One of the joys of being my mother’s daughter is acting as the courier of her kindness, most often as the deliverer of baked goods to family and friends, and even sometimes to strangers. From a young age I was often sent to neighbours with fresh muffins or bread or whatever had emerged from her oven just because she thought they needed a treat, casseroles and dishes of soup to those unwell. She did the work, but I received the thanks and could bask in her goodness; I have slid far on her cookie diplomacy!
Last week I delivered some of my mother’s Christmas baking to a friend, who had a little card and gift waiting for me. It is a beautiful pine needle basket made by an artist from Maine called Morning Star Wolf. My friend said the basket might look empty, but it was filled with gratitude. What a gift.
I am writing to you from a house without electricity. This is the third time since post tropical storm Fiona blew through here at the end of September that our power has gone out from wind knocking trees over onto the line running along our lane. The electricity was out for nine days after Fiona, and this time it’s only been 22 hours, a dawdle.
We (have to) have a generator to keep the furnace, water pump, refrigerators, and a few lights going, but we usually only run it a few hours during the day, not constantly. It’s a Honda 6,500 watt that we bought in 2003 and it has given great service, even with shamefully little maintenance. It lives in our outbuilding and feeds underground to a sub-panel in our basement. I’m hoping very soon to replace or augment it with a battery backup system that would ideally be able to connect to our solar panels, which are grid tied and essentially dead during power outages.
Thankfully our internet provider stopped trying to restring our fibre line above ground and decided last month to bury it most of the 1,000 feet from the road to our house. When the generator is running, or the backup battery on the modem is in use, we can be online and make landline calls; this is a big improvement from pre-Fiona.
I’m not sure how we are going to deal with the remaining trees in our lane. There are dozens of white spruce to be cut, each about 60 years old and 60 feet tall, and it will be a big job, more than I can handle, and potentially dangerous near the power lines. We will also look at paying to have our line buried, though I have no idea what that would cost.
Since Fiona changed the structure of our forest, so many trees are exposed and keep snapping off or falling over in strong winds, and a few onto our power line. I’ve not been able to find the words to describe how Fiona destroyed parts of our forest. I still can’t believe how quickly the woods I knew so well were flattened.
I am aware that these minor hiccups and inconveniences are insignificant bumps on a privileged, gilded road. Many will never have the luxuries we have right now, even without electricity. It could be worse, no doubt about it, but it has been tiring and disorienting.
I developed a bit of a mantra to get through the days and weeks after Fiona, the endless lugging of brush and cutting of massive trees: At least a tree can only fall once. If they could only leave the power lines alone.
To keep sawdust out of your work boots, take an old pair of socks, cut off the foot, and use them as gaiters. A hack learned from my forester pal Bruce Craig, put to much use the past three months.
Peter captured so beautifully the rollercoaster that November is for me. I always find this time of year a bit unsettling: the shorter days, the cold north wind after the tease of a warm day, the chores I should be doing and can’t get to, the looooong lead up to Christmas, the passing of another year.
It’s probably not a surprise to anyone who has read along with this blog that I am often thinking of times past, but lately the people who are long gone are gathering around me in ways I’ve not felt before. Most days I drive by the houses where generations of my family have lived and I picture them inside, or working in the barn, or standing by the road chatting with a neighbour. These houses are empty, uninhabited, so available for my imagination to fill them again. It is comforting but strange, as if something happened on All Saints’ Day this year that released them back into the world. I’m not going mad, but perhaps there are things I need to learn from these people.
Freeland 1935. My grandfather has stooks of grain in his field at the top of the photo, and my mother is living with her grandparents at the farm in the bottom, on the corner of the Barlow and Murray roads.
US President Joe Biden’s granddaughter, Naomi Biden, will be marrying a fellow called Peter Neal. Saw this photo of the couple this morning.
Peter Neal and Naomi Biden
Hmmm. There was something about Neal’s eyes and smile that reminded me of someone, a television actor from my childhood, but I couldn’t remember who it was, or what show he had been on, but I knew the actor I was thinking of had dark hair and a moustache.
I showed the photo to Steven, who is a decade older than me and has a much better memory, but he drew a blank. So I added a moustache.
Very natural.
Funnily enough, this still didn’t help Steven, and neither TinEye or Google Image Search could pinpoint the 70s star with my life-like rendering. I mean, come on, that moustache looked so natural! You know, that guy on that show! Nope.
Needing to scratch this pop culture itch, I searched for “1970s US sitcom casts” and scrolled until I found him.
The cast of Petticoat Junction and not Peter Neal.
Gomez Addams, Commander Sherman, husband of Patty Duke – John Astin! I didn’t watch either the Addams Family or Petticoat Junction, but there he was, sitting in a dark corner of my tv-addled brain, barely discernible, but just clear enough to let me match him with someone who looks absolutely nothing like him. Good try, brain.
My third crop of garlic went in the ground this afternoon. I started with two bulbs of Phillips, a hardneck variety purchased from Hope Seeds, in 2020. That duo yielded 22 bulbs that I planted last fall, with the miraculous result that all 150 cloves planted grew! I credit the aged chicken manure produced by our little flock for the good outcome.
Phillips proud of Phillips.
I kept the 50 largest bulbs to plant this fall and the rest I have been using in the kitchen. Local garlic is wonderful but expensive, so it really is a worthwhile crop, even in my small garden. It doesn’t take a lot of work, and having something to plant in the fall when everything else is going dormant and there is less to do in the garden is very hopeful.
