. You are now warned and can skip the post and come back later.

My granddaughter  - the one I used to post about as 'Little Stuff' - is a big girl now. She graduated from McGill Thursday evening. My tall, athletic, beautiful granddaughter. Her mother did tell me her Grade Point Average sometime, but I don’t recall the detail. There might have been an A- in there somewhere, but she was pretty well straight A, in a course that looked to me like a mountain to climb. It was a mixed Arts and Science program called Sustainability, Science and Society. She graduated with the highest grade point average in the Arts and Science faculty. Her mother did the same in her undergraduate degree and received a Governor General’s Medal for the highest marks in Arts and Science from McMaster. It will be interesting to see if that is still done and if Audrey gets one.

We just talked to her mother, who seemed to me to be a bit peeved that Audrey’ achievement was not better recognised. Katie said that there was a huge group graduating and that in essence they were all just marched across the stage, tapped on the shoulder and ushered off. However, Audrey looked beautiful, her father bought her flowers (held in place by a McGill teddy bear, I am told) and we will have time to make much of her before she leaves for England and the high-octane Master’s program for which she has been accepted. I don’t know much about it yet except that it seems to feature psychology and that the girl will ace it. (Again, as her mother before her. Katie got a UK Commonwealth scholarship and did a PhD in biology at Cambridge). Audrey has applied for funding, but has not heard as yet.

When she is not being a top student, Audrey runs. She was on the McGill track team as a sprinter and trained in Ottawa for some years with the Lion’s Track and Field club. Her latest is a venture into longer distances and she entered in the 5 Kilometre race in Ottawa last weekend – ran on her 22^nd birthday in fact – and placed not badly. She got a program on line to learn from and I think she expects to do better with more experience. This is a girl who does things Well.

Whenever I think about it, I marvel at our good fortune in our daughters. Both reached the top of their professions; Katie is a professor at University of Ottawa (and if you want to know what kind of professor she is, google ‘Rate My Prof’ and read the praise from her students). Wendy left the Foreign Service from the position of High Commissioner – that is what an Ambassador is called in Commonwealth countries. She was one of six Assistant Secretary positions at NATO, a really amazing post. She has had postings and positions all over Europe and in Africa. In her spare time, she has done things like canoe down the Grand Canyon. Although it is highly unlikely I will be around to see the heights Audrey may reach, I am sure she will climb with skill and determination.

All my girls have brains and good taste and wide-ranging interests. And cats. No one could ask for more. 

The Pageantry of It All

 

I have just spent an hour listening to King Charles III read the Speech from the Throne. It was the first time ever for me to see the pageantry and customs surrounding what has been a standard of parliamentary democracy as we practice it. The reminder that the present form goes back hundreds of years is something I did not need because it is something I value. I learned the ins and outs of the form as a university undergraduate by participating in ‘Model Parliaments’, and in formal debates. It is a good method, although at times it can seem cumbersome. It is a method that, I believe, would preclude the present mockery of democracy in the United States. A Prime Minister is not able to govern by proclamation; a government that tried that would fail and an election would be triggered.

The speech was interesting in several ways. It sounded to me as if the king had inserted little bits of it by himself, most especially the conclusion where he quoted the national anthem’s wording of “the true north strong and free.” Total kitsch. But right, in context. Can't fault it but I cannot see the government’s writers putting that in. And too many figures quoted. In addition, I have a few minor complaints about the format. One is that it seems stupid to have issued the man a floppy booklet to read from where he struggled at times to turn the pages. The other is that it is annoying to have an English language voice-over for the French. Most of us have enough second language to follow clear, slowly read statements, especially if they are repeats of the same material. I wanted to judge the king’s French accent and was unable to hear him.

Anyway, that was my morning. Trade barriers, energy conservation and management, housing starts, some lowering/increasing of fees and rates, increased military spending (we’ve heard that before), all stuff that came up in the campaign. Annoying that the Liberals are taking credit for the dental program; the NDP shoved that one down their throats. Mostly, though, the speech was about sovereignty. With the king making the running. It would be more amusing if it were less important.

I like our country, a lot, and never more so than when we do something as stodgy but as pertinent as this morning’s entertainment.

