Author Archives: Thelma

History passing

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I took my mother to an audiologist appointment at the mall in Summerside yesterday. She’s nearly deaf now in her right ear, with about 10% of her hearing remaining, and has been completely deaf in her left ear for over 80 years. She receives a disability pension from Veterans Affairs because her hearing loss was due to her Second World War service, so she can get an updated hearing aid every few years. The newer digital hearing aids have been life changing for my mother.

After her appointment, we took the opportunity to run a couple of errands, which meant spanning the length of the mall. Though she can walk quite well (with assistance) for short distances, we often use a transfer wheelchair for longer outings.

I’ve been following the coverage of events marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day and have found the images of the couple of dozen Canadian Second World War veterans who travelled to Europe for the commemorations very moving, probably the last trip for many.

Perhaps it was due to being awash in all this poignancy that I found myself pushing my tiny mother and overcome with the urge to call out to the people in the mall, “Look at this woman! She’s 102, she walked to a train station by herself with a little suitcase over 80 years ago to join the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division! She saw a German U-boat surface in the Gulf of St. Lawrence! She lost her hearing during the war! This is history passing in front of you!”

But I didn’t yell, of course. We just kept walking and rolling by the people staring at their phones and browsing in shops, my mother just another elderly person. We stopped to talk to the niece of another veteran of that long ago war, who said her centenarian aunt was in the hospital again, having a rough time. My mother went home and wrote her veteran friend a get well card that I delivered to the hospital today.

I’m told there are fewer than 10 Second World War veterans left on PEI. History is passing.

Vivian Phillips in front of my parent’s first apartment at 37 Russell Street, Summerside, 1945. Though released from her RCAF service in January of that year, she is still wearing her very serviceable military uniform shoes.

Backyard

I am still slowly dealing with debris from long-ago storms Fiona and Dorian. Most of the downed trees, hundreds of them on the 23 acres we occupy, will never be “cleaned up”. It’s too big of a job for me, the tangle of toppled 60-year-old spruce trees impenetrable in many places. I did a walk a couple of hundred feet from our house the other day and had to haul myself over trees piled four or five feet high, a brief panic of wondering if I was suddenly too old for such exertions followed by the relief that I am still quite physically strong.

Visitors comment on the destruction, on the fire hazard I’m allowing to remain. Yes, it’s true, it is all a fire hazard, but living in a forest full of conifers is a fire hazard anyway, dead or alive, so I’m used to it, and as a full-time caregiver I can’t do much more about it than I have. There are endless opportunities to worry about risks real and imagined, as I was reminded of at an emergency measures training I took many years ago.

We were to list what possible disasters could befall our municipalities, and we ticked off all types of natural disasters and possible human-caused chaos. The instructor, knowing exactly where my house is, said, “What about you, Thelma, what’s overhead all the time where you live?” Fuel-filled jets heading from North America to Europe, that’s what, and they could crash in Portage, he said, causing the western end of PEI to be cut off and straining the resources of our local emergency crews to deal with a disaster of such magnitude. Wide-eyed, we nervously laughed at this, thinking it so unlikely, but internally my younger self, who listened to the planes flying overhead on summer nights in our uninsulated cottage, wondering if some of them might be Russian missiles headed to the US, didn’t think it so far-fetched.

So I pick away at the fire hazard in the forest, my only real goal to reestablish walking paths that were there before Dorian in 2019 or, more likely, make new paths where an easier way through is evident. There is a lot to be said for taking the easy way, especially in nature. Nature just wants us to leave it alone to do its thing, to recognize that constantly trying to bend and shape it to our needs is futile and counterproductive. When you get comfortable with the mess of nature, less anxious to constantly clean everything up, the mess of life becomes more bearable. My Mary Oliver poem this morning certainly agrees:

BACKYARD
I had not time to haul out all
the dead stuff so it hung, limp
or dry, wherever the wind swung it

over or down or across. All summer
it stayed that way, untrimmed, and
thickened. The paths grew
damp and uncomfortable and mossy until
nobody could get through but a mouse or a

shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter
totally without direction management
supervision. The birds loved it.

Mary Oliver 
from Owls and Other Fantasies, 2003

News brought to you by a US hedge fund

These were the front two pages of The Guardian newspaper yesterday. It wasn’t a wrapper, as I first assumed, as the back two pages had normal newspaper articles.

