down the road

 I am going down the road for Thanksgiving Weekend. This is a Canadian holiday, traditionally used for closing up the family cottage and having a family dinner, usually with local, preferably homegrown food. I can remember a turkey slowly smoking on the BBQ on a frigid afternoon on a porch at a summer cottage by a lake in the Laurentians. We were blessed.

So until I return, unless I find a computer in the next few days --- be blessed.

I'm packing, so there is total chaos, and it's pouring outside - so no exterior pictures. So here's an illustration of the immediate situation.

When I was eight my father caught me playing touch football. I was severely reprimanded. When I was in high school I was not allowed to take technical drawing because I was a girl. When I then said that I wanted to be an architect, the guidance counselor, Miss Oswald, told me that women could not be architects. So in the end I got married, because that was what girls did. So I offer you this.

Bridgetown lighthouse

Hampton has a lovely  small lighthouse which is now owned by the community - but Bridgetown has its lighthouse. When I drove by the other day and saw it mirrored in the Annapolis River, I couldn't resist adding it to my lighthouse file. The Valley runis between the North  and the South Mountains. It is arable and fertile and should be feeding us all if only the farmers would get a decent break. And the lighthouse - right down to the last detail, this model sits at the end of some pasture land.

friendship

For several years I had watched the large brown cat hunting across the road, but the Czarina had never met him until this past weekend. They circled each other, checked each other out and then sat down together. Cats in their friendly, well at least non-agressive, mode avoid eye contact - so with one turned from the other they sit together. If only it were so simple for humans, no frivolous conversations, no sizing up facial expressions, no coded intimations, just sitting together, back to back. If only my relationships were so easy! At least little, but feisty Czarina didn't take on the large brown brute.

green ceiling

"Pickling Spice" is its name. How I would love to have the job of naming paints! The rain is pouring down. The wheelbarrow is standing forlornly in the daylily field. Today it is not enticing me. Tomorrow I return to New Brunswick, so it will wait there for a week and a half. But the studio ceiling has its first coat of green. So there is accomplishment. As upstairs is a half story the ceiling reaches down to a three foot wall, so it is not just above, but beside me, too. The second coat will have to wait. Now to cup of tea and a good book. I'm reading Timothy Findley's "Not Wanted on the Voyage".

paint job

A lovely warm sunny day with my garden waiting for me to come and play, but I was indoors sanding the last coat of plaster and putting up the primer. Then I zipped over the mountain and into town to buy the ceiling paint (green).Finally I had an hour to play in the garden. When I am in the daylily field Miss Johnston, the cat, always comes to accompany me. She's my garden gnome. Finally at the end of a long day I came out to play.

Happy Returns

Happy Returns is still bravely flowering in the daylily field. There are several others, too. They all seem to be yellow variations. Perhaps longevity comes with yellow. Each day I pick one for the house. I spent today forking and spading. Every time I get up now my body tells me all about it. I thought physical exercise was supposed to be good for me.