Caterpillar Hell

 We are in the second year of a heavy infestation of Gypsy Moth caterpillars. In our vicinity the tree trunks are festooned with squirming masses of the wretched things, the little ones are swinging from an extruded thread in order to travel, and the leaves are getting smaller and lacier by the day on our cherished oak trees, oak being one of their preferred  foods. As I drove back from our shopping town today, I could spot tree after tree that is at least half defoliated. It is going to be a sad year. Last year both the closest trees were completely chomped, but they did put out a second set of leaves.

JG is determined to salvage at least the two closest oaks to the house, if not the other ones in the nearest copses, and to do so he is spraying the trees with an enzyme. This adheres to the leaves if there is no rain before it dries, and when the caterpillars eat it, it kills them, without killing anything else. But it has to be sprayed onto the leaves and these are not small trees. JG has rigged up a sprayer. I got some photos of the first iteration yesterday but did not manage to capture the full arc. I will try again tomorrow. In the meantime,

here is the best so far.

Down by the Tay

The first day of really nice summer weather. A friend and I decided on a socially distanced lunch meeting at a local park. All of the picnic tables have been removed, annoyingly, as an anti-Covid measure, but the park does have one bench secured in a concrete slab that is still in place. And so we took our sandwiches and coffees there. 

All four of these photos are taken from this bench, looking downstream. When we first got there, the air was still cool and very still. I have always been fascinated by reflections and so I took one shot as a reference and then zoomed in on the best of the reflections. One of the most intriguing things about the outburst of spring in our part of the world is the variance of shades of green, and I think this second photo captures that quite nicely.

This is the mid range of the telephoto in my small camera, a Coolpix P7000, that I use a lot because it fits in my purse or pocket and has a wrist strap, handy when holding a sandwich in the other hand or a walking pole or whatever. 

As I put the camera down, my friend, who does not like snakes, spotted this charmer forging upstream against the current. He, or she I guess, is barely visible, except for the wake, but this is the extreme of the magnification the Coolpix will do. My friend was glad it was not closer. There were four of them, as we watched, and they all went happily by us.

There were no bugs, also happily. And no one bugged us for using the bench.
 

All Experience is an Arch

 

Our younger daughter, the YD, has just completed a walking tour of part of the coast of Turkey. She sent us an itinerary and we have been enjoying the photos as she tramped through, over and down the mountainous coast. She did it solo, a bit of a worry for her father and me, but she is not only competent and prepared, she is also lucky, and this combination has taken her through many treks in strange, wonderful and sometimes dangerous (Namibian desert, solo) places. Some of these adventures have been on foot, some on a bicycle and many in a white-water capable boat. The time that she sent a photo of canoeing down a waterfall comes to mind.

The reassuring thing about these photos, however, is that she has had to live through the experience in order to send them. Whether we live through the thought of what she is going to do next is a different matter.

 Parenting is a strange and wonderful thing. You are handed a fragile bundle weighing in at three kilos with a shriek that would shatter glass and no instruction booklet. (Forget Dr Spock and all the ‘What to Expect’ tomes. No matter what, it is not going to be what you expect.) And so, no matter what, you manage. The shriek turns into varied noises that can be interpreted in a general sort of way. The varied noises turn into words … and ‘NO’ arrives very soon after ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’. The bundle becomes mobile and grows out of its clothing at short and regular intervals. Before you are ready for it, the adorable moppet is hanging from trees, wielding paring knives and coming home bleeding from a fall off a skateboard. And before you recover from that, the offspring is looking you in the eye, passing a driver’s test and applying for post-secondary courses in far-flung lands. Plus, it is convinced that you are both dumb and old-fashioned.

