So, this morning is an opportunity to count my blessings.
The morning after in the backyard at Cathedral Farm
I guess I was one of the lucky ones. The freezing-rain and snow storm that yesterday and last night went through this part of Ontario was much worse farther south, where 100,000 electrical customers are without power this morning, so the news says. Hopefully, for their sakes, their power will be restored.
It’s March in Ontario after all, so anything can happen; and it will.
It’s not over yet, Mr. Massey Too
The forecast today for the Bruce Peninsula area calls for freezing rain, ice pellets, snow and north-east winds for the next couple of days. Environment Canada’s weather forecasting service has issued a “winter storm warning” for the area. School buses are cancelled all over the Bluewater School Board area that includes all of Grey and Bruce counties. I understand from the news it’s the same story all over southern Ontario.
And here I am at the end of long and vulnerable phone and electrical lines, down Cathedral Drive and through the forest along an unopened road allowance. I’d say the prospect of fallen lines and a power outage is more than likely, for me here, and possibly lots of other people on the peninsula. We’ll see. But our local “hydro” crews always do all they can to help us get back on line. Continue reading
The building over a period of months, and now this past week the official opening of a swanky new supermarket in the town south of Hope Ness has certainly given me pause to think about changes marking the passage of time and how they may suddenly, unexpectedly, hit home.
Usually, life seems to move slowly with little if any change from day to day, week to week, month to month, perhaps even year to year for some of us, or so we may fool ourselves into thinking.
But then one day it hits – so much has changed, so many things have happened, and the reality of time passing and the changes that involves must be faced, or not. Continue reading
I must have spent the night of July 1-2, 1961 in Salt Lake City, in a bed in a small YMCA on a downtown side street. That makes sense. I remember getting up early in the morning there, reaching the outskirts of the city by about 8 a.m. and picking up a ride, and then another fairly quickly. I look at the map of that area now and I figure I could have made it to that highway crossroads in southern Idaho by noon.
An ash tree reaches for the sky in the Hope Bay Forest
I remember being hung up there unable to get a ride for maybe two hours. There were no trees and the junction of the two highways was at the top of a plateau from which the highways fell away in several directions. And after a while it was too hot standing under the sun so I walked over to a truck stop about 100 yards away. There was a counter with bar chairs and some tables. A clean-cut, casually dressed man who looked to be in his mid-30s was eating his lunch at the far end of the counter. A couple of truckers sat talking at a table. I noticed there was a sign on the wall above the counter that said “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” I was just 18 at the time, so what did I know, and when the large man in a white apron behind the counter asked me what I wanted I ordered a coffee and inquired about the sign. Continue reading
It’s tough to get a word in edgewise when you’re having a tooth filled. But the World’s Best Dentist and I always seem to do a pretty good job in the few minutes it takes for the freezing to take effect; and then afterwards for a few moments when the work is done.
Yes, yes . . . the infernal T-word came up. It was bound to: we both follow current events pretty closely; and in case anybody doesn’t get it yet, the fate of the world is at stake in the still-uncertain outcome of the incredible political events taking place in the U.S. Continue reading
Canadian voters chose a hopeful future not a hateful one when they elected the country’s new Liberal government last October 19.
“Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways, this is what positive politics can do,” Liberal leader, now Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said that night in his victory speech. He had led his party from third place to first, in terms of the number of seats in Parliament, with an election campaign that was markedly different from the divisive one the now-former Conservative government ran. Continue reading
The day before I had started to walk that section of the Bruce Trail that enters, or emerges, from the woods right at the end of my driveway. But as some of you may know my attention was caught a short distance along by a rock formation partially covered by moss that was luminous with life on an otherwise grey day.
I went back late this afternoon to finish that walk to what surely must be one of the best lookouts on the Niagara Escarpment. The sun was low in the sky, but bright, and lighting up the still largely snow-covered forest floor. So, in places it was still a bit of a slog. But at this time of year without the leaf canopy overhead you get a chance to see the forest in a different, perhaps more revealing light in some ways. Continue reading
It has been said, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as if all that matters is who’s looking. But this partially moss-covered rock formation that caught my eye this morning beside the Bruce Trail surely must have a beauty in its own right.
Allow me to be the first person to tell you that spring has officially arrived in Hope Ness and most of the rest of southern Ontario, in the country of Canada, on the planet Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy, one of many galaxies too numerous to count in the still-expanding universe, about which we still know next to nothing.
Let the seed-starting begin
So in the context of that cosmic vastness, what is so remarkable about the first day of spring, that I should proclaim and hereby celebrate its arrival even though it’s technically still two weeks away, as the Sun and the Earth do their annual dance?
It’s remarkable because so far as I know, and you know, and anybody else knows, this little blue-green jewel of a planet is the only place in the universe where this annual miracle of life awakening happens. Oh, yes, certain assumptions have been made. How could we possibly be alone in such a universe? And where are those mysterious radio-like signals, if that’s what they are, coming from? Continue reading
The technical support woman on the other end of the line somewhere in the U.S. south or south-west sounded weary, and a little stressed. I always try to exchange a little small talk with those call-centre/tech support folks; after all, I’m a real, live human being, and so are they. It often leads to something interesting. This time was no exception.
I took a risk and sympathized with her and her great nation about the present “political situation” it finds itself in, “what with Trump and all.”
I went a little farther than that even by suggesting the man and his careless mouth are playing “a dangerous game” with the future of his country and the world. “There’s a reason why we study history in school,” I said. “It’s happened before, somewhere else, and not that long ago.” Continue reading
Finding Hope Ness 