May 11, 2026
I have been quiet for a few days, mostly because I put my
back out and was prescribed a hydromorphone. Plays the dickens with my head. This
morning I dumped half a cup of hot coffee on my lap. But, I should be doing a
post about the spring flowers, and will try to concentrate.
The daughters came out yesterday with all sorts of goodies
for lunch, the highlight being a Mother’s Day cake with flowers and butterflies
on it. The butterflies were paper, but the rest was icing and a sheer,
indulgent, delight. They then went for a walk in the woods, trundling around
the trails they have known since they were small children, and came back with
some lovely flower shots.
It is amusing, in passing, to note that the daughter who can squat right down beside a flower to get the best angle had her sixtieth birthday last month. I am pretty sure if I had tried to do that at the same age, they would have had to bring in a crane to get me up again.
A few posts ago, I put
up a photo of my two little girls dancing down a trail. That is one of
the trails on our land (we have 300 acres and I can get confused). We bought
the first hundred when the daughters were quite young, maybe nine and eight and they grew up
spending weekends and holidays here, in a four-seasons cabin that we built. For
most of that time we had no hydro and so we heated with a wood stove, and lit and
cooked with gas that lived in large tanks at the back of the cabin. We carried
water from a well and our toilet facility was a township-approved pit privy.
(Read, outhouse, urban friends.)
What did we do here in all of our open time? We made and
maintained trails. JG taught himself woodmanship and did an inventory of our
trees, bushes and plants. We cut quantities of firewood. We were able to buy
more land, some of it carrying good sugar maple and so we made a bit of maple
syrup and got ourselves hooked into becoming maple people. This involved
building a sugar house, cutting even more wood, stringing tubing, clearing more
trails and, finally, boiling, bottling and selling. Plus eating a bit along the
way. In winter we played in the snow - skis and snowmobiles - and in other seasons we worked. Or built. Evenings, we read. No electricity means no TV.
Around where the girls became adults we were able
to get electrical power and a telephone. JG redid the cabin with electric
lights and electric stove and frig. Glorious. Only, in drilling out the inlets
for the power, we enabled mice. Somewhere there was a hole big enough to admit
them and we could not find it. We never have found it, and the cabin is now a storage place.
Sometime after that, JG retired. Finished work on a Friday
and on Saturday we started in seriously to build our dream home on our land,
still referred to, with very little reason, as ‘the farm’. I should write a
post or more about that building spree. Someday. I have to get the flower
photos up.
Happy belated Mother’s Day!
ReplyDeleteHappy belated Mother’s Day!
ReplyDeleteAnd to you.
DeleteMy inlaws property where we often holidayed is often referred to The Farm. It distinguished it from a previous family cottage. I have never called it The Farm because "holidaying on the farm" would sound weird to others. There was nothing farmish about it although there was a barn from ancient times -- two barns in point of fact.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fascinating story!
ReplyDeleteWell, we had a fenced orchard and some cellar holes. And an iron wheel rim. I guess I just have to sound weird, but I get you.
ReplyDeleteI'm so sorry about your back! You never realize how pivotal it is until it causes you pain.
ReplyDeleteLove the flower pictures. When we were all growing up, my father used to take us to the neighbourhood park to pick Spring Beauties for our mother. This park is full of gorgeous, stately old trees, mostly oaks. Under each of them was always a huge drift of Spring Beauties. We picked so many that my mother used to run out of things to put them in. They don't last, but they are so lovely and such harbingers of spring that I still bring home any I find near my own home just to have them.
Oh, those old trails are the best trails.
ReplyDeleteWhat is funny is the number of stops we just have to make to check things out. Are the orchids in bloom? How high is the level at the dam in the beaver pond? And on and on.
DeletePS I’m sorry about your back.
ReplyDeleteLaughing about 'pivotal'. My problem included an inability to do that. And, I am curious, what are 'Spring Beauties'? One type of flower or a general term?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteSpring Beauties are a real thing! Here's a link to show you all about them.
DeleteI would have like to see a photo of that cake.
ReplyDeleteI hope your back is doing better by the time you read this.
It is, and I will see about the cake. It is always good to have publicity.
DeleteMy family story up here in the Ottawa Valley is very similar. I'm 74 next week. Last year I could squat and stumble through the bush with gay abandon. Sadly, won't be able to do all that again.
ReplyDeleteYeah. A few more than last year for me. Stumble is the operative term.
DeleteI hope your back is feeling better now. What a lot of work you have done on your acres. Three hundred! Here we think we're doing well to have one or two acres and most plots are very much smaller.
ReplyDeleteYour cake sounds wonderful and your daughters even more so. What a splendid childhood they must have had, playing outside and exploring.
The daughters? I think so. They had a lot of freedom but I worried that they would not be 'contemporary' with their age mates. They tell me it did not matter, but I was concerned at the time. When you raise extremely bright kids to be a bit different, they could have been bullied. Luckily, only a bit and the school went after it.
DeleteI too would not be able to squat down and get back up easily, so kudos to your daughter for being able to do so. Hope that your back will be feeling better soon with the meds. That amount of land did take a lot of maintenance, but what fun your daughter had on all that space.
ReplyDeleteI really feel sad that we can no longer keep the acres maintained as we used to do. We have wonderful neighbours who do some of it for us. And, yes, the daughters did have a wonderful time as children and teens here, in spite of having to work in the sugar bush, lug firewood and make cement. I should post some photos.
ReplyDeleteLove the red trillium picture. We get them so rarely here.
ReplyDeleteI hope your back is better. Hydromorphone is no joke.
Mary, it reads to me that we have parallel lives. Similar stories. We are having issues.
ReplyDeleteThanks you for your fun comments. I am fried planting flowers.