 And of course you are old-fashioned. Your parents and your era formed you in many ways and each generation needs to push off from that and conform to a new reality. Or not, but that is another matter. If you are lucky, your child becomes an adult friend – sort of – who remains part and parcel of your life. You may get a phone call from another continent asking for a recipe. You may get a phone call most days from a mobile phone at drive-home time. You may get a phone call asking for an emergency baby-sit. You will get an email to warn you when a grandkid is arriving for a stay or a granddog needs a temporary home. You may be gifted with potted plants, with refugees from the kitchen cupboards or refrigerator or be tasked to sell a house. You may need to get a cell phone to monitor a grandkid. You will certainly find that the grandkid knows more about the cell phone than you do. And you are going, no matter what, to feel not just old-fashioned but a century out of date.

 Or so has been my experience.

 Friendship, in my experience, comes in two levels. One level is shared experience. I have one set of friends from right back to childhood. My closest friend from that group is a woman who grew up next door; we shared school days, a university double room, parallel marriages and almost parallel childbirth. I have other friends from different sources, one the wife of a friend my husband made in grad school. Again, common experience. I also have friends I have made from living in the same place. The second level grows out of the first and the friendship becomes one in which not only experience but also thought and emotion are shared. We make a coffee date and fulminate about the last annoying thing our husbands did or how our age affects our health and ability. We laugh at the same things and share opinions about books we are reading and current events. To an extent, the friendships are shaped by location – the ties can be in letters and phone calls or face to face meetings. Friendship with adult children can be one or the other or both, sometimes distanced, sometimes close.

 I believe that I am very lucky in that my children like me. Or I think they do. I have just come off a Whatsapp digital discussion (new process for me and I become a mouth breather as I try cope with the phone keyboard) with the daughter who is presently in Turkey. She visited a museum and sent photos and a link to a website that discusses what she saw there. It is a source of great contentment to me that she wants to share that experience. The other daughter, the elder (ED) was here on the weekend with her partner to pick up an exercise bike. We got caught up on the doings of the grandkid in a quick conversation. We cheated on the Covid required distancing with this daughter and her family to celebrate her birthday. Shared experience in both cases. 

There are a lot of photos of festive meals over many celebrations to be treasured. In fact, there is a shared photo website with this daughter (also at the upper limit of my computer skills to access) full of shots of places and things that have caught her eye. She takes marvellous photographs. It is a source of great joy that I have access to this sharing of  her life. Here is a sample - a photo she took in our woodlot of the grandkid - with dog.

When this daughter's daughter was born, I was asked to stay for a couple of days to start off the parenting experience. I have never been more flattered or happier to oblige.

 In my experience, my children have not been the only source of joy and satisfaction in my life but they have enriched it beyond words to describe.

 

An Old School Blogging Meme.

 This  is a steal from The Department of Nance. It's an Old School Blogging meme, and it's easy fun. Here we go.

1.       What's something you're looking forward to doing once you get your vaccine or things open up after the pandemic is over?

Hugging my daughter and my granddaughter. I guess they will also have to have been jabbed and seasoned before this can happen.

I am amused by how we refer to the act of getting the vaccine. In North America we get ‘shot’. In the UK they get ‘jabbed’. That verb certainly has a different feel. I can’t help thinking about the doctor I had as a girl. He had delivered my mother and her sisters as a young doctor, and so he had been practicing at least 32 + 8 years when I remember going to him. And I think that as a young doctor he had purchased a set of hypodermic needles and, as happened in those days, he sterilized and reused them. When I was his patient, it is my firmly held belief that he was still using the same needles to give shots and that they had probably never been sharpened. Oh, ouch!

2.       What simple thing made you happy recently?

We have a robin. He is not happy, but he is here.

What was your favourite subject and worst subject in school?

English, of course. But I always took as much math as I could because I could get high marks in it and bring up my average. Worst? Um, your choice of physics or chemistry.

4.       Which of your blogposts is your favourite?

This one. It is heartfelt. Little Stuff’s Tea Party would be a close second, I guess. Little Stuff is now about to graduate from High School and attend a prestigious university on scholarship. Sigh.

5.       Coffee or Tea? Beer or Wine? Hard stuff?

Coffee. Lots. Black. Strong. If it is a hot summer day, beer. Cold. Very cold. Hard stuff. No. But JG and friend hold a Scotch and Stock Market evening from time to time and I like the way the Scotch smells. Oh, and it has to be single malt, just as a passing comment. 

