A friend who sends me a photo every year of the Foxley River oysters she has on her birthday at an Ottawa oyster house is instead in Paris for this year’s celebration. She’ll be sipping champagne and enjoying lovely French oysters, which is just as well as there are no Foxley River oysters for her to slurp in Bytown this year, or probably for a few years to come, due to two diseases that have killed virtually all the oysters in our area.

Before she left Amsterdam for Paris, she went to see The Mouse Mansion (Muizenhuis), and true to her boosterism of all things PEI, spotted some miniature PEI potato bags in amongst the extensive and charming collection of tiny things and sent me photographic evidence. I think the bags say McKenna Bros Inc., which is a farm in Kings County. How and why they made it into this teeny wonderland remains a mini Dutch mystery.