On Mother's Day

 

My father was newly home from the Navy - 1947

Today is the day set aside, as they say, for children to honour their mothers. As a concept, I must say it annoys me. The ‘day’ becomes an occasion to spend money on things like cards, flowers, small gifts. You might arrange to take mother out of the house for a meal she does not have to cook; good luck at getting into any restaurant where you have not made a reservation well in advance. You might, given the situation, fete your mother at home and cook a meal for her. This is supposing that you are part of a ‘nuclear’ family and your mother lives separately from you. The whole thing is a contrived event that does, for me, very little.

 Honouring a mother? What does that even mean? To ‘honour’ someone is to, (The Oxford Dictionary says),.”regard with great respect. Example: "They honoured their parents in all they did."

Similar: hold in great respect, hold in high esteem, have a high regard for, esteem, respect, admire, defer to, look up to, think highly of, appreciate, value, prize, cherish, reverence, revere, venerate’ worship, put on a pedestal.

Some of the similar terms I can buy into. I like “think highly of”, “hold in great respect”. My mother was a woman of blazing intelligence, driven to do everything she did as perfectly as possible, a curious, warm, observing, thinking person. She was funny, thoughtful, graceful, driven. Obviously, someone to “hold in high esteem”. But to “put on a pedestal’ is a step way too far. She could be opinionated, dismissive, wrong about something. She was a master at ignoring things. She could worry at an impressive level about things that were just fine.

 My mother did her best, and it was a very good best, to bring me up to be a model child and adolescent. And I did my best, mostly, to measure up. Good grades, good manners, participation in the things my mother thought were worth while like Brownies, Sunday school and swimming lessons. (I liked the swimming.) I was, until about age fifteen, a good girl. In fairness, I have to say that what I chose to read was never censored, my friends were always welcomed, my interests were fostered even if they were not hers. And as I grew up and grew out of the circled wagons of her expectations of me, I never stopped loving her and trying to make her happy. After I left home, for instance, I wrote a weekly letter detailing a great deal of what I was doing and thinking. When she arrived at my wedding with a white dress and hat for me to wear, I wore them. When she sewed bright yellow trousers for me to wear, I wore those too.

 Many of my housekeeping habits, my choices in reading, my expectations in interactions with people, are still in keeping with my mother’s tastes and ways. I fold my towels in threes the way she did. I keep a lot of books she would approve. (Well, probably not the science fiction and fantasy – she was not enchanted even with Tolkien.) I think of her often with love. I miss her, often. I tried my best not to bring up my daughters to be good girls, to be model children. But honesty compels me to say that I am not sure I did any better for them than she did for me.

As a new grandmother - Christmas, 1966

 It is Mother’s Day. But I know that my mother is with me for 365 days a year and I am good with that. Maybe the word I should use is “cherish’. I cherish all we had together. I remember things she did and said, often. I miss her. I loved her.

Sweet Violets

 The yard of the house I lived in as a girl was long and narrow, with a paved walkway down the centre that led to the trash bins, the back fence and the back gate into the alley. The alley itself was dirt and worked well for hopscotch. On the right side of the yard, just behind the back of the house, stood a single car garage. Behind that, again, was a huge old willow tree. My mother’s wash lines ran from the garage to the willow and from the willow to a post at the back of the yard. Behind the garage not much grew as it was shady, but there were, in season, clumps of small, hardy violets. A beautiful deep purple, they were very scented. My mother loved to hang clothes on the line above them as she said things came in from the line ‘smelling wonderful’.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

My mother was a determined gardener. On a trellis beside the house there was a clematis, one she had transplanted every time she and my father moved, and, as well, there was a bed of peonies and several rose vines of various lengths of thorns, the one with really vicious thorns beside the garage door. At the back of the property, to screen the alley, there was a line of flowering bushes – bridal wreath is the one I recall. I envied the children of the house across the alley as there were several of them to split what seemed to me to be endless amounts of yard work, including but not limited to policing the willow’s dead branches, cutting back the evil roses, sweeping, raking and, when I was older, cutting the grass. I don’t recall paying much heed to those violets.

