After the Hiatus

I have been busy teaching, entertaining and visiting ... and now I am home.  Before I start preparations for next week's lessons, I will fill in some of the blanks.

My friend Erma is just back from a visit to Kenya so we had a great gossipy visit last weekend.  Layla, who sent money off with Erma on this trip, joined us for dinner on Saturday.  Layla is 20 and has been raising money for disadvantaged kids to help them get an education since she was a young teenager.  I met her when she was fifteen.  She has helped to build kitchens and dormitories at the Daisy Centre for kids with disabilities, sent a crippled girl off to have a necessary operation so that she could attend high school as a CHES scholarship girl, and used her funds for a myriad of other small projects.  Erma taught in Western Kenya from 2001 - 2003.  She made it her business to discover where help was needed, and has been raising money and awareness in her Canadian church and high school ever since her return.  She has been back three or four times, each time discovering more projects to help, and so her Kenyan work continues to grow.

Dan, Sarah, Lucas and Remi spent a few days here while I visited Techwood and Scootz.  We all enjoyed shaking up our lives a little, and I came home to a clean house, fewer weeds and a mowed lawn, to a stream free of a tree that threatened to block it, and to a clothesline that works like a charm again..

While they worked and played here at the lake, I went off on missions in the Lanark area, and managed to fill my three days in interesting ways. 

I walked every day a few times with Kenya and old Charlie and discovered just how friendly Lanark is ... and how beautiful the gardens and river are.  Charlie loved his walks and hip-hopped along beside Kenya despite his arthritis.

At the annual Balderson sale I picked up bathing suits that will last me for another few years.  In Perth I found a wine cup that smooths out rough wine, and a bar of natural soap that smells good enough to eat.  I also attended a great outdoor concert in the rain with a new friend. 

Before I left, the boys and I went off to McDonald's Corners where I discovered the nicest Saturday Market I've ever been to.  Listening to conversations around me while I drank fair trade coffee, I was reminded of a recent trip to London when I marched against the Iraq War with hordes of little old grey haired ladies and men ... all from the peace protest era.  I bought quiches and fudge from little girls raising money for autism, and, when I asked why they were so interested, was told by the younger one that her older sister looked after a little girl who was on the spectrum. I don't think I have ever met nicer kids, and when I told their camera-toting grandfather, he said that it had to be his wife's influence because he was a bad actor.  Then I wandered over to talk to a goat lady ... and was reminded of my own experiences with goats ... another tale from the depths of memory.

After eating our way around the market, we drove to the dump where I found books and blouses at the recycling centre, and then visited the woman who bought Techwood's old place.  I like her ... and her dogs.  She too has a Charlie with the oddest colouring imaginable.  He looks ferocious but hides behind her skirts as soon as you speak to him.  It took Scootz a few minutes of gentle stroking to convince him to come out from under the desk once we were inside.  A friend of his owner described him as a cut and paste dog because his cross breeding has not created a harmonious blend at all.  Rather he has a shepherd size and shape, a pit bullish head, some dalmation freckles, a spectacular grey diamond on a white forehead, and his front half is white, the back half dark.

I was glad to get home, but I am very glad I spent a few days with my boys.  And it was nice to meet a new friend with whom I have so much in common.  Maybe next time I visit he will give me a ride on his Harley.

Last night I made the mistake of retreating from the steady rain into a movie.  Have you seen "The Weatherman"?  I found it terribly depressing ... good ... but hard to watch the protagonist's repeated failures and unremitting sadness ...

And now I must start work on my lessons for next week.  I am teaching Monday, Thursday and Friday this week.  Roger, the young Swiss carpenter, will be joined by a handicraft teacher in her early fifties and another younger Swiss woman.  I want to work with their common interests and the things they can teach one another.  I picked up some second hand books on handicrafts in Lanark ... so I think I will start there.

Have a great week ... and I will try to make more regular appearances than I have lately.

More Ketchup

While I was busy filling in imaginary words and thoughts for speech balloons, I missed the real excitement.  A tree fell and hit the top hydro line (that's the only live one) and caught on fire.  Only Hydro Quebec could resolve that situation, and they arrived 16 hours later when I was already out for the night (around 10 p.m. on Thursday).  They brought their poles and left them on the side of the road and used their cherry picker to lift the tree (its fire long extinguished on its own) off the wire.  I don't know how I missed it.  Apparently they had several big vehicles and massive lighting units operating right across from my bedroom window!  Even Kenya slept through it.  And through the fireworks that my next door neighbours set off.

