Sunshine and a day for outdoor chores

 We are having quite a beautiful autumn. Sure, we get some rainy days and the nights are frosty. It still seems pretty mild and sunny from my perspective.

We had a great long chat with my dear brother last night. He is coming to terms with the tragic death of his eldest son on Thanksgiving. He is hoping to go to Port Colborne very soon to spend some quality time with his other two boys, reminiscing and looking at photos. Their own private celebration of life.

I try to spend time outdoors puttering around. There isn't much more I can do for the gardens. The garlic is mulched with a thick layer of leaves. There are still a few carrots and turnips in the west side garden box. This brings to mind a chat I had in the little grocery store the other day. I had bought a larger turnip to add to our stash. The woman behind me in line asked me if I called them turnip or rutabaga. (I call them turnip). We agreed that the small white ones are not very nice. The clerk proceeded to tell us how her mother cooked them and how much she hated them. My dear old dad liked them that way, calling them Tatties and Neeps. Only in a small town small grocery store would you get that interaction. 

Yesterday I pulled all the vines and trellis off the back porch. I stashed the trellis under the porch, but they probably won't be used next year. We are going to tear off the big porch and rebuild. The new stairs will be located where we had the trellis for hops. The back porch is 25 or so years old. It is huge, about 15 by 15 feet. We don't use it because it gets too hot once the weather warms up. Many of the boards are showing serious rot. We will tear it off and salvage what is still "good". The new porch will be about four by 15 feet with the clothesline at one end and the stairs at the other.  I will have to think about relocating some precious plants in the spring.

I've painted the fresh wood around the new patio door. Terrible paint! It's like milk, impossible to NOT have splatters. After that nonsense I had to wash the glass.  I just wanted to get the wood sealed. I think the back of the house is going to need a total coat of paint next spring.

I watched an aspen shedding it's leaves in a sunbeam just now. It looked like gold dust falling.

A sad day for our country

 I have written at length in the past about our family's military history going back generations. My eldest grandson is our present serving member, in an eastern Canada unit.

Early this morning we saw the news about a catastrophic explosion at the training center in Wainwright Alberta. At this moment the death toll sits at FOUR with dozens of catastrophic injuries.

Public information has not been released about the cause of the situation.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured and bereaved. If your family is affected by this horrible situation, we are thinking of you.

It had to happen sooner or later

 Every surface was white when I woke up this morning! And it wasn't feathers or frost! I'm really surprised that the back porch never melted away, because the sun did hit it for several hours. We are heading for a relatively warm, sunny, few days so it won't linger to long.

M puttered around outdoors putting some things to bed and torching the pile of brush above the garden. Pup and I wandered up hill to swap out the sd cards in the cameras. We still aren't seeing any wildlife.

We started getting organized to make a lot of cabbage rolls. I thought we were going to do it all today, but no, there is just to much preparing before we get rolling.

Daughter T and I are off to visit a craft thing tomorrow, and maybe a spot of lunch. Daughter C and her partner P were intending to come visit today until their cat got sick. Hopefully we will get another nice weekend before winter lands for the duration.

The military establishment near us is doing some training with helicopters. We had a huge, low flying Chinook and a small Huey buss our little valley.  Those big guys are LOUD!

Thanksgiving Weekend will never be the same

 

This sweet fellow was my brothers eldest son Ben. He has tragically died as a result of a car crash last night, Thanksgiving Monday.

I can't imagine losing a child, or so tragically.

As a little lad he was obsessed with fire trucks and fire fighters. My brother has the sweetest photo of Benny, age about five, at the firehall. One of the staff put one of their big old jackets and a helmet on him. Benny has his head thrown back, eyes closed, laughing his head off.  He was in love with that until he got old enough to discover cars!

My nephew was a speed demon who was involved with the racing community in central Ontario. Was he speeding? He wrapped the car around a power pole on a long straight stretch. The weather was HORRIBLE.  Unless there were witnesses, we will never know. We just have to try to believe he was doing what he loved to do at the time of the crash.

I hope his beloved Grandpa Jack was there to greet him on the other side. 

Family Time

 We had a lovely dinner with family and friends yesterday. The weather was great too. Sadly, mr. M mother and step father were not able to join us. His dear mother is in rapidly declining health. M and his brother D are going to spend next weekend with them. My daughter and her partner are coming up to visit from the GTA so I will be hanging back home. 