Sometime in there the willow had to be cut down. It may have been damaged in a storm; I am not sure. My mother commissioned a post for her clothes lines and the new lines ran from the garage to the post. I don’t think my mother planted anything more except a new baby tree. But, when my parents decided to sell the big house in Windsor and move to our city, there was a firm directive to me to get out a trowel and some trugs and dig up enough violets that my mother could be sure some would survive to reach their new home. She also considered the clematis, but since their grandparents were moving two climate zones colder, my daughters persuaded their grandma to let them give her a new, hardy clematis that would thrive in Ottawa.

My parents’ new home was a bungalow on a huge lot, the original suburb having been on septic systems. It was painted white with a black front door and my mother immediately realized that it needed, indeed cried for, red geraniums and white in a border across the front. When she discovered a rhubarb patch, she was delighted, and she relished a back patio with the clothes line in easy reach. When she received a picnic table for a Mother’s Day gift, her pleasure was complete. The clematis was duly installed and lawn maintenance people hired. (Although if they did not arrive to my mother’s taste in grass length, I cut. And raked. And cut.) The violets were also duly transplanted, some at my parents’ place and some in a corner of my aunt’s backyard, the bit not taken up by the swimming pool.

Forward a number of years, and my aunt was being overrun by violets, she said. She dug the majority of them and firmly gave them to me. I brought them out here and planted a row of them in the low bush beside the cut lawn at the side of the house. And sort of forgot about them, except in the week or two that they flower and the scent is wafted across the grass.

 

The photos accompanying this essay illustrate that these violets are stubborn, take-charge flowers. Plant one and ignore it and you have a multitude. This week, as spring peeps up, they are front and centre in our lawn. And the scent is still wonderful.

A Pledge

Younger Daughter (YD) on the left, Elder Daugher (ED) on the right. Clothes by Grandma

 I gave my daughter a piece of advice in the form of a truism a few days ago. “If you do not put yourself first,” I pontificated, “no one else will.”  A trite piece of advice but a sound one and I meant it. It is a working adage that I have tried to follow, off and on for sure, during my life, and a thing that I was sorry I did not do, if I had not been doing it Got that? Right.

JG and I are both in our eighties and, logically, moving toward the end of our ability to live by ourselves and look after ourselves. Much as I want to deny this, my creaking bones, lack of balance, frozen shoulder, reduced blood oxygen level (and lack of patience about all of these) are facts. It is hard work to make the bed, cook a meal, get showered and dressed in the morning, sweep the porch, stay awake while trying to read. JG has ongoing issues as well. Our daughters are doing some eldercare now and will see it increase as time and infirmity go on. Thus the advice in para #1 above.

The cabin 'at the farm'

It will not be the first time that our offspring have had to come second to what we, the parents, chose. When they were just school age, we chose to buy recreational land, a 100-acre parcel, over an hour’s drive from where we lived in the city. Not a cottage on a beach, not a chalet in ski country, but an old abandoned farm at the very end of an unimproved road. (So unimproved was the road, in fact, that for the first few years we accessed the property in winter by snowmobile.) The cabin we built on this land was heated by a woodstove, lighted by propane, serviced by an outhouse, provided with water drawn by the pailful from a surface well and provisioned with food toted in from the city, mostly, as in summer we could not leave food requiring refrigeration and in winter canned goods froze. We chose to spend all of our weekends and holidays ‘at the farm’ and the daughters were part of it by necessity.

I worried from time to time that the girls were missing out on vital parts of growing up, on bonding with groups of friends on weekends, movie dates, sports teams, even television (no hydro, remember). On the other hand, they learned to navigate by themselves in scrub bush, cross-country ski, build a fire in the snow, take their rowboat out onto the creek. They became, faute de mieux, readers and players of board games. They packed their own weekend clothes, packed their city activities into five days a week, and also learned to rely on each other. That they fit their lives into what we, their parents wanted to do, was not entirely a bad thing.

The year that the ED was in Grade 13 my father decided to move himself and my mother from their large Windsor home to an Ottawa bungalow, a short drive from where we then lived. I don’t know if I have mentioned that I am an only child, but that I am is pertinent. My mother was fragile both physically and, increasingly, mentally, and my father needed help in looking after her. I found them the house, facilitated the move and, in self defence, enrolled in a two-year certificate program at our local community college. My father did what he could to cushion me by hiring help summer and winter for their large yard. (They considered apartments when planning but my mother needed flowers and grassy space.) My mother did enjoy my reports of what I was learning and it gave me hours in the day that she perceived to be my own.