I plant garlic in rows 6″ apart. Luckily the dibber I use to poke the hole for each clove has a shaft that is exactly 6″ long, so it’s easy to space them out in the bed.
But equally as lucky, if I just want to poke a hole with my finger, is that I know that my hand is 6″ long, and my index finger is almost 3″ long, pretty much the perfect depth for a garlic clove. One of our set design teachers at the National Theatre School taught me that trick, to measure your hands and fingers so you would never be without a measure. It is one of the “handiest” hacks I know!
My hand is a half a foot, but a whole hand!And 3″ wide.
Just now, as I was looking out the living room window trying to decide how to spend this day, a flock of robins bounced down our lane. Two, then three, leapfrogging over each other. Moving from the red dirt road to the green grass, all of it covered with leaves from the white birch, the maskwi.
I counted seven in all, running and hopping, turning over leaves that were nearly the same colour as their beautiful rusty breasts. They were finding little earthworms and the ancient sowbugs, tiny crustaceans that walk on earth.
As the last robin hopped out of my view, I was still undecided as to what I should do with the rest of this day, still fresh and new, but my robin friends certainly reminded me to walk lightly on the earth and appreciate whatever I find. The sun is finally up and the maskwi are glowing in its light.
Modern Stoicism are offering their ”live like a Stoic” week again this year starting October 24, and you can still sign up. I’ve been participating in this free program for many years, and while I probably couldn’t call myself a devoted Stoic, Stoic Week has given me tools that I believe help me feel more balanced and happier. It is now a rare morning when I don’t think upon waking: “Today I will encounter things I can control and things I can’t control, and I will try to deal with both calmly.”
I have not yet written about my family’s experience with post tropical storm Fiona, but I was surprised at how I was able to emerge from our house after the storm, faced with weeks worth of cleanup and an altered landscape, and just look at it all but not pass judgement. It was what it was. I have said many times over the past three weeks: ”At least a tree can only fall once.”
For someone who has always predicted, planned and prepared to try to stay ahead of problems, this calm and, dare I say, Stoic outlook was proof that at least some of what I’ve been studying these past few years has worked. Stoicism is not at all about becoming emotionless or robotic; it is about finding balance and perspective, and learning how to ride out the storms of life, both literal and figurative.
It’s sort of remarkable that I’ve reached this point in my blogging life and not really talked much about decluttering or minimalism. I am not a minimalist – far from it – but love the idea of it, and aspire to live with fewer things cluttering my house and mind.
Just as life is too short to eat terrible bread, it is also to short to use a terrible pen. Once upon a time I would pick up free pens wherever I saw one, and they were almost all terrible. The ink never runs freely and smoothly, they don’t last, and generally tend to be better advertisements than writing utensils.
The result of all this was that I used to have a drawer full of pens, but as most of them didn’t work or worked poorly, I usually grabbed the same one every day, most often a blue ink retractable Papermate Flexgrip, which I bought by the box.
I finally came to the conclusion that keeping things I would never use was silly and a waste of resources. If someone else can use it, then pass it along or, better yet, don’t acquire something I will never use or never really enjoy.
So the obvious first step was easy: stop taking free pens! Next, I took the pens I didn’t want and that worked ok to meetings with me, where someone usually forgot to take a pen and wanted to borrow mine. “Here, take this one, and keep it,” I would say, like Daddy Warbucks. Little did they know they were helping me out more than I was helping them.
Over the dozen or so years of this whittling down, I’ve made myself use pens that worked well but didn’t like until they finally ran out of ink. Now I can take the dead pens and throw them in a recycling bin at Staples, where I am optimistic they actually make something with them and not just greenwash them into the local landfill.
This morning the last Flexgrip I have gave up the ghost. I am left with a Bic Round Stic that Steven got at a conference. When it wears out, I have the Sheaffer pen someone gave me when I graduated high school in 1984. I was able to buy a new cartridge for it, and it will likely be the only ballpoint I will own.
News out of Sackville, New Brunswick that Mel’s Tea Room is closing, sending Mount Allison University alumni into fits of nostalgia. Generations of Mount Allison University students ate, socialised and studied at Mel’s, and I was certainly one of them. It was like something out of a movie: green walls, counter with stools, hard booths, great diner food and strong coffee. Always someone coming and going. When I attended Mount A in the late 80s, their magazine section was second to none.
Town residents and students had an uneasy relationship at times, similar to the way people who live in a touristy city feel about those who crowd their streets. While residents knew that the university was good for the economy of the town, we students could certainly be a pain. At Mel’s, though, everyone sort of just got along on common ground. Even as thoughtless youth, we knew it was a place to revere and appreciate. Everyone loved Mel’s
I have only been there a few times since I graduated in 1989, the last being in 2013 when Steven wrote the lyrics for an opera presented by students of the Mt. A music faculty. I grabbed some shots on my last visit, the diner eerily sort of empty that night. I had my usual club sandwich and fries and soaked the place in, remembering all the fun I had there, all my pals, the thrill of being one in a long conveyor belt of students who felt at home at Mel’s, knowing I would eventually be replaced, but loving the smoke and coffee and fries and friends and laughter.
Rainy night on Bridge StreetThe booths, the floor, those green wallsJukebox and fabulous speakers
Sit a while
Club sandwich and fries, pleaseVeggie burger?Booth wall, complete with names carved on trim