We had the technician from our new service provider at the door very early this morning. The phone call last evening said they would be here at 8AM so my dear daughter got up early while M and I snoozed on. He arrived at 9:30. We were very disappointed to learn that we wouldn't be changing internet providers until the spring. Our cables haven't been laid in, and the contractor doing that part of the work isn't scheduled to be down here for two months. If we are frozen up or have snow, that can't lay lines until spring. so we continue at the mercy of that ding dong bell company.

We are having a lazy day. I delivered my daughter home around noon, then scuppered on home to sit quietly and knit. My great grandson B.L. has outgrown the beautiful sweater I knit him last winter. He wanted to wear it but it's much to short. Using a pattern called "FLAX", I can knit one up pretty quickly for him. I'm going to make it on the bigger size. I felt sad for the little lad when I dropped his Oma home. He was all alone riding his bike up and down the lane. There are no other children close by for him to play with, and his sister was with her mother.  He's only eight years old. He came running up to me for a big hug and said "I hope you have a good afternoon Granny". I love these two little ones. 

Shots from a lovely day

 

Long Shadows, river levels dropped in anticipation of spring floods, red leaves and lazy walks up my quiet country road

Preparations

 Today was just a gorgeous day. It was warm and sunny. The pup and I walked up our back trail to the woods. The maple leaves carpeting the trail smell lovely. This evening there are THUNDERSTORMS blowing around S.Ontario, though they are missing us. 

We are approaching Thanksgiving Weekend. We are hosting dinner on Sunday. I will.collect my dear daughter. Several members of M family will be with us. His dear mother is in failing health so they have had to bow out.

The pies are baked and in the freezer. We will shift the bird from the freezer to the refrigerator on Friday.

I'm plugging away at cleaning house. My stamina still isn't back to normal. I was supposed to be.in an aqua fit class two weeks ago but that isn't happening! Maybe next week?

One solid sick week

 Yeppers, the sickest I've been in YEARS!

M seems to be resisting it to some degree. He bombarded it with some of his alternative medicines. He's braver than I about that stuff.

I'm getting a wee bit better every day. This afternoon I had a burst of energy and toddled outside to do some yard work. I managed to trim everything along the west side of the back porch. The rubble got loaded into the wheel barrow then trundled to the woods for dumping. I believe in returning organic stuff to the earth. After that I washed up and hit the bed for half an hour!

After a rest, I made a cup of tea and knit for a bit. Then I got back upstairs to swap out my summer duvet for the winter one. Changing those covers is as physically demanding as that yard work. I had to lay down again! Hahaha

 It got quite breezy this afternoon. The beautiful maple trees really started shedding. I can see the forest floor at the back of the house now. This evening the pup and I walked up the forest trail behind the house. I needed to put one of the trail cameras further into the bush now that hunting season is upon us. We have had interlopers with guns trespass in bygone years. When the girl and I were out front removing some trellis for storage, a deer was snorting and huffing in the woods. We don't see them but they let us know they see us. They seem to be hanging out in the woods behind our shed. I heard them there a couple of weeks ago too.

So that's the kind of day it's been. I hope we can go for a drive tomorrow.

The flu house

I had strange things happening to my body over night that kind of made me think this flu is finally letting go. I'd say I'm 25% better.

We needed some things from the store. Taking precautions, I ran through quickly, getting back into the car $130 poorer. We put away the food and faced the music. I'm whooped! 

M has it now. Lots of napping going on. Tylenol and antihistamines are our friends again.

Wednesday September 30

 Tomorrow is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation & Orange Shirt Day in Canada

It is the day we remember and honor our First Nations people and the struggles they have had at the hand of the people who came here back in the day.

Orange Shirt Day is in remembrance of the children who were lost or suffered in residential schools.

My family are settlers who have history with the First Nations people. There is a Canadian author named Catherine Parr Trail. My grandmothers maternal grandparents were part of the colony that is the subject of her book. If it wasn't for the First Nations women teaching my ancestor how to live in this harsh land, I doubt they would have survived.  My grandmother shared lessons with us that she was taught by her grandmother and mother. Most of my cousins have forgotten, but I try to carry them on. 

