Jingle all the way

Well, Christmas has come and while not yet gone (there are twelve days after all), the pot-lucks my waistline and I have been enjoying have drawn to a close for now. The last one was on Boxing Day with Greg’s family; they are all quiet adults and fortunately, as you will appreciate later in this ramble, I can tell them apart. Not only that but we enjoyed our wine, without anyone one accidentally dropping a bottle on the kitchen floor as happened in a previous year, even before we had imbibed.

However, blame it on the darkness of the season, but other things have been going a bit haywire around here. Accidents have abounded.

I may have mentioned our neighbour who is so closely in touch with nature that, in warmer weather, he walks au naturel  in his garden — like Adam in Eden and not nearly as pretty a sight, I venture to say, though I haven't seen Adam. Anyhow, his love of the feral extends to feeding the multitudes of stray cats and kittens in our neighbourhood.



Cute but doomed

He recently had the misfortune of being scratched by one of his protégés the second time he sprayed it with an antiseptic — in a vain attempt to cure its ear mites. His subsequent plea for better cat by-laws was written up in the paper just before Christmas and dismissed as impossible to enforce by the local authorities who noted that “people” should stop feeding the cats.

A couple of days later he himself contributed to cat control when, sad to say, he accidentally backed over the only cat I had named (it used to visit us at suppertime when we ate out on the deck). Our somewhat clueless ‘answer to Adam’ said wee Bollifer had been sleeping under his car and didn’t get out of the way in time. Nature red in tooth and pick-up truck, I guess.

On a happier note, the Hort’s Christmas potluck dinner was both well-attended and deliciously provisioned. However, the woman who guards the tea and coffee bailiwick at all our meetings had set everyone into tizzy earlier in the day when she fell over her own threshold and broke both arms.  She joined the ranks of the other fallen, including a choir member who slipped on grass and fractured her knee.  All these calamities and it was not even snowy yet (well, not on the night I began to write this!)

Greg, a volunteer hanging basket waterer, proved handy on two other accounts. He is a dab hand at making vast amounts of coffee to the correct strength and at “offering the blessing” before meals. He mentioned both the staggering amount of food and the incapacitated members in a prayer which was both heartfelt (he was hungry) and empathetic (he fell on ice two years ago and broke his shoulder).



And this is just the dessert table

Alas, our Prince Philip (you may remember him from our Diamond Jubilee celebrations in September) had suffered a stroke the day before and was recovering in hospital (but happily has since returned home).  Nevertheless at the time, his wife the erstwhile Queen was understandably distraught.

I am not by nature a very touchy-feely sort of person. It does not come naturally, and I have to think very carefully about what to say to those who have suffered a misfortune. I usually try to rehearse using myself as the recipient of my words. If I like them, then, chances are, others will. 

With this in mind, I approached our Queen Elizabeth after the meal to offer a few words of support, as I hadn’t had a chance to do this when she’d arrived.  I was a bit disconcerted when my words were not received as I expected.  In fact, I was subjected to a rather quizzical stare. Then she began to laugh.  Thanks goodness she has a sense of humour: I had fallen victim to another weakness of mine. I am absolutely unable to tell people from around here apart. I try hard and fail, fail, fail.  

Our Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth sisters

The woman I was being so solicitous towards was the sister of the afflicted woman, and worse, she has been widowed for many years.  Not only that but I have confused her with her sister before. Mortified, I tried to disappear into nearest door jamb.  

I must say that after those rather dubious beginnings, Christmas itself turned out just fine. We had our own Christmas dinner at home in Parkhill the weekend before with one of our sons. I remembered to thaw and serve the shrimp ring. Aside from agreeing that next year I will follow his suggestion and have carrots, not turnips, the vegetables were a success.



mmmm ... shrimps

 

We were well lashed with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and mince pie by the time we set out for my mother’s retirement home in Toronto. We had to miss the Christmas dinner at Christie Gardens because they hold it at lunch and we couldn’t get there in time and still have Greg’s Christmas Day service. Mother scooted down for it, but at supper we enjoyed salmon. It took two days before turkey reappeared on the menu, this time as a sandwich.

The Toronto families came over on Boxing Day. When our five-year-old grandson opened his Star Wars Lego, he exclaimed in wonder, “Oh my goodness!” However, his reaction to his Star Wars calendar was, “I’ve got one of those” as he dropped it on the floor (I had been prepared for this by one of my Friends on Facebook who had it happen to her with a six-year-old nephew).

