Hail to the 5-gallon bucket, the ubiquitous hold-all and do-all. Preppers seems to have a million uses for them, so look for them on the coat of arms of some future post-apocalyptic government. I am not a prepper, but I like to be prepared, and have many empty 5-gallon bucket, so I reserve the right to some day become a prepper. I’m ready!
I love using these buckets in the garden for weeding, but have always wished I could get the handle to stand up to make the bucket easier to grab and go. This week I cracked it. Bucket, meet bungee cord.
The handle stays up, so I won’t be grabbing the side of the bucket to move it when I’m on my hands and knees in a flower bed, which has always meant eventually breaking chips off the side of the bucket. And it’s easily reversible if I want to let the handle fold back down.
The bucket handles are mostly made of metal with a plastic piece that you hold. That plastic piece seems to break down long before the bucket does, and carrying a heavy bucket while only grabbing the thin metal bit is uncomfortable, so I take a piece of old water hose, cut off a suitable length, split it lengthways, and tape it over the handle. Ready for a few more years of puttering.
Electrical tape, because my father used electrical tape to mend everything, and I have many vintage rolls to get through.
The land where I live in Foxley River remains the unceded territory of the Miꞌkmaq people, who have occupied this island for over 12,000 years. Since European settlers arrived, the piece of land where my house is has been claimed by six people, as far as I can figure, including me.
It was once owned by Creelman MacArthur from Summerside, a businessman and politician. As far as I know, he never lived in Foxley River, and I suspect he bought the place solely as an investment. He had hoped the property would be designated as Prince Edward Island’s national park, as he mentioned when he spoke to a National Parks Amendment Bill in the Senate on June 17, 1938:
Hon. CREELMAN MacARTHUR: … Five years ago I acquired the old Warburton estate of 655 acres, only to realize that it was a white elephant. I built a lodge and a concrete and steel dam and put in some 50,000 trout. In a word, I did everything that I thought might appeal to the Commission when selecting in the province an area for a national park which would be attractive to tourists. But it seems the outstanding requirement was surf bathing, and my property had only sheltered stretches of river. It is a very beautiful area and its waters are well stocked with trout, lobster and oysters.
Right Hon. Mr. GRAHAM: What a place!
Hon. Mr. MacARTHUR: The property cost me some $15,000.I offered it to the Government as a gift, free of restrictions of any kind. I thought in that way a greater service would be rendered to this country, and to visitors in this country, than could be rendered byme as an individual.
However, it was deemed the part of wisdom to select an area in Queen’s county, of which the honourable senator from Queen’s (Hon. Mr. Sinclair) can speak in more detail than I can. Mr. Cromarty and another gentleman from the Parks Branch went down and after looking at four or five sites selected the one referred to in the Bill. Unfortunately, there was some difficulty with three or four landowners with regard to the expropriation, and for a year or more there has been some contention. This difficulty has now been removed, and the purpose of this Bill is to describe the area. We are now looking forward to having a park which will be the equal of anything in any other province in Canada.
And so the PEI National Park did not end up in Foxley River, but in Cavendish, in the heart of the area made popular by author Lucy Maud Montgomery and her Anne of Green Gables books. Just as well, but I’m sure Senator MacArthur had hoped to recoup part of his $15,000 investment, even if he did say (after the fact) that he had intended to give the property to the government as a gift. I don’t say that to be mean, and I never met the man, or his family, but I’m sure there would have been some way for him to make a little money on the deal. Business is business.
Mr. MacArthur died in 1943, and his Foxley River estate eventually broken up into smaller parcels, 23 acres of which we now inhabit. Part of the lodge he had built in 1933 is still here, as well as the dam and the descendants of those 50,000 trout!
I found a postcard online years ago that was probably taken in the 1930s or 40s of the view from the shore in front of our house looking northward up Foxley River. I wondered when I found it if MacArthur had the photo taken to advertise the beauty of his property, perhaps as something he could hand out to sway the opinion of the decision makers at the Ottawa Parks Branch. There really isn’t any other reason why this photo was taken, being so far from the beaten track as we were and still are.
I have many times tried to recreate this postcard photos, capture some mountainous clouds, but never have I caught a similar sky. It is startlingly the same vista, though, despite the massive forest fire that ravaged this area in 1960 and the many decades that have passed. The building in the centre is long gone, but the trees on the far shore look almost the same, with the same breaks in the treeline.
Yesterday a neighbour was making hay on that far field, as has been done for nearly two centuries on that piece of land. This area dodged becoming a tourist mecca 90 years ago, but how long before that field becomes cottage lots is anyone’s guess, so I am thankful for its timeless beauty every day. A miracle, really.
Saving this screen shot from the Indigenous Services Canada’s page that tracks the progress of getting clean drinking water to First Nations communities in Canada, a long-standing promise of our federal government that never seems to be fulfilled.
A friend asked me what I’ve been up to lately. I said I’ve been in my shop fixing an old school desk that was wiggly because the glue holding it together had dried out. She asked me to send a picture, so I did.
I was going to delete the photo, but then decided it is possibly the best portrait I could ever make of my brain: quite messy but also reasonably organized, full of stuff I probably should have gotten rid of ages ago, practical, a mix of old and new, slightly scattered, but all mine.
I am the cleaner
called by the housekeeper
who got a text from the valet
that a Reagan china plate
had been smashed in the President’s Dining Room.