6.       What movie, if you happen upon it while channel surfing, will you always stop and watch?

I do not channel surf. I do not know how to run JG’s complicated system. (Up to four remotes, given what he has selected.) If I could access the TV without help, probably TLOTR.

7.       When shoe shopping, what's your biggest problem?

Buying sandals with covered toes. I have the world’s ugliest toenails. They cannot be seen in public.

8.       Ice cream cone or cupcake?

It has to be a cupcake if both are available. An iced cupcake, thus not a dry one.  If not, I will take whatever you give me with sugar in it, except coffee.

9.       What have you learned about yourself during this pandemic?

It has been forcibly brought home to me that I am not as nice a person as I would like to be. The shutdown of my activities has left me restless and depressed. I lose my temper when I should not, lack the willpower to do the things I should be doing and am not supporting my friends and family to the extent that I could and should. It is all very well to say that we should be giving ourselves a break during this crisis, but there are limits. I think I have exceeded them.

10.   Does your family think you're the eccentric one?

No. Just a bit crazy.

That wraps it up. 

° yahoo.

Shot

 We made the one hour drive to Smiths Falls to our designated vaccine centre and JG got his first dose, he being in the over 80 cohort. Except for having to make the drive, it went smoothly and he was in, shot, did his wait and was out in a little over half an hour. He said he had to give his name a lot of times, but that the operation seemed to be running well.

I got registered for my first shot - same location - also very smoothly. Went on line at 8:05 am on the first day I was eligible, lied and said I was 80+ as required (no one seems to have changed that piece), was put into a queue and watched a little running man for about 20 minutes or so, was put onto the site, entered my data, got a date and printed the receipt, all in time for breakfast before 9:00 am. Except for the lack of clarity in the eligibility section, it was easy and faster than I had expected. In fact, what I did expect was an endless circle on my screen while I sat on hold, hungry, for most of the morning. So the running man was a nice surprise and the fact that he did run, even nicer.

And so ... on my date, which is April 10th, we will spend another three hours trekking to Smiths Falls. However, we got a lunch out over it. Could be a lot worse.

Mixing it Up

There was a post up this morning in Facebook saying, essentially, if you have Irish blood, watch this. It was a video of a young girl singing Danny Boy, very sweetly, with visuals of the Irish coast. I think of myself as about a quarter Irish, in a British Isles mongrel mix. My daughter gave me a gene search kit for Christmas a few years ago, and I came out about there. Peasant stock, obviously, looking at my big bones and square build. None of which is very relevant, except that I am white. Privilege from the word go.( I am also female. Discrimination from the word go, although in many respects covert and subtle. Subject of another rant some other time.)

If you are mixed race and it shows, the discrimination is neither covert nor subtle. It is right there in your face. If you want a picture of how a whole society handles mixed race, I direct you to the Benjamin January series that Barbara Hambly has written about pre Civil War New Orleans. The discrimination informs every plot and defines every character. It is also a superbly written and thought-out bunch of books. And I came away from reading some of those books questioning everything I thought I knew about prejudice.

I grew up in an integrated community, or so I thought. Windsor, Ontario, where I was raised, is across the river from Detroit, Michigan and was a landing place for Underground Railway escapees. The escaping slaves got to British controlled territory, were automatically free and safe, and stayed. So there was a good representation of blacks in the schools and in the city. Many of my classes in public school had black* kids in them. And the black kids were frequently mixed race and showed it in either feature or skin tone. This was normal for me. What I did not know was that the black community valued these evidences. When you think about it, that sucks. Most of the identified-as-black people with lighter skin tones, or straight, light-coloured hair or Caucasian features, have these attributes because they have a female ancestor(s) who were raped or coerced by white men. The resulting children were slaves like their mothers, but with mixed genes. And their heritage shows in their Canadian descendants.

* The polite term we used at the time was ‘Negro’. I know this is no longer acceptable. But I do not really understand what is. I don’t like African American because for me, an American is someone south of the border. And African North American does not work. So I use ‘black’, and I really hope you are not offended.

