Thanks to my son-in-law Scott for catching this classic, picking-corn-for-dinner moment at Cathedral Drive Farm, Hope Ness this past Sunday. Rembrandt would have known too what to do.
That’s my daughter Kathy, my youngest grandson Jacob, and my good friend, the most beautiful dog in the world, Buddy. And me too, looking for the best cobs of ripening corn.
Yes, the long spring-summer drought kept the corn down. But the rains came and in the end it was sweet.
See how lucky I am.
Jorden and great grandpa in the beans
The second-floor window of my office in this old farm house at the end of a no-exit road overlooks a vegetable garden that’s proved to be way too big this season for this old guy. A prolonged drought that began in late May and only just ended didn’t help. Continue reading
Ontario Premier Doug Ford
I can’t bring myself to refer to the new Ontario government as “Progressive Conservative,” though technically that is the name of the party that won the June 7 election, and with 40.6 percent of the popular vote ended up with a large majority of seats in the provincial Legislature. Continue reading
Listen, and you might just hear the bees
In the morning I take some time to stand amid the buckwheat, fully in bloom now, and listen to the murmur of countless bees and other insect pollinators. The bumblebees seem to be most prevalent, certainly most visible. Where they go when they’re not hear gathering nectar from dense proliferation of white, buckwheat flowers, I don’t know. I let them be, no pun intended, but I think a lot about the great danger posed to them and their buzzing friends by the widespread use of the most recent type of human-made pesticides, neonicotinoids, or neonics for short. Continue reading
To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.
-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s twitter message, January, 2017
There it is. That’s what the fuss is all about, the entire reason why, according to Conservative politicians in Toronto and Ottawa, Canada is in the midst of a “migrant crisis,” or more succinctly, in a “mess.”
Words are important, especially hyperactive words like that, with hateful, anti-migrant, populist/political movements coming to power in the U.S. and Europe while millions of displaced people are risking their lives to find a safe haven, or barely surviving in squalid refugee camps. Continue reading
Finding Hope Ness 