As I swept up the red and gold shards
I thought of all who had slept there when it was a bedroom,
ate there after Jackie turned it into a dining room.
I remember the Bush twins
flicking cereal at each other
when they visited their grandparents.
I was new then, and they were naughty, but polite,
raised in privilege, but with humility, too.
The last family ate healthy meals together.
Laughing teasing sharing.
Phones banned from the table.
In awe of this place.
Grateful and light.
Always my first name.
Hello and please and thank you.
As I try to carefully remove the ketchup from the white woodwork
The blue and cream rug
The handmade gold wallpaper
The delicate vases
(it went everywhere)
I realize we will need experts
To do restoration work.
The conservators will need to dig deep
into their tool chests
to find something
to remove the stain that
the man-child has left.
Thumbs constantly rubbing his glass and metal soother,
rage and rudeness.
He doesn’t know my name.
No hello, just grunts and discontent.
It’s January 5.
Just a few more days.
When I hear a small plane or helicopter approaching our house, I run outside and give them a big wave. I’ve been doing this my entire life, but the little plane that flew over our house just now is the first one that clearly waggled its wings back at me. Never give up.
I used to spend part of each yoga practice gently encouraging Sally the tabby to move off my blanket as she joined me in the weird human thing I seemed to be doing, which often puts me in a cat petting position, but rarely results in feline adoration. Then I folded my blanket a bit differently one day, and she had a place to do the cozy cat while I did the downward dog. Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to give a little.
Just listened to a long discussion on local radio about the staffing challenges some tourism operators on PEI are facing this summer, which are serious for businesses small and large. They touched on lack of transportation, affordable housing, having to be more flexible with lengths of shifts and contracts, and affordable and accessible child care as some of the reasons they have difficulty attracting staff for service jobs.
While this discussion was specifically about labour stresses, I think we would do well to talk more about how the climate crisis is going to change the tourism industry, which is a major economic driver on PEI. I wonder how long tourism will remain a viable business in light of drastically increased fuel prices and the climate crisis. It’s not even officially summer yet, and already over 100 million US citizens were told to stay indoors this week because of extreme heat, and that’s just the most startling of many similar articles I read this week about extreme weather.
How long will it be seen as ethical to encourage people to jet somewhere for a winter break in the sun, or a week on PEI’s sandy beaches? Will tourism become limited to where you can drive in an electric vehicle or on public transport and not round-the-world excursions?
Our ability to imagine and plan for the future is one thing that seems to set humans apart from other animals, but as a society we don’t seem to have changed much about how we balance what we do today against how it will affect the future. I don’t see much change yet, and the clock is ticking.
Our house is still on fire, and we are toasting marshmallows on the flames.
Great Uncle George Harris gets a mention in the June 14, 1922 The Charlottetown Guardian. Nice to know he was well-liked, and not, as you might try to decode, a salesman for the Popular milk company, or from Popular. Pretty sure he worked for himself, milking the cows and bottling the milk.
His improved home still stands on the outskirts of Summerside, the barns that held his milk cows more or less intact. That end of town is still farmland, but not for long, as businesses continue to move to the north end.
My mother stayed at George and Carrie’s house on her way to enlist in the RCAF 79 years ago (Carrie was the youngest sister of my great-grandmother, Eva Hardy). George drove my mother from his house to the Summerside train station in his horse and milk delivery wagon, where she caught the train to Moncton and then on to do her basic training in Ottawa.
Also in today’s 100-year-old paper was the obituary of my friend’s great grandmother. I knew more people in the antique edition that in the one published today!
Mrs. McKenna died just a few weeks after her son, Philip, was killed working on the railway near his home in Conway, PEI.
It is not uncommon to find empty mussel shells in the woods around our home, the two halves still attached to each other but usually missing one piece of one shell. Crows will pick a mussel from the shore, fly up onto a tree branch, hold the mussel with their feet while prying it open with their beak, pick out the meat, and drop the shell when they are done.
Yesterday I spotted a shell in birch and poplar leaves, probably 200 feet from the river. It will soon be completely submerged, slowly releasing calcium and other minerals into the forest floor over the next decades. Forests think and move in centuries, while humans count days and weeks and months and years. Is it any wonder humans can’t see what trees are doing, how they communicate to each other (and us)? They probably feel we need to slow down a little.
Last evening I gathered some dry grass from the shore below our house to use as mulch in my garden. It floats on the river and gathers after storms, a mixture of seaweed and terrestrial grasses. Other things can arrive, too: pieces of wood, branches, dead fish, feathers. As I gathered a few hay forkfuls, I picked out and disposed of a short piece of plastic rope, the plastic top off a coffee cup and a couple of plastic bags.
I left the mussel shells I found in the pile of grass, and they will disappear into my garden, breaking under my rubber boots, split by a hoe, freezing and thawing, rubbed by worms and microbes, catching the rain.
I appreciate more and more the riches I have around me, even if, to some, it’s just a pile of old dead grass. With an endless supply of fallen leaves and grasses, I don’t need to buy bark mulch that is trucked in from far away. The mulch I use would definitely not be welcome in a beautifully manicured neighbourhood, but that’s not where I live. It’s taken a while, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with the rougher look and letting nature move right up to my front door.
The crow and I gather from the shore, apart but together, same-same.