When I was 15, I befriended a young mother in our neighbourhood. She was a First Nations woman from Manitoba. At only 25, she had five children. The troubled past wasn't really on our radar back at that time, but she told me her stories of growing up on a depressed reservation and being forced to Residential School.  The children were stripped of their culture and treated very badly. Unfortunately quite a few didn't make it out alive. I think of her often and wonder how she and her children carried on. Her stories have never left me. 

On the road again

 This afternoon we hopped in Ruby and headed out to an area south east of us, called the Lanark Highlands. This region produces the greatest percentage of Ontario maple syrup. There is a lot of maple there. 

The colors were just spectacular! As it was very overcast and a bit hazy,  I had no luck taking any photographs.

We were off to meet a gentleman selling the tires off his Toyota. The price was certainly right but, man, did we have an interesting time finding his place.

On our way we planned to stop at an orchard at Burnstown to buy apples and cider. We were so disappointed the place is closed on Monday and Tuesday.

On the return trip we stopped at a little hut at the top of a farm lane. They were offering pumpkins and a small bag of apples. They are kind of odd looking, probably cross bred to spy apples. Those were my grandmothers favorite baking apples.

M stopped into Valley Heritage Radio station to buy some CDs. They sell an eclectic mix of local artists. He's been going on about this song about  blue frogs of Ashdad as long as I've known him, and sure enough, they had that CD. I popped into the vet clinic and picked up another bottle of my dogs arthritis medication. It was kind of an expensive day!

EDIT: I had to correct a lot of odd spelling mistakes in this post. Sometimes these programs we post to pop letters in where they don't belong....or is it just me???

A beauty of a day

 I took some Tylenol Cold and Sinus this morning, which greatly alleviated my symptoms. There is work to be done!!

First on the agenda was peeling and slicing the last of the apples. M then made a coarse sort of apple sauce. I had some frozen puff pastry sheets in the freezer, so we are going to make two strudels.  We were talking about how flavorful the wild apples are. The store apples have been so cross bred that they have lost a lot of their unique flavors.

There is some serious yard work to get done up. M. hauled the patio table down off the porch. I brought all of the garlic and onions out of the dark garage and got them all cleaned up and into baskets. Now the table can go under the porch for the winter. I took all of the stalks and broke them up and stuffed them into the old washer tubs my neighbour brought over. I topped that with a thick layer of grass clippings and then a good thick layer of hummusy soil.  They will be ready for planting in the spring.

After that my get up and go left the building so I came in for a cup of tea.  I feel better getting a couple of chores off my list.

My trip to S.Ontario

 So, last Monday I drove down to Peterborough to see my siblings and my fathers cousin.

My fathers family is very fractured. When he was 6 or 7, his mother ditched him and his sister with her parents and scuppered off to the U.S. with their newborn baby sister in her arms. His father was not part of the household as he was living elsewhere with his WIFE. I was 6 when my grandfather died, but I have no memory of meeting him.

When my grandmother went to the US, she had my infant aunt adopted into another family. She married the guy she ran off with, then had at least five more children with him. There are possibly others. Some were in foster care, some were under supervision of older siblings. It was complicated. One died in unsupervised care.

My father passed away in 2013, well into his 90th decade. I kept hoping he would talk about his family, but it didn't happen. I only discovered the identity of his father a week or so before he passed. One of my American cousins found a photo of him and sent it to me, thinking it was my father! When the backing was steamed off we discovered my grandfathers name written on the back. 

My brother and I then DNA tested with two companies for proof. A whole lot of information came to light from some of our closest matches. We learned that we had relatives in the neighbourhood. 

Last year I met two daughters of my fathers first cousin Gordon. We had a wonderful visit. They were absolutely aghast with the story. One of the ladies gave me contact information for my fathers last living first cousin. She is living very close to my siblings! We have written a few letters and spoken on the phone but didn't actually meet until this week.

My first impression was how much she resembles my fathers full sister. She was tickled to learn she actually looks like somebody. As an only child, her life was different too. She told me wonderful stories about my grandfather and his wife, who she was very close to. The whole family lived on the same block. My father and his sister lived at the corner, about four streets down. If they ever knew their aunts and uncles lived within walking distance, they never told us. My cousin R had no knowledge of Dad and B, or baby P.

Cousin R, too, was aghast at the story of her older cousins miserable childhood. It was so completely opposite to hers, just up the street.

We will be visiting again when I manage to get enough nerve to go to the city again.