The Guardian Saturday, April 26, 2025 Page 1
The Guardian Saturday, April 26, 2025 Page 2

The next page also looked like a front page, but the reverse of this page was numbered 4, so it was the third page.

The Guardian Saturday, April 26, 2025 Page 3

Yes, the front two pages were labelled in small print as paid political advertising, but who paid the bill, and how much did it cost? It’s difficult to take this any other way than a huge endorsement of one federal party over the other. Postmedia could have refused to take the ad, or agreed only to place it further back in the paper. This was a choice. And I’d be as disappointed if it were an ad for the Liberals or any other party.

Deceptive, creepy and mercenary.

See-saw

As world stock markets hop around in reaction to the US presidents tariff tantrums, be certain that some well-connected folks will be making a lot of money. Pump and dump, market manipulation, a quick whisper at the country club to watch the news on a certain date and time, all nearly impossible to prove.

Thus it has always been, the rich getting richer, but the unethical cruelty of such blatant avarice while cutting lifesaving foreign and domestic aid programs is nauseating. How much do they need? The answer will always be more.

I keep thinking about JP Morgan moving four billion dollars worth of gold bullion to New York in February.

French Fried Granola

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.

Bye American

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.

Old-Timey Talk

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?

Old Tools

It’s probably no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I like to keep the things I own for as long as I can, which has meant figuring out how to fix a lot of things. It started out as frugality but has now become as much, if not more, about keeping things out of landfill. I get this trait mostly from my father, who worked hard for everything he got. Even later in his life when he had money to buy new things, he would buy used and fix them up, always looking to save a dollar. I am a bit more of a spendthrift in comparison, not having his mechanical skills to buy things like used lawnmowers and get them going, but I certainly have the desire to not spend money on replacing something that could be fixed.

The handle of my 2001 vintage snow shovel, purchased at Callbeck’s Home Hardware in Summerside, broke this morning while I was trying to dislodge frozen snow and ice from my mother’s deck. I knew not to use it to pry, but the temptation to get one more piece of ice shifted was too much, and I paid!

I trundled off to my shop, stood in the warm springish sun and whittled the end of the shovel handle so it would fit back into the blade. It’s a bit shorter now than it was when purchased, but I bet I am a few centimetres shorter as well, so it evens out. The cutting edge on the shovel blade has worn down over the years, and I’ve periodically trimmed the sides to even it all up.

Two shovels, some wood shavings, my boot prints and skunk tracks.

I put the repaired shovel next to a metal one with a wooden handle that stands beside our shop door and is used to clear that step and the chicken run. It is really old – older than me, I expect – and would have come from our general store. It used to stand outside the back door of our former house next to the store. It’s a Champion No. 105 and though it has been outside for most of its life and has a crack in the blade where someone else pushed the limits of what you should pry with a snow shovel, it is still good. I have an extra handle kicking around from another shovel that rotted away that I can always replace the Champion’s with, if need be.

So, I’m in good shovel shape for another 23 years, when I will be 81 and hopefully still shovelling and fixing and standing in the sun.

MyPEI Account

I had a health test recently, the results of which I would receive in the mail. Not having heard anything by this morning, I wondered for the thousandth time in my life why the results couldn’t be available to me online. I decided to search “PEI patient medical records” to see if there has been any update on this long-promised service.

I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a pilot project for MyPEI and MyHealthPEI, where PEI residents can signup for early access to both online government and health services. I gathered the ID I needed to register, quickly moved through the easy online verification process, which included me saying my name in a video that is uploaded to their system to be reviewed by someone somewhere (verification in person is also available at Access PEI locations), and within a couple of hours, my account was active.

I haven’t had much time to look around on the MyPEI site (don’t think there’s actually much there yet), but the MyHealthPEI site (which seems to be provided by Telus Health) contained a list of my immunizations back to 2013. The Lab Results section was empty, but I found a notice that said they will be making results available for tests starting with those taken in March 2025.

The My Health Links section seems to be rich with links to resources on a wide range of topics. I’ve always found the Health PEI website a bit awkward to navigate – you sometimes need to know what you are looking for to look for it! – but this is well laid out.

In the end, I didn’t find what I wanted this time, but am hopeful that soon the days of waiting for medical tests to show up in the mail will be a thing of the past. The adoption of electronic medical records has been a long and bumpy process for the PEI health system, so this is a positive and important step.