Inconvenience in the Wilds of North Middlesex:

Here in North Middlesex, we seem obsessed with inconvenience. Take the the future of our high school; a city bigwig’s suggestion that E-learning might help the enrolment problem found few backers. Better to be inconvenienced by having your children go all the way to London apparently.  Wind turbine farms have generated more than the expected electricity: some local residents have lain down on the road to inconvenience truck drivers delivering the turbine blades. On another front, even though, as our newspaper solemnly reported, “January is a time of no mosquito issues,” concerned citizens reviewed plans to render life as inconvenient as possible for next year’s crop. Well, who can quarrel with that!

Nevertheless, for me, living in a small village means things are handy: You can go to the library and be home again in 10 minutes — and that includes checking out the books the librarian called you about when she realized that Hotmail failed to send the automated message.

Recently, one of the wardens hurriedly left church just as Communion was starting. I didn’t quite catch her explanation, but apparently she was coming back. I was last in line and tried to delay — in both kinds   — in case she returned in time, but she just missed.  However, she did partake of the final hymn and the dismissal. She had just put her house up for sale.  A Sunday morning showing was scheduled, so she had to dash home to put her cat in the car.

And things are made handy: Take the bright yellow port-a-potty behind the sign on Main St. advertising the Parkhill Area Horticultural Society (aka the Hort).  Apparently, the municipality asked the company to remove it during the last postal strike for reasons I am not clear about, but it has reappeared — like a winter aconite in a snowy garden.

A letter to the editor in the Parkhill Gazette reminded readers that our local sanitation company donated it not just for families tobogganing on the hill beside the post office but for all visitors to the town. It gets serviced weekly, has a hand sanitizer dispenser, and is available for use “no matter what time of the day or night.”

There are other washrooms, but they are at the Leisure Club, a distant stroll on the other side of Coronation Park (past the famed Royal Oak, carved to commemorate William and Kate's wedding) and, inconveniently, they don’t open until May.

Speaking of trees, had you attended the general meeting of the Hort, you would have learned something handy about landscaping. The owner of the local nursery advised against spending hundreds of dollars on a formal landscape design. Just bring your house measurements to their garden store, and she’ll draw an outline of your house and yard in the gravel driveway and place plants in it until the desired effect is reached.   Then you can spend that money on plants rather than paper!

Also, everyone knows about the convenience of mulch for the garden especially when it provides nitrogen for the soil. A lively and somewhat unexpected discussion ensued as to the nitrogen-providing benefits of human urine. Apparently, it is very handy for re-invigorating compost heaps, and if you can get urine from a male of the species, it can be used to ward off unwanted critters. This surprising information raised a few titters amongst the mostly female audience. Practically speaking, we could use some around our neck of the woods as we have been shocked by a threesome of semi-feral cats, enlivened prematurely  by the mild weather no doubt, engaging in unmentionable activity on our lawn.

But alas, there is a downside to convenience. We have been subjected to more than our share of door-to-door inquiries especially about natural gas contracts and subscriptions to the London Free Press, neither of which we want.   We accept solicitations from the Heart and Stroke Foundation, however, as their representative is also our neighbour and has used his Bobcat to clear snow from the foot of our driveway  (before we got our own beast — whereupon, as you will recall, it stopped snowing).

Anyway, the other day I was meandering around the kitchen in my dressing gown when the doorbell rang. It was only 10:00 in the morning, so much too early for the Mr. Heart and Stroke. I shrank down beside the sink until I was sure whoever it was had gone. To add insult to injury, there was another knock on the door several hours later. By this time I was properly clothed but still not convivial.  I am an introvert so for me, answering the door is like answering the phone: if it’s important, they’ll call back. 

And sure enough they did.  As I was making dinner, another knock on the door. I said to Greg who’d arrived home a few minutes before, “For goodness sake, that’s the third time today! Can’t they get the point!”  He said rather firmly, “I think you’d better answer it.” This startled me, as his attitude to unasked-for social interruptions is much like mine.  But I did as I was bidden, looked out and saw a grey van parked in the driveway. Turning to come back up the porch steps, there was the driver. He was carrying a huge bouquet of flowers. 

Yes, it was the chap from Frontier Flowers delivering my Valentine’s bouquet.