I passed that course and actually (and at my age, too) got a job in the industry, but my mother was really struggling and dad could not cope. I got calls at work; I lost weekends. I quit the job and took on eldercare. At the end, at one point I was sleeping on a rug beside my mother’s bed with a light shining on me so that she could see I was there. Luckily for her and all of us, her physical health broke down and she died before the mental stress became unendurable. My father took about a year to regroup, then moved himself into a seniors’ residence and installed his childless sister in the next apartment over. I became a chauffeur when necessary, but dad managed himself and his sister mostly solo. I started a home-based business in the intervals.

The house JG built 'at the farm'

Dad died in September of ’97 and my aunt lasted until February of ’98. Meanwhile my mother’ s unmarried sister’s health deteriorated and I was the caregiver there, first long distance to Windsor and then, after a move for her, in our city. By this time JG had retired and we were building our forever home here ‘at the farm’.  And, up until the big Ice Storm of ’98 crunched our bush, we were making maple syrup. I was a busy person facilitating other people’s lives for a few years in there. But once we got settled, I found several fun things to do for myself in the place where I found myself, mostly by joining boards of interesting activities. I became a busy person in my own right once again.

I miss, profoundly, being that busy person. Bad health, partly fueled by a lifetime of bad habits, has pretty well parked me in an electrically controlled recliner chair in the living room or here, at my computer, where I feel still in charge. We are very lucky to have the financial resources to hire help for what we cannot do ourselves. (Or we can hire help once we admit we can’t do it; some problems in this regard.) Our daughters take the time to check on us by phone and in person at a level I really hope is not too onerous, and their father has the odd job for them to do (on the roof, for instance) when they visit. Not too demanding yet.

If I am going to be honest here, I would have to say that I resented getting pulled into a lot of care for my elders. I knew it had to be done, I knew I had to do it, I even wanted to do it, but I still got angry about being ‘on call’. Or, I think that was at least part of the anger. The rest was, I believe, anger at fate. Anger at illness that turned my vital, intelligent, funny mother into a whiny child. Anger at age that robbed my equally funny and independent aunt of her self-reliance.  I can identify a mixture of annoyance and amusement at my male-dominant dad’s assumption that whenever he made an appointment, I would be available to take him to it. Maybe the problem was being taken for granted, for coming second in the calculation of what should happen.

Unless and until age and infirmity rob me of my personality, I swear I will do my best not to take my daughters for granted. And to manage so that they can put themselves first. 

Ides of April, Plus 1.

 It is April 16th, 2025 and yesterday was my 83^rd birthday. I was taken out for a fine dinner with my family, given gorgeous yellow roses (a story behind these) candy, cards, a book that I will treasure and a new frying pan and lid. Wait, you say. All of these things to cherish you and a … frying pan. Well, yes.

I have had for far too may years a frying pan that I use for a lot of recipes. It was the exact correct size, for one thing, to make two toasted cheese sandwiches. It had a lid that fits perfectly. It is just the right depth for fried rice, for sausage, the right length for bacon. A long list of pluses. But it was just plain worn out and the coating was probably slowly leaching plastic into our systems. JG has been at me to replace it. We have, I hasten to add, other frying pans in useful sizes. But this one was my kitchen helper. I have been procrastinating about replacing it. JG managed, somehow, to research the pan and yesterday presented me with a beautiful Paderno pan and matching lid, a much better lid than the old one. He went to a lot of trouble, I suspect, to find it. A frying pan to cherish, from someone who knows the exact right thing.

The flowers? My mother loved, above all other blooms, yellow roses. My dad always got her a big bunch on her combined birthday and wedding anniversary. Always yellow roses. My girls remembered this and gave me an opulent bouquet of them, carefully placed in small vials to keep them watered in transit. They are beautiful and they will last and are, presently, front and centre in our living room where I can admire them.