My two-year-old granddaughter was entranced with a giraffe puppet because “it has a mouth,” and the 10-month-old ignored her new toys and blissfully teethed on an old Tele-tubby from great-granny’s play basket.

Greg and I gave the adult children large jingle bells — Christmas decorations for the tree or so we thought, completely forgetting what it is like to have very small children. Truly, we did forget; this was an accident.  Immediately, the three little ones in the midst of a crescendo of Christmas bags, gifts, tissue paper, ribbons and cards, fell upon them and shook them to their heart’s content while we all joined in singing Jingle Bells.  No doubt, they will have many hours of fun doing this again later at their own homes.

In the meantime, home once more, I will write thank-you notes.  Greg will fire up the snowblower and add its roar to the charm of the season. It won’t be jingle bells, but the driveway will be passable. 



And the snow is blowing on our front lawn not the neighbours'

 

Dispatch #14: Parkhill whoops it up

Well, it’s officially fall here in beautiful North Middesex. The temperatures are lot cooler now, and the leaves are beginning to turn. The ladies in the choir have resumed wearing their formal choir gowns after a sartorial recess during the summer.

The temperature has also cooled around the advisability of having a crosswalk on Main Street: this innovation is no more. The signs have been taken away and the lines painted over. The problem now is that a handful of drivers have gotten used to the cross walk and stop for pedestrians; however, others usually coming at top speed from the opposite direction at the same time have never had any intention of stopping and still don’t. So it is wise to be even more careful than before ― when if someone sailed through the crosswalk narrowly missing a pedestrian, they would just holler out their open window, “Oh sorry.” Now they just barrel along with the windows closed.

Cars are now just a blur.

Ah well. The fall fair was held on the weekend. I helped out at the Hort. Soc. display. Cost me $5 to get into the fairgrounds  and, when I complained, a reprimand from one of the ladies I was replacing for not being more enthusiastic about supporting the town. I did have a good time handing out candies to children while their mothers signed raffle tickets for a draw on a chrysanthemum. Just about every one of the kiddies said please and thank you without being prompted, whereupon I offered them another candy. I found out later, at the St. James beef dinner, that the mum was won by the mother-in-law of the daughter of one of my fellow directors and back yard neighbour. Good to have that loose end tied up.

After my hour was up, I toured the petting zoo on my way back to the car. I eyed a llama (we were roughly the same height ― it might have been an alpaca) and patted a sheep. Sheep have extraordinarily thick coats. Never having experienced a sheep except from a distance, I thought their fleece would be like cat fur with a perm, but no, it was more like a bouncy rug.

Sadly, I missed the baby contest; it will be a week or so before I find out in the paper who had the most dimples and rolls, not to mention who was the baldest, happiest or youngest. There were 10 classes in all and you could enter your baby in up to three of them.

The fair ambassador was crowned the night before. We have gotten away from queen of the fair in light of a push to a more unisex modernity, although there is still a fair prince and princess chosen from amongst the younger crowd. Some fairs still crown a queen of the furrow, but thank goodness we don’t. We don’t dance around maypoles either, but there is a demolition derby and lawn mower races (riding, not push) for those who like destruction and noise. 

Speaking of royalty, we had a bang-up kickoff to the fall season of the Hort. Soc. when we
commemorated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. This event quickly took on a life of its own. We decided to invite the attendees to dress up. Many of the ladies, normally attired for gardening, donned skirts, hats and white gloves.  As someone noted, we “cleaned up good.”

Indeed we did!
 



This is our usual look.

 



We're ready for our guests to arrive.

My gloves and those of one or two others (see gloved hand in photo above ) dated from public school graduation or high school proms.

 

My Ryerson grad dress  -  and gloves: 1960

and in 2012

 

Greg was asked to dedicate the carving of the Royal Oak tree trunk, which commemorates the wedding of William and Diana and Rapunzel letting down her hair. He also alluded to the Diamond Jubilee and Queen Elizabeth rosebushes we’ve added to the garden around the gazebo. They are a bit buried under mulch at the moment but will blossom again next spring I’m sure. I was rather perplexed as to whom the dedication was being made; Greg kind of fluffed over that bit.