I have joined a Facebook group called ‘If you grew up in Windsor…’. A lot of people are posting school photos to this group and I am surprised at how few black kids show in the photos. When I look at my own high school yearbooks which are available on line (I threw out my own copies years ago), I can’t spot a girl I know was black by running my eye down the photos. Her skin tone is not different on the somewhat yellowed page. And when I look at other class photos, there are perhaps three or four with dark enough skin to catch my eye or with a big Afro. I am pretty sure there are more that I do not catch. But not enough to really show an integrated community. Not nearly enough.

My father had a friend who was black and a lawyer. I am pretty sure he was unusual and not invited to be a member of the local Golf and Country Club. My parents had no other black friends although they were not members of the Club either. My aunt was. She moved to a retirement complex in her eighties and was quite surprised and upset to find a neighbour of Chinese extraction. However, the neighbour was a hot Bridge player and pretty soon my aunt, another Bridge fiend, was on a first name basis with her and there were no more comments. Thus is prejudice overcome, she said with a somewhat rueful chuckle. The point being that my aunt’s acquaintance had previously all been white.

In my daughters’ schools and generation, the mix is there, obvious and taken for granted. Children in every class photo are a mix of colour and race. We were lucky there, I think, as our school was next to a fairly large area of what was called ‘low rent’ housing. When my daughter came home upset about a classmate whose parent could not afford to buy material for a sewing project, it was a valuable lesson for her. When she came home and told me she had torn up the application for the French Immersion program, it was a valuable lesson for me.

My point is, the race thing is improving. The fact that so many young people are demonstrating and marching and actually living the richness of an integrated life is heartening. In my childhood community, the stories that motivate them would have been suppressed. I envision to a world in which the majority of people are mixed. Married to one another and producing beautiful mixed children. Mixed together in schools, neighbourhoods and at work. Mixed together in all levels of government. And not as mixed up as I was as a kid.

Making Maple Syrup

 

I wrote this article a few years ago and posted it, but on this warm and windy March day, I think it is worth repeating.

There have been several articles in both the local and national press lately saying that maple syrup is ‘Good For You’.  That it has antioxidants and other good stuff.  I knew that a long time ago because I was a maple syrup producer for over a quarter of a century and we used this kind of info to market the product. Here is some of the research: 

Maple Canada's pure maple syrup label - 'Maple Syrup contains significant amounts of potassium (35 mg/tbsp), calcium (21 mg/tbsp), small amounts of iron and phosphorus, and trace amounts of B-vitamins. Its sodium content is a low 2 mg/tbsp. Maple syrup can be declared a good source of 3 essential elements - calcium, iron and thiamine';

and

Wikipedia's entry which says 'Maple syrup has a number of nutritional benefits for humans. It is low in fructose compared to other popular sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup and agave syrup - extremely high percentage of fructose can be deleterious and can trigger fructose malabsorption, metabolic syndrome, hypertriglyceridemia, decreased glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia, and accelerated uric acid formation. Maple syrup is an excellent source of the trace mineral manganese, with 2 tbsp (13.33 grams) containing about 0.44mg or 22% of the FDA Daily Value (DV%) of 2 mg. It is also a good source of zinc with 2 tbs (13.33 grams) containing 0.55mg or 3.7% of the FDA Daily Value (DV%) of 15 mg.' 

 

I could keep on with this, but you get the picture.

 

Depending on whom you ask, sugar has 50 or 60 calories per tablespoon.  So does maple syrup.  It is, after all, sugar.  For some people it is an acquired taste - my son-in-law dislikes it, for instance.  But most people, given the chance, love it. My grandfather used to pour it on eggs; my father had a dish of prunes with maple syrup most days.  Both of them got through an imperial gallon (four litres and a bit) or more each year, single handed. However, the single, simplest reason people avoid it is that it costs a lot.  In our district, which produces a lot of Ontario's maple products, a two litre container sells for $38 and a cup of granulated maple sugar is $5.00.  That's right out of most people's comfort zone.  Especially when cane sugar and the syrup made from it are so cheap.