Of course Kenya is sleeping through a lot these days and nights.  She is exhausted by all the swimming and playing she's been doing.  She chased sticks thrown by the little boys most of the weekend, and for the last couple of days I have been exercising her with the kayak.  Yesterday I whipped across the lake to deliver dog fur to a neighbour who has a pesky groundhog.  Kenya swam behind me and while I visited she chased sticks into the water.  Then we headed home.  She was finally beat enough to say no to retrieving a stick.  I still had enough energy to go for a long refreshing swim that relaxed me.

On Friday night I joined a group of people at a local restaurant ... interesting but a little strange.  The woman who invited us all failed to show up and the odd assortment of people who were there were somewhat bemused by her absence.   We ended up doing what people usually do ... found those people with whom we had most in common and chatted.  Nice break from talking to Kenya and bearing the noise of machinery.

My box garden is becoming a rainforest of tangled vines.  Lots of nascent tomatoes and nasturtium flowers.  Just leaves on  the pepper plants and leaves and vines on the cucumber.  The onions are doing well.  I ate one yesterday.  The second crop of radishes is coming along nicely.  And I have given up on the chard and the leeks.  The Thai basil  and the arugula are quietly doing their thing and providing me with salad ingredients nearly every day.

I nurtured a weed in my chard square for a few weeks, but when I went to the market yesterday morning I asked the farmer from whom I bought Swiss chard what she thought had happened to mine.  She said that I would definitely have chard by now if the seed was viable and had not been killed off by heat or eaten by a bird. So I went home and uprooted the very healthy weed I had been growing and transplanted a lettuce into that square.  I think I will transplant one of my regular basil plants into the leeks' square.


Outside the box, the zucchinis are producing lots of flowers but far fewer zucchinis ... I think I have a plethora of male blossoms.  Apparently you can deep fry them.

All the herbs except the basil are doing well.

The beans, nasturtiums, and morning glories are all madly climbing the trellis to the deck railing and I have a riot of green foliage and lots of blue and red flowers but no bean flowers or beans yet.

Tonight I am entertaining Tom and Marlene.  I am not sure what I will prepare but I do know that my herbs will be part of the meal ... and the Dutch ginger cake I bought at the market will be served with an iced coffee drink that is wonderful.  You make double strength coffee and blend it with ice cubes and vanilla ice cream and then chill.  It is very refreshing but not calorie free.

Tomorrow I start another week of teaching.  I expect to enjoy it ... two hours a day with a middle aged Swiss woman  who would like to have some of her lessons in a canoe.  We may ask Conchita who is married to one of the men on the lake to join us.  She is not too sure about cold Canadian lake water, so we will see.

I have been  reading another travel book called The Female Nomad and Friends.  It is a combination of adventures and recipes picked up along the way by an interesting and varied group of solo women travelers.  Almost all of the women have websites to visit and several have  recommended SERVAS as a good way to meet interesting people as you travel. A few weeks ago I decided to become a host for SERVAS and if I ever get my act together will jump through the necessary hoops.  And then I may register as a traveler as well.  All this reading about adventures is making my feet itch again.

So that's it ... the weekend dollop of ketchup ... hope your weekend has been enjoyable and that you are looking forward to a week of blistering heat in a pleasantly cool environment.

Travel Books and Gardens

 am reading Laurie Gough's first travel book, Kite Strings.  It was written in her twenties and tells of her adventures in the southern hemisphere.  Much of it deals with living in Fiji which abundantly supports its society of food gatherers.  Laurie taught with me in June.  She has a second book out (which I will definitely buy) and she teaches a course in travel writing which I intend to take.  Her writing is remarkable ... on a par with Karen Connely's, Touch the Dragon, which won a GG for non-fiction the year it came out.  This is a book I would find hard to lend out in case it didn't come home.

My own garden is becoming Edenic in its fecundity too.  Here are some photos.

First the beans ... the vines ... no beans yet.

 Then the beefsteak tomato plant which has two tiny tomatoes so far.  This is one of them.


And the other tomato plant in the box which has five mini tomatoes so far:

And then there are the zucchinis. I am already eating from the first plant shown, but the other garden up by the house looks as if it will soon be feeding me too.

And then there are the nasturtiums which are wonderfully colourful and edible, and the herbs which are all madly producing far more than I can enjoy by myself despite my most heroic efforts.

Tiffany: a case of mistaken identity

An Email to a Friend sent Thursday:

Yesterday I took a break from the!@##$$$%% taxes and went to Montreal with a neighbour and friend.
Strange trip ... but fun. I thought she was inviting me to go to the fashion district with her sister but in fact she wanted me to accompany her to the Tiffany Glass Exhibition at Les Beaux Arts.