The book? Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words, Conversation in an Age of Rage. A topic and writer that both hit dead on my interests.

The chocolate? Well, yes. In spite of the fact that my scale tells me that I should not have it. Yum.

The cards from the daughters, inserted here. The card from my husband… made me shed tears.

One of my nicest treats, a phone call from a cousin. The topmost treat might have been, though, a conversation with the grandkid who was walking in Montreal on her way to study, and who seems, although loaded with exams and work, to be training for and cheerfully contemplating running a 5-k race next month.

My family, in all its glory.

Trump Tantrum Explored

Opinion column from the Washington Post by Philip Bump. 

 Now fact Checked. Wikipedia, Axios, Newyorker, all confirm. Firing was in first term - not clear in article. "Investigation" as of yesterday.

An official from the first Trump administration is being targeted for speaking the truth.

April 10, 2025 at 4:02 p.m -The Washington Post)

After the 2016 election, when it was understood that Russia had tried to influence the outcome, social media companies introduced a number of changes that allow them to better control misinformation and abuse on their platforms. One effect was that some prominent voices on the right found their posts being removed or muffled. It happened on the left as well, but on the right — in part because of the perceived politics of tech companies and Silicon Valley — these actions were attributed to partisanship rather than practicality. This argument soon trickled up to then-President Donald Trump.

Lower down on the administration’s organizational chart, though, officials were themselves working to ensure that the interference seen in 2016 didn’t occur in 2020. In October 2020, a Department of Homeland Security report identified evidence that foreign adversaries were “using covert and overt influence measures” to try to affect votes “and the electoral process itself.” Despite Trump’s insistence that the 2016 vote (and his election) hadn’t been affected by foreign interference, the government was responding to reality, briefing social media companies on threats and, in 2018, standing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to address foreign threats, including against elections. Trump nominated Chris Krebs to lead the agency.

By all outward appearances, there was no foreign interference that affected the results of the ensuing 2020 presidential election. What there was, however, was a change in the occupant to the White House.

You know what happened next. Trump, who had for months been stoking the idea that there was something uncertain or unstable about the U.S. electoral process, seized on the idea that the election had been stolen. During the weeks after the election, he embraced a wide variety of false and debunked assertions about how he’d been the victim of a left-wing plot to deny him a second term. Anytime a new theory emerged about how the election might have been stolen, Trump shared it with the American public as if it were fact — which at no point it was.

Among the claims he and his allies elevated was that electronic voting machines had been tampered with. Krebs, tasked with ensuring that this wouldn’t happen, put out a statement assuring Americans that election systems had not been manipulated.

Trump took this badly. Within hours, he announced Krebs’s firing on Twitter, insisting that claims about the security of the election were false and flew in the face of available evidence. Again, the opposite was true; it was Trump’s claims that failed to comport with the evidence, much less reality.

It could have ended there. But allegations that the 2020 election had been negatively influenced, leading to Trump’s loss, snowballed. Because early claims about explicit fraud and illegal voting were not substantiated, the pro-Trump narrative began to center more heavily on allegations that the outcome had been rigged. Voters, it held, had been unduly influenced by the suppression of information or false claims about politically potent issues. For example, that social media companies had briefly limited the sharing of a story about Joe Biden’s son eventually became a central element of the idea that they had been acting on behalf of the left.

As people learned that those companies had been briefed about potential foreign threats, a narrative emerged that the government had told the companies to limit the story — however incongruous it was that the government was at that time led by Trump himself. (What’s more, there’s no evidence that the brief restriction significantly affected the election.) Just as it had done before the election, the right attributed to malice and deviousness what was more easily and more accurately explained as explicable responses to evolving circumstances.

CISA’s rejection of Trump’s claims was fading into history until Wednesday, when Trump announced that he was removing Krebs’s security clearance and calling for the Justice Department to launch a fishing expedition, seeking out any scintillas of illegality in which Krebs or CISA might theoretically have been engaged. It was as explicit a manifestation of Trump’s vengeful worldview as anything we’ve seen since his second inauguration. There remains no evidence at all that CISA or Krebs engaged in any systematic effort to violate the law or even to combat disinformation because of ideology rather than factuality.