 

It was not always so. If you read Susanna Moodie's nineteenth century diary, 'Roughing It In The Bush', you will find her complaining bitterly about having to use maple sugar since she could not afford 'white'. The maple flavour spoiled the taste of her tea. White sugar was imported into Canada then and I think most of the expense was generated by transportation.  Moodie lived a long way from the lakes that provided the only easy way of moving around Upper Canada and even then the sugar had to come by ship from, I think, the West Indies.  Maple sugar, on the other hand, could be had by drilling holes in hard maple trees, collecting the sap and boiling and boiling and boiling the water out.  

 

Sap has, if you're lucky, three percent sugar.  Syrup has sixty-six percent sugar.  That's a lot of water to boil away.  But wood was free, except for labour, and the only expense in creating maple syrup back then was the cost of big iron kettles.

 And time and labour, of course.  Using kettles over an open fire, you moved the condensing sap from kettle to kettle, kept the fire burning hot, and skimmed constantly.  Several gallons a day would be a good haul and you would have to stand over the kettles constantly.  Labour intensive, for sure. Photo credit,

 

Throughout the twentieth century, techniques for making maple syrup improved, as did those for making cane sugar.  The cost of importing the cane sugar also dropped precipitously.  Even with purpose-built evaporators for maple sap, reverse osmosis techniques for refining sap and plastic tubing collection, however, the labour required to make maple syrup kept the prices high (and the equipment costs rose with the new techniques).  When producers switched from wood fired evaporators to oil fired, the price of fuel added to the cost.  And when the family sizes decreased, labour had to be hired, at North American prices.  Now even the huge maple bushes of ten thousand or more taps cannot compete with imported sugar; maple products have become a luxury. Even at the high prices presently current, maple producers are not making a lot of money.

 

This high cost requires that maple products be marketed as luxury goods.  And the talking points are many.  Maple is authentic, the marketers cry.  It tastes far better that the stuff put out by Aunt Jemima. Lately, with the surge of interest in local and naturally nutritious food, the push has been to market maple syrup as a healthy alternative to regular sugar as well as the connoisseur's choice. Thus the news releases dropping nutritional information, accompanied by advertisements singing the same tune.  I made a poster for a neighbour's sale tables that said, in part, 'In this world of processed products with their additives and such, Be sure to think of maple for that sweet, nutritious touch'.  Specious as all get out, but that's the marketing game.

 

There is a point to all of this. Along with a lot of other people, I think we in North America are poisoning ourselves with too much sugar.  If a family were to calculate what their yearly intake of white sugar would be, price the total cost, buy the amount of maple syrup that amount of money would bring them, and then use only that amount of sugar, they would be a good bit healthier at the end of a year.

 

If they had access to a maple bush and made their own syrup, they would be a great deal more fit, too. I speak from personal experience

as my husband and I, with help, ran a small maple operation for over twenty-five years. It is hard, unrelenting labour to tap, boil and bottle maple syrup. If you are not slogging through heavy snow in the bush on snowshoes, you are heaving chunks of wood into the fire under the evaporator or anxiously measuring sugar content. We live in maple syrup country still and have neigbours who make and sell syrup and sugar. In fact, tomorrow they will be slogging through the bush making sure tonight’s high wind did not break branches and pull their tubing apart. Maple syrup is worth every penny you pay for it.

 

Disjointed, disgruntled and, therefore, full of Digressions.

 

I wrote this over several days - it is quite a ragbag of thoughts unfinished.

And then my darling daughter posted this ... the blossoms are apple.

It is February the sixteenth, a winter day in Lanark Highlands. And here we are, sheltering at home. Or, we are most of the time. As of the today we are due to come out of lockdown and go to ‘green’ status. The husband and I cheated however, by having friends in to dinner on Sunday and hosting our ED and her family on Monday. I do not feel the least guilty about this as we should have been allowed out of lockdown last week like the counties north and south of us. The fact that we are going to green status should make that clear.