I prepared by shoving my camera and a skirt I wanted to find a top to match into my pack.  It was only when we were actually on Sherbrooke Street looking for parking that she said we would not be going to the fashion centre she had mentioned; that her sister said it specialized in skimpy tops for very young people.

Before we made the trip, she had said that Tiffany would only be in town for a few more days and I thought Tiffany was a friend of her sister's ... someone coming with us! Duhhh ...

Anyway we had lunch with her very strange sister ... 70 years old ... and GLAMOROUS! For forty years she was Holt Renfrew's top salesperson selling Estee Lauder ... and believe me ... she proved that make- up can transform a woman. Skinny as hell. Spike heeled boots. A knee that juts out to the side. A packrat whose 3 bedroom apartment in NDG is so stuffed to overflowing that she has to sleep on the livingroom couch and she won't allow anyone in.

And delightful!

At the restaurant women kept coming up and telling her how much they missed her ... clients ... ranging from a chic fifties matron to a thirty-something lovely natural beauty who had been going to her since she was a teenager. And, except for the make-up,  there wasn't even a hint of artifice about her.

So we were really there to go to Tiffany Exhibition:

I love stained glass ... used to do it ... still have my tools and some glass ... so it was fun to go to the Musee ... but oh my, I hate crowded galleries and museums ...  you have to make your way through masses of hot sticky odiferous humanity to see the exhibits.

Montreal is fresh and green, and the women, as always, amazing ... it was a good break from the drudgery of taxes!

My friend's response:

LOL  You thought Tiffany was a friend of her sister? That is hysterical. Did it ever occur to you that you might be seen as odd by some?  Naw, not possible.


I guess everyone within a thousand miles of Montreal knew that the glass exhibition was in Montreal except me!  I am going to have to leave the hermitage more often!

A Bad Trip

What was I thinking?

Several months ago, I paid my $35 and signed up for a trip to St. Sauveur. The purpose of the trip was a little hazy. Discount outlets were mentioned. And cafes. The local stitch and bitchers were putting it on and a neighbour of mine was doing the actual organizing. I imagined fibre outlets, cozy bistros, and quaint architecture. From time to time I had some second thoughts about the whole thing but people assured me that St. Sauveur was a lovely place to visit so I decided to accept my fate and began to look forward to the excursion.

On Monday I took Kenya to spend a couple of days with Tamarak and Carlos, their two dogs, the kids' five cats, and a daughter's palm-sized dog called Kaiah. Kenya loves visiting them; for a gregarious dog who like cats even better than dogs, it's like having a holiday in a zoo.

On Tuesday morning at seven I was on my way to pick up Rowboat Flo. We arrived at the Vorlage parking lot to the clucking and chortling of fifty women already being gregarious. I was hailed by several people from my past life as well as neighbours and acquaintances from Wakefield. Have I mentioned that I am not very gregarious ... that I take a couple of hours of silence and tea to wake up before starting my day in earnest? I huddled into my hermit's corner and took out my water bottle and the peanut butter sandwich and banana I'd brought along.

The bus rumbled out of the parking lot at 7:30, and I watched familiar landscape slide past the rain-misted window, and thought that this would be just fine. One of the organizers announced that we would be stopping at Tim Horton's and then at the factory outlets and then moving on to an unintelligible mumble. We took a side trip to get to a very crowded Tim Horton's parking lot, a detour I didn't appreciate, but then I am not a coffee drinker. Get over it, I told myself. These people need their morning caffeine.

An hour later I began to wonder where we were. We were taking a very different route from the one I had thought we'd take ... you know ... divided highways where you can make good time. By ten the bus was crawling along a winding gravel road, jolting from one pothole to the next and stopping and starting at every set of railway tracks. When I got up to use the washroom I had to lurch from one hand rail to the next. At the doorway to the facility I wondered whether I should wait until the bus found its footing, but decided that might take longer than I wanted to wait. It was an experience.

By now everyone was talking about the fact that this was supposed to be a 2 ½ hour trip and the driver was undoubtedly lost since we had seen signs for different towns coming at us from opposite directions. No explanations were given by anyone in charge so the rumours grew.

At 11, 3 ½ hours after our bus left Vorlage, we finally arrived at the factory outlet shopping centre. It was a 20 minute walk from the village of St. Sauveur. Immediately visible was a McDonald's and several factory outlet stores. Is this it? I wondered. Did we travel 3 ½ hours to get to a McDonald's and the same factory outlet stores that exist at the corner of Baseline and Woodroffe?