The president’s targeting of Krebs is in part a product of the massive economy Trump created by denying the 2020 election results. Loyalists who alleged fraud or left-wing deviousness were showered with the pro-Trump right’s most important currency: attention. Not that they didn’t believe Trump’s claims about rigging and theft, mind you; the idea that the election had been determined by nefarious elites is inherently appealing on the right. Particularly given how many Trump supporters knew no supporters of Joe Biden, the results seemed facially incomprehensible to many of them. So, sure. It was the elites.

CISA was a frequent target of these increasingly complicated narratives about 2020 and its aftermath, thanks in part to Elon Musk. The billionaire fully bought into the idea that social media companies had acted against the right, so he bought Twitter and allowed writers who bore obvious hostility to the establishment to cherry-pick from the company’s internal records. They cobbled together a contrived (and at times flatly erroneous) story about malfeasance into which CISA was looped. Boosted by Trump’s allies in Congress, the narrative gained the appearance of being credible, even though it wasn’t. Trump had the pretext he needed for Wednesday’s action.

In signing the executive order targeting Krebs, Trump made clear his intent.

“This was a disgraceful election,” he said about the 2020 contest. “And this guy” — Krebs — “sat back … and he’s tried to make the case that this election was a safe election. I think he said, ‘This is the safest election we’ve ever had.’ And yet every day you read in the papers about more and more fraud that’s discovered. He’s the fraud. He’s a disgrace. So we’ll find out whether or not it was a safe election.”

We’ve seen this before, from Trump and others in his second administration: Use the credibility of the office and the government to undermine reality in service of right-wing rhetoric. We need to see if vaccines and fluoride are safe, so we’re launching investigations (run by people who share our worldview). We need to revisit the allegations against the people who engaged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. We need to strip funding for research into climate change and instead boost coal production. And on and on and on.

Election denialism, though, holds a special place in Trump’s heart because he’s seemingly incapable of accepting that voters simply rejected him. Potential administration staffers were reportedly quizzed on their views about the election outcome, with employment apparently dependent on conforming with Trump’s position.

Targeting Krebs is in part about punishing perceived disloyalty and in part about overhauling reality. It is unquestionably also about leveraging the power of the state against a someone who had the temerity to insist that the truth was true. Calling for an investigation of Krebs is flatly authoritarian, perhaps more so than any other example of Trump going after his enemies.

It is a statement from the most powerful person in the country that the federal government will be deployed to monitor compliance with his worldview.

Plaints from a Petulant Pedant

I know that English, like all spoken languages, is mutable. The speakers determine, over time, expression, vowel placement and sound, consonant use, definition. But, knowing that, I mourn for some of the grace notes that I was taught were correct and that I no longer hear used.

For one, the use of few/fewer and less. The distinction between a numeric noun or group and a general one is vanishing, even on CBC and other bastions of good speech. “I hear less birdsong because there are fewer birds.’ Generic ‘birdsong’, no quantity. Numeric for ‘birds’ because they are countable. “I will have less of that noise in the back of the class, thank you.” Fewer than five turkeys survived the winter.”  Fewer people than formerly make this distinction.

And then there are those delightful verbs to lie and to lay. Mostly, to lay is used correctly in the present and past tenses. “The hen lays and egg. The duck laid an egg yesterday. Both of them have laid sporadically this year.” Got that? It is to lie that gets all messed up. “The fallen statue lies face up. It lay there yesterday. I think it must have lain there for longer than that.” When is the last time you heard someone use lain. You hear “He laid there (sometimes spelled layed) all night.” I used to introduce this concept to the Grade 9 classes by telling them that “You have to LAY something.” And then I would pause and wait for the boys to stop snickering. But, some of them at least remembered. Of course - “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

When I hear someone using ‘fulsome’ to describe a generously complete action or item – “He gave a fulsome report, leaving nothing out.” – it rattles me. I learned the word as denoting an insincere overabundance. “Fulsome praise” was too much, over the top, embarrassing. I once had a discussion about me described as “fulsome”. When I called the speaker on it, he assured me that all he had meant was that there had been a lot of it. But. This man was a writer and former English teacher and lecturer. He knew both meanings. And I knew which one he intended.

