Today’s rabbit hole was the link between Woodstock and the popularisation of granola in North America. I searched for granola and the top hit was a recipe with a surprising first ingredient.
The actual recipe does not include french fries (quel dommage!) and calls for light-brown sugar instead of golden brown, confirming once again that although I’ve spent lots of time on the internet over the past 30+ years, I understand very little about how it works.
Today is the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, but you could be forgiven for thinking it was the first day of autumn with all the red maple leaves everywhere.
In response to US tariffs on Canadian goods and increasingly ominous threats of annexation from the US president, many shoppers want to avoid buying things made in the US, so stores and sales flyers are dotted with little leaves to denote items are “Made in Canada” or “Product of Canada”, regulatory distinctions few of us knew about a couple of months ago.
US fresh produce is languishing on store shelves, and Canadian grocery chains are quickly trying to find new suppliers. This means that instead of the Florida and California citrus fruit we have seen in grocery stores for decades, those products are coming to the east coast of Canada from new-to-us places like Turkey, Israel and Egypt.
I have long despaired at seeing things like fresh Peruvian asparagus and Chinese snow peas in my local store, so I can’t say I’m thrilled with this development. I wonder how much of it ultimately gets thrown out, all that effort and fossil fuel spent on transporting garbage around the world.
I hope this new patriotic consumerism will make people consider not only where their products are from but if they need them at all. The climate crisis is still barrelling forward full tilt, and the nonsense coming out of the US is distracting from the real urgency to address this existential issue, which must certainly suit the “drill baby drill” ding dongs.
Stores will continue to sell us things if we continue to purchase them but, as we’ve seen from the rapid switch away from US produce, stores also notice when we don’t buy things.
My mother was watching a news channel yesterday and a piece about the current US president came on. She uses closed captioning because of her profound hearing loss, so thankfully I didn’t have to hear him. I said something like “Oh brother, now what?” and she laughed and declared him a scallywag. He certainly is.
Partly through hearing loss and partly through being raised by people born in rural PEI in the 1800s and early 1900s, my mother uses some interesting pronunciations and phrases, some of which I have also adopted.
When Biden stepped down from the 2024 US presidential election, my mother said it was because he was too “doty”, which means feeble-minded, in your dotage. Not dotty, though kind of the same.
My mother calls the red tomato sauce catsup, because that’s what it used to be, though most people say and spell it ketchup now. And she always pronounces tomato “to-mah-to”.
Drought, as in a prolonged period of dry weather, she pronounces to rhyme with “truth”, so “druth”, which sounds very old country to me.
Something I’ve never heard outside our family came from her uncle Everett Hardy. She always said that he called a windy, rainy storm a pompero, as in “it’s blowing a pompero,” and she would often refer to a storm that way. I could never find any other reference to this word and sort of thought he just made it up.
I was at the Summerside library a few years ago and they had just received a reprint of The Sailor’s Word-Book, which is a list of nautical words. I looked up pompero and didn’t find anything, but flipped around the “p” section and found:
Pampero: A violent squall of wind from the S.W., attended with rain, thunder, and lightning, over the immense plains or pampas of the Rio de la Plata, where it rages like a hurricane.
Bingo! How did her uncle, who never travelled much further than Nova Scotia once or twice, learn a word from South America? He loved to read, especially about sailing and the sea, so perhaps he learned about it in a book, but I rather expect it was something he heard someone else use, a word that travelled on the ships that moved up and down the Atlantic. My mother and I still call a wild storm a pompero, so guess that mispronunciation is our very own word.
To express surprise we may say “Land o’Goshen”, or use “by cracky” for emphasis, by cracky.
My mother has never sworn in all my 40+ years of living with her. She called someone an ass a couple of years ago, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard. My surprise at hearing that word come out of her mouth, and the intent behind it, made me laugh until I cried. And yes, I can confirm the fellow in question is an ass, and it’s not the scallywag-in-chief to the south but someone who lives close by who will remain nameless…and an ass.
I used to be a bit ashamed of my PEI accent, and used to actively tamp it down when I lived off Island, but now I don’t care and it’s as thick as it probably was when I was a child. I definitely use the inhaled “yuh” a lot, eh?