Attendees also answered the Queen Quiz and heard an amusing talk by Paul Knowles about English gardens and gardeners. Then we enjoyed tea served from china cups and saucers the organizers brought from home, along with a slice of the half chocolate/half white slab cake decorated with the Queen’s Canadian Standard and purchased from Sobey’s in Grand Bend.
 

Yum yum - almost to nice to slice

 

The piece de resistance for the occasion, however, was the guest appearance of none other than Her Majesty and Prince Philip, aka Eric and Eileen Scott. Eileen wore a bright yellow dress, white gloves and carried a black handbag on her arm; her summery hat was decorated with rose blossoms. I would be remiss if I did not mention that Eric wore tails and a bowler hat and walked several steps behind his wife.

Our royal couple cut the cake.

 

They were perfect choice as they resembled the Royal Couple in so many other ways. It was noted that like the Queen and Prince Philip, they were also celebrating their 65^th wedding anniversary this fall and had four children (three girls and a boy as opposed to three boys and a girl, but who cares). They sat in special chairs borrowed from the United Church; the Anglican rector was a bit sniffy for some reason about lending out ours (suggesting the bishop might object). 

The special chairs and their special occupants

However, lest we get too hoity toity, we will be brought back to earth at next month’s meeting when the topic will be “creating your own indoor worm composter.” We have to bring our own plastic container, but the worms will be provided.

On the way to the Woodleigh Replicas

We will eventually arrive at the Replicas, so do not despair if you are reading for this reason alone. These posts are like the cliff-hanger at the end of the segments of a serialized novel: a tease to keep the reader going.  To get there faster, I will omit some details, including visits with relatives in Toronto and a very enjoyable lunch in Kingston with John Geddes, who amongst other things heads up CanAssist Africa, about which we had a lively conversation.

In any event, on our annual trips to the East Coast, it is always after Quebec City, along the lovely stretch of highway by the St. Lawrence that I feel truly on vacation — no more big cities and traffic jams but soothing pastoral views.

However, a quieter highway brings challenges of its own.

We rounded the corner at Riviere-de-Loup just after noon and headed south towards New Brunswick.  Lots of road construction meant that we eschewed a meal at Tim Horton’s just then, as we couldn’t see how to rejoin the highway were we to leave it.  This was a big mistake, as there are no restaurants on the subsequent stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway.  And while the rolling hills making up the last sputter of the Appalachians provide excellent views, they destroy radio reception and with not much to distract us, we got hungrier and hungrier.

Mind you, we were kept alert not only by looking out for a place to eat, but also for moose. The powers-that-be in Quebec have not seen fit to build moose fences along the highway, and apparently a moose called Prudence is very common there. Her name and picture are on a lot of signs although the moose on the signs has antlers, so I feel Prudence is a bit of a misnomer. We did not see any sign of her, thank goodness, and finally just before we got to New Brunswick, we spied an Irving gas station and restaurant and turned off the highway to eat.

Greg sensibly ordered the fish and chips; I was captivated by a salmon pie with egg sauce. It sounded tasty; I had visions of flakey pastry, a light sauce and delicately flavoured local salmon.  I was so hungry that it was not until about halfway through the meal I realized how wrong that was. Where was the dill, the crunchy onion and celery bits, and the delicious pastried salmon? What were hard-cooked egg slices doing in a pale sea of sauce. Why did the salmon seem tinned?  Silly me (although at the restaurant beside the gas station in Fortune, PEI, you do get an excellent meal — but more on that later).

What redeemed the meal unexpectedly was dessert. Amongst the apple crisp, brownies, and death-by-chocolate chocolate cake listed on the menu, there was, unaccountably, a “gateau Reine Elizabeth de luxe.” (What made it de luxe, apparently, was a layer of mousseline.) I have never before seen a Queen Elizabeth cake on a restaurant menu, and Quebec was the last place I would have expected it.

Not only that, but this spring for the first time in decades, I have twice made a Queen Elizabeth cake.  The reason?  To celebrate Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, first at the Anglican Ladies' Guild and later at  the Horticultural Society's pot luck dinner for weeders and waterers. So my gustatory antennae were up. Although it was against our better judgement calorifically speaking, what else could we do but order a slice and two forks. The cake came with the mandatory coconut-brown sugar icing. What a treat. Only a quick turn under the broiler to brown the coconut would have been needed to boost an 8.5 to a 9.   The sloppy salmon pie and enervated green beans and carrots medley faded from my memory, as we resumed our journey towards Woodstock and a place to sleep overnight.

 To be continued …