I have on my desk, tucked behind the computer monitor, Fowler’s English Usage, The Oxford Reference Dictionary, Dreyer’s English and the MLA Style Manual. If the Dreyer title is not familiar, Ben Dreyer was the Copy Chief at Random House for many years and so you might be more familiar with the Penguin Style and Usage title.

And I still get things wrong on a regular basis. Mutable, right?

A Post about Puppets

The public school that I attended had an art teacher and a well-equipped art room. One of the things we learned to do was make marionettes. I remember it very well as I loved doing it. We started with lightbulbs and used paper mâché to form the head. The body was sewn and stuffed, with joints. We used a T bar, the simplest form of manipulating a puppet like that, with strings of fishing line. My puppet was Queen Guenevere; she had a velvet dress that my mother helped me make from scraps left over from my Christmas dress. As I recall, she was strung from the shoulders, wrists and knees, the last with the line running through the dress. And we did shows for the school.

This introduction gave me a taste for theatre. I did not much enjoy performing, but making the costumes and scenery and setting things up was fascinating. I carried this into high school, working backstage for musicals (We did a cutdown Mikado, for one) and on sets and decorations for assemblies and dances. My favourite memory from this time is dressing the biggest guy in our class in a hoop skirt and white wig as Snow White. As I recall, my mother sacrificed a double bed sheet for this skirt. It was not all good fun – at one point purple dye from the Angel Gabriel’s wings got sprayed onto my father’s white shirts and my mother was Not Amused.

In university, I also did stage and musical crew work. I recall ordering enough light brown grease paint to turn all of the principals plus a chorus of Canadian girls in February from white and pasty to brown and shiny. Getting it all off again was another matter and I appear in the university’s year book holding a cast member by the hair and scrubbing his face. My worst moment? A Shakespearian character was getting his eyes gouged out when his wig came off and went thump on the stage.

But back to puppets. My next venture was to teach my daughters and their friends – age about five to seven I think – to use hand puppets. They were avid Sesame Street fans, and some of my husband’s work socks became dragon heads. Other puppets were also single arm, but flat of the hand with the head stuck onto the middle finger and the other fingers folded to make shoulders. We used an ironing board for a stage and my mother’s discarded drapes for curtains. JG had a good quality tape recorder and that also was useful.

I got into costuming again when the ED was in gymnastics. I recall a whole set of leotards for a team and a set of costumes for a Christmas pageant. And somehow the YD needed a costume for a school play. And a uniform for a choir. Also, there were, my delight, Hallowe’en costumes. The height of that – a Monarch butterfly that the grandkid’s mother used for an adult party, costuming her spouse as the caterpillar.

But, the most fun. I joined a group called “Kids on the Block”. It is still extant and you can read about a version of it here. My puppet had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair. She had speech difficulties. The puppets were full body and we stood behind them dressed in black and spoke for them, after taking a class to learn what they should say in answer to questions from the audience. The audience was mostly composed of public school children, although we did some adult presentations as well, usually to acquaint teachers and parents about the program. It was really rewarding and the group was composed of some very skilled and caring people.

That’s about it. In my house are two beautiful marionettes, gifts from my daughters as adults, and a third, a lamb with floppy legs on a T bar. This last of my toys went on outings when I was working with a small child on basic English skills (and if the father learned the difference between “in” and “on” with his daughter, score one.) 

Jobs and all that - for Nance

One of my fellow bloggers put up a list of all of her jobs, and challenged us to to the same. So, here is my list. She also asked which of these jobs were, to paraphrase, influential. I whipped down my list and left it for a bit. When I got back to it, I recalled several different paid positions that I had simply forgotten to put in. Two of them were summer jobs in high school for the money, and could be seen as preparation for a life as a housewife, one aspect of this being chambermaid. The other one I left off is one from which I was fired, probably justifiably as I look back but painful at the time. Most of what I have been paid for otherwise has to do with words, teaching them or working with them. My love has always been visual art, an area in which I am a modestly talented amateur with enough sense to have realized this early on. With words I am pretty proficient. The theatre, costumes and puppetry have always been for fun. The secretarial stints? A fee paid to a world that has always been kind to me.