Dispatches from the Wilds of North Middlesex #7

Summertime and the livin' is queasy

The dog days of summer are upon us. For about 20 days during July and August, Sirius, the dog star, rises and sets with the sun. According to the ancients in Egypt and Rome, Sirius adds its heat to the sun’s, and hot sultry weather, not to mention frenzied behaviour, is the result. Whatever the cause, residents of North Middlesex have been exhibiting the effects of stifling temperatures.

For one thing, goofy crimes seem to be on the rise. Joining the litany of petty thefts reported in the crime column of the Parkhill Gazette, are these: A 20-year-old youth was charged for walking down a local street with an open beer in his hand — at 5:30 in the morning. In nearby Southwest Middlesex, a middle-aged man was ticketed for the “impaired driving of a motor vehicle.” The vehicle in question was an electric bicycle.

In the almost-too-stupid-to-be-true department, a driver was charged with speeding and then found to have a suspended licence, along with a number of other licencing offences. His vehicle was towed. A routine check on the friend who came to pick him up revealed she was driving without insurance, and as the report dryly noted, “Her vehicle was towed.”

Three kids, aged 12 and 14, left an large empty box on the front steps of someone’s home, rang the doorbell and ran but apparently not fast enough. Located shortly after by the police, they were taken home to their parents and “warned about mischief charges.”

Unfortunately, not all offenses are as laughable as those. Police have not yet found the vandals who tore the cross off the roof of the local Catholic elementary school and then hurled it against one of the windows of the church across the street. As reported in the London Free Press, a church spokesperson noted, “Using the cross, which for us is a pretty powerful symbol of love, to do something destructive, is missing the whole point of what it is."

Then there is the individual who poured paint over a car parked overnight on Main St. Black on the outside and white on the inside: maybe the way the perpetrator views life at the moment. So far, no word on suspects there either.

Not to forget — the hordes of mosquitoes. I had hoped to write these dispatches without having to use the M-word. However, temperatures are up all over town because of the on-going infestation. To add humiliation to itchiness, it’s been the subject of articles in the London Free Press as well as Canada’s national magazine (no, not Toronto Life, but Maclean’s).

A meeting at the community centre drew about 400 hot, angry residents. Unfortunately, I wasn’t among them, as I was cooling my heels in bug-free Toronto at the time. However, attendees learned more than they will likely ever need to know about the life cycles of various mosquito species, all of which are propagating in a flagrantly irresponsible fashion just about everywhere here. Unfortunately, not much was reported initially in the local paper, as the new editor was, in her own words, still familiarizing herself with the issue.

The company that did the larvicide spraying offered to blanket the town with malathion, which its representative said wouldn’t affect people and pets and would be effective for four to five days in killing all adults (mosquitoes, that is). This suggestion did not receive widespread approbation. Instead, some townsfolk wondered why the population of bats, frogs, and dragonflies is so low. Apparently this has nothing to do with chemical sprays and everything to do with the “present state of the swamp area,” according to a rather nebulous follow-up report in the Gazette.

Turning to agriculture, until recent deluges, the corn was getting so stressed in some fields that the leaves looked like spikes. Apparently, half an inch of rain does the soy beans some good, but not the corn. It needs more. Irrigation is banned to save water, but word on the street (well, more accurately, in my neighbour’s kitchen) says a plane was spotted spraying the corn with some kind of stress guard to cut down on the moisture evaporating from the leaves. The other day, I saw a helicopter fly over our back forty, but I cannot attest to its purpose. I’m not growing corn. Word in the kitchen says it was probably on the look-out for marijuana. I’m not growing that either.

In the truly unsavoury department (Reader Alert – don’t read if close to mealtime, especially if it involves pork), Greg and I were shocked by the sight of a bin of dead pigs sitting beside the highway to Grand Bend. We were on our way to our usual Saturday breakfast of, what else, bacon and eggs, accompanied by lashings of Globe and Mail. The bin shared the field with a billboard announcing the sacredness of all human life, leading me to conjecture that someone was making some kind of odd political or theological statement: either that all life wasn’t sacred or that the lives of pigs should be included.

However, when I asked about it in church the next day, I was quickly disabused of that subtlety. The bin is intended for dead baby pigs whose small size means the lid can be closed while awaiting the arrival of the dead-stock guy. In the heat, some adults succumb, and their fly-ridden and bloated carcasses overflow the container.

The next day, I was holding forth on this travesty of provincial regulation and highway aesthetics, when I was told by a retired farmer that I was overly squeamish and should remember that Farmers Feed Cities. True, but it really makes me think twice about wanting to put “pork on my fork.”