 It was really nice to talk to someone face to face and share a meal. The weirdest thing about lockdown, for my part, seems to be the way time stretches and contracts. A morning can disappear while I do a Sudoku and read the papers. An afternoon can be absorbed by a self-indulgent nap. But January lasted forever. There were months and months of it, seemingly. With only a few very hurried trips to the pharmacy or grocery store to break it.

 All of Canada is waiting for vaccination and some of us are being very snarky about it. The orders that our government put in last fall may not be honoured and the federal government, specifically the Prime Minister, is being blamed for it, especially in the more ‘conservative’ press. That we are not at the front of the queue does not surprise me. We do not have any facility that can manufacture vaccines and the countries that do are quite overwhelmed. Not to mention, favouring home consumption first. Big surprise that. Not.

 Well, that was then. It is now the second last day of February and we were blessed (humph) today with a fine fall of nice new wet snow to go on top of the nice old deep snow. As they said in the days of sail, ‘No bottom with this line’. As one of my daughter’s friends posted who had tried to snowshoe in it, it was deep and very difficult to walk in. Their dog let them break trail. We had a dog that liked to ride on the back of our snowshoes. I feel for the syrup producers who are on the verge of tapping and will have to cope with this. Unless, of course, it sets up. Every snowshoer’s dream.

 Canada now has a third vaccine approved. Not that this will stop the cacophony of complaints about slow roll-out. I figure we are lucky to have vaccines at all and do not see that the date at which 75 and up (that’s me) will be on the roster is unreasonable at April 15^th. There are a lot, a very great lot, of people in vulnerable positions, essential workers of all kinds, who need the shot a lot more than I do, including the harried young people stocking the grocery shelves and handing me my prescription drugs. I can wait. Even if we do cheat a bit.

 Next week I have an appointment to get my back assessed, a pool therapy class if the assessment is good, and book club and discussion group meetings that might take place in person – masked and distanced, but unZoomed. It would be nice to be looking forward to things staying that open, but I figure we have one more lock-down at least to go judging by what else is happening in the world. Now if I could look forward to a restaurant meal, that would be Nirvana.

We have ...this. Plus, since I snapped this shot from the front door without checking to see if the camera lens had opened fully, more snow. The bent tree on the far right is an apple tree. It does not have blossoms. 

 

Snow Kidding

 The daughter in Pakistan sent an email yesterday saying that she missed the snow. Yeah. I had to drive to our shopping town yesterday and it was an, um, interesting drive as the weather was doing one of those things it does in Eastern Ontario in February. Cloud, snow, wet and clingy, wind, sky clearing, more wind, cloud arriving, more snow, and repeat. So, I slithered, breathing through my mouth, part of the time and stepped cheerfully along in the sun for the rest of the time. We have snow. We have almost all of the snow that the snow gods have dumped on us for the last month. 

I have a blogging buddy called Nance, who just put up a post about shovelling. She may need counselling soon. Oh, Nance, if you want to do some shovelling up here, feel free to pack the scraper as well because there are spots where it will be needed.

I just took some photos from our porches. Our unshovelled porches. YD, feel free to admire as you sit in your garden where, I imagine, you have flowers. 

Tomorrow we have a fine young man with a strong back hired to shovel the roof. 

This is showing the laneway out to the road. 

Laneway behind the house. 

The field. Under that layer of snow is my rock garden. The bit of blue on the far right side is a tarp covering JG's woodpile for next year.

To sport with Amaryllis in the window

 And two more blooms to come. She is a thing of beauty and a joy for the next few days at least.

Mother Love

 

I can’t resist doing this, I really can’t. I do promise not to cross post this to Facebook though.

 I just watched a video of my highly-competent, very professional (at the top of her profession) daughter giving an impassioned speech about picking up litter and policing green spaces. The video also contained a clip of her picking up after a group of children, stuffing the litter into a plastic bag.

 I was impressed.

 And then I had a metal picture of what her room looked like when she was a teen-ager.

 I am still stifling peals of unholy mirth.

You know that saying about a prophet being without honour in their own country? Yeah.