And do I talk to the checker at the grocery store? Yes, always, including thanks for not crushing the bread when appropriate.

A timeline on these lists would probably be useful, but as a stopgap, the paid list starts at age 14 and ends at age 60 or so. The volunteer list - high school to two years ago. 

•  Babysitter
• Library Assistant
• Kitchen help, chambermaid, server, Doon School of Fine Art (in exchange for lessons, board)
• Chambermaid, Bigwin Inn
• Swimming teacher, swimming team coach and lifeguard
• High School Teacher
• Essay marking for Hamilton Collegiate Institute Grade 13 English*
• Supply teacher, both panels
• Trustee, Ottawa School Board
• Personnel Officer, Ottawa Board of Education
• Maple Syrup Camp worker/ Maple Salesperson
• Assistant, Advertising Consultancy
• Secretary, Incorporated Investment Company
• Free Lance Advertising Consultant

So much for the paid employment. As a volunteer

• Makeup artist, wardrobe, theatre, high school and university
• English language coach, essay marker
• Editor, Cook Book
• Costume maker, gymnastics teams
• Secretary/treasurer for several organizations
• Puppeteer
• Kitchen staff, local hall
• Advertising member, executive, local hall
• ESL for adults teacher

*An explanation here. The Hamilton Board of Education gathered the students in the Grade 13, a university preparation year at that time, into one school in downtown Hamilton. The Head of the English Department there was extremely busy in management as the school also attracted a large component of Hong Kong students with a huge range of ability in the language. He wanted to teach but knew he would not be able to keep up with the essay stipulation in the syllabus. I was at home with first one and then a second newborn. We discussed and he hired me to mark the essays for his students and to flag any problems I saw as I read them. He had four classes, 100 students approx. And so, I marked. With comments. And added a comment sheet for his information as needed. We found and supported one suicidal girl this way; I have always been pleased about that.

Iced

 April Fool’s Day anyone? We have a dandy here; a return to winter conditions that is more than annoying. We had a ten-inch dump of snow late last week and then freezing rain and then a day of warmth and fog that did little to the snow but fuse it into a soggy mess. And today we had a freeze and lovely sun shining on all the ice. The freezing rain seems to have brought down every dead twig and branch on every tree around and all of this mess is strewn across the ice. Although there was enough melt to clear the laneway, we have a complete ice cover on the lawn and field. It is amusing to look at the tracks the turkeys have left. Friday, they left a hole for every step they took and today they can stroll along right on top. But, of course, there is nothing much for them to eat.

I am worrying a lot about the songbirds. The male red-winged blackbirds arrived about ten days ago. They come before the females, I think to set up their defended sites. But the marsh where they should be doing this is frozen. A flock of at least two dozen was mobbing our feeders – the sunflower silo as well as the corn on the platform feeder. And the suet ball has been eaten away the last few days at a great rate. I figured it would be the last one this year, but if this weather holds, we will probably put one more out. And as for the robins – there is little or nothing available for ground feeders nor will there be until we get a good melt and a few sunny days afterwards. It may be a quiet spring.

We have more freezing rain forecast for tomorrow, too. At least we had only a minor power outage. Our Hydro crews are heroes, truly. With all the clobber being pulled out of the trees by the ice, most of us in this area had only a few hours before repair was completed. Farther south, I gather, it was much worse. We have, as most of our neighbours have also, a generator, a good one that allows us to run the stove and electronics as well as the frig and water pump. We do lose the internet because, although we host a node, the tower is too far from the house to be powered by the generator. It is a good thing my car is a hybrid.

It is salutary, in a way, to be without electricity. It makes you realize how dependent we all are on it and other modern conveniences. The pioneers who opened up this land had nothing. No light at night except firelight, no screening on their windows, no heat except wood, no food except what they grew and foraged themselves. There was no easy access to medical care. In fact, there were trails, not roads, and not a plow to be dreamt of. At first, there was no schooling for their children although the Scots who settled here got that up and running pretty fast. They also put a library together, and a meeting hall that did double duty for prayer and everything else. Amazingly tough and adaptable people, in truth. And neighbourly. As their descendants still are – I got checked by two different neighbours in this latest mess just to make sure we were warm and safe. It still goes on.