"Calm down," the inner voice scolded. "This will be a two hour stop for bargain hunting." Then the organizer's voice drowned out the sweet sane little voice in my head. "Be back here at the bus by 5 when we will be leaving."

"Five?!?" screamed my little inner voice. "That's six hours here!"

Flo said, "I guess we won't be going into second hand shops and Sally Anne's today."

We asked where St. Sauveur was and headed in that direction stopping once for specific instructions. After five minutes, Flo said she was unable to walk any further. She was in pain. (Flo is 80 years old.) So much for our escape from the outlet mall.

"Well we can eat at McDonald's," said Flo hopefully.

Good god, no ... I began to search for an alternative. Bad enough to have to spend six hours wandering around a sterile shopping mall. I wasn't going to compound the misery by eating sawdust under a golden arch.

That was when we discovered the nicest fast food place I've ever encountered. You lined up and ordered pre-made food, but it was good food, and the decor was several steps above the red and yellow clowns of McDonald's. It became one of our two bases over the course of the next six hours. The other was a protected bench near a washroom.

By 3:30 Flo and I had bought some panties, an eco-friendly shopping bag, and a pair of far too expensive jeans. Then, we discovered a discount grocery store where we had our happiest shopping of the entire day. They had Quebec artisanale cheeses, squeaky fresh curds, a mountain of local garlic for $2, an armful of fresh leeks for $4, bulk quantities of flax seed for a song ... We filled a shopping cart and felt as if the day had almost been worth it.

Then we made our way back to the bus, loaded our purchases into the overhead bin, and relaxed. Flo fell asleep and I finished the sock I was working on.

Once I got home I still had to go and pick up Kenya ... I got home at 9, ate some curds with a slice of bread and a tomato, washed the whole thing down with a glass of red wine ... and fell asleep.

Were there any good things about that trip? Probably the nicest (and quite surprising)
thing we encountered was very very nice salespeople. They were genuinely pleasant whether we bought anything or not. It was also nice to talk to old acquaintances from my teaching life and to chat with Pike Lake neighbours when no one was in a hurry.

Would I sign up again? No. I am not a shopper and I really don't like being surrounded by people and traveling that way. The next time I visit the Laurentians I will take my car and my dog and amble my way along stopping at second hand shops and tiny restaurants that look interesting. I will choose a sunny autumn day, and I won't really care if I ever reach the discount mall. But if I did happen upon it again, I'd go straight to the grocery store and load up on garlic, leeks and cheese.

And now today I plan to paint and make vicchyssoise.

Endangered Species

A Swedish reader wrote that she is reveling in the bookstores of San Francisco (People Reading Blog) because bookstores have disappeared in her country. Everyone buys their books on-line. A good reason for us to protect our endangered species while we still have them.

I, however, am as guilty as everyone else. Here we have one book store. I would love to give them all my business but every time I have tried, the books have to be ordered and they invariably take much longer (and are far more expensive) than Amazon.

I would love to go to San Francisco and spend a week in book stores, wouldn't you? I would also look for the parrots and climb the hills and take photos of idiosyncratic windows and doorways populated by cats.

As you can see by the last photo, I am neither knitting nor reading. Instead we are all cooking, cuddling babies and enjoying the joy of our dogs' reunion.

Zeke the Nova Scotia Toller comes this morning so Kenya will have company for a whole week.

I will start reading and knitting again this weekend.

Bringing Home Your Travels

What do you bring home from your travels?

I bring home recipes, hobbies, kitchen utensils, household goods, and clothing.

Every time I use a Kenyan wooden rolling pin I am taken back to the market.

Whenever I pass the wall hangings from Mongolia I return to the steppes, to Ulaan Baatar and to friends I made there, especially Seema who gave me the second of these.

Each time I make something felted I am back in a dining room in Wolfville where Mud Mama taught Arrow, Max and me how to felt.

Most of the clothing I bring back I wear, and when I do, I remember its origins, but there are several pieces of clothing that I almost never wear. These hang on closet doors and are simply reminders of wonderful trips and experiences.

One is a Palestinian hand embroidered black dress that I bought in a store in Amman. The mother of one of my students gave me a richly coloured silk sash and creamy lace hejab to go with it and showed me where she kept the key to her house. She was a wonderful feisty woman who refused to be a hidden woman when her husband died and was by tradition, to move into her son's home to be under his care. She insisted on a key of her own, and she created a secret pocket in the embroidered bodice of her dress to hold it.

I have three African dresses and as many Mongolian traditional dresses or dels, and each has its own story to tell, but I will save those stories for other posts.