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.

Dispatch from the wilds of North Middlesex: #8

 A Parkhill ode to autumn 

Autumn is a season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness” in other times and places, but here, not so much.  It’s mid-October, and I still have dozens of spring bulbs to plant.  However, today is wuthering (cold, rainy and windy, in other more prosaic words), so I am safely indoors watching leaves and small branches fly off the poplars in the back yard and hoping the 60-year-old trees themselves don’t topple.

Speaking of which, the biggest story here — aside perhaps from the provincial election, in which the incumbent was likewise tossed away on the winds of change — is arboreal.  The tree trunk carving in Coronation Park is now complete. The work was commissioned by the Parkhill and Area Horticultural Society — known here as simply the Hort.  An earlier dispatch reported that the carver said the old trunk “spoke to him.” Now we know what it said:  a fairy tale come true in oak.  For older folk, the side towards the street commemorates the recent Royal Wedding with the initials C and W rapturously entwined on a shield and surrounded by a fantasy of oak leaves and roses.

The other side depicts  Rapunzel  letting down a long braid of hair just tantalizingly out of reach of a spry youth climbing up to meet her.  This latter image is intended for the entertainment of children, with the underlying hope that none of them will later vandalize what captivated them as youngsters.  Around the top are several jaunty plump acorns carved from the truncated remains of four or five large branches. The intentional fallacy prevents me from contemplating what the artist had in mind when he included them, but to me they appear more mammiferous than memorial.

Before my imagination takes us irretrievably gutter-ward, I should report on another new feature here in town:  the crosswalk on Main St.  Coincidentally, the same pedestrian safety device had been instituted in Souris, PEI when we visited this summer.

Each appears to be confusing to both motorists and pedestrians — but for different reasons. In Souris, as in much of the Island, cars still stop for pedestrians without having to be told. In Parkhill, they don’t. It can be embarrassing either way – well, actually, here it might also be fatal.

In any event, last year in Souris I walked up and down by the post office trying to find the mailbox. Veering a bit close to the curb, I slowly realized that traffic both ways had come to a halt. Not wanting to seem ungrateful, I crossed the street. Traffic flow resumed.  Gazing back across at a wider angle than before, I spied the mailbox, stopped traffic, re-crossed the road and mailed my postcards.

This summer, crossing Main St. in Souris had become complicated. Does crosswalk protocol mean that cars need stop only there, or can they still be expected to stop anywhere along the road?  Small children on bicycles seemed to think so, as they darted across anywhere as before.

Here in Parkhill, it’s not that simple (and, incidentally, the only people crossing Main St. without looking first are ATV operators driving illegally on the hiking trail, oblivious to the fact they have suddenly intersected with the road).  Anyhow, the Highway Traffic Act makes clear no one is to move into the path of a vehicle that is “so close it is impracticable for the driver to yield the right of way.” This would describe most vehicles barrelling along Main St. In fact, local opinion holds that the OPP would be better advised to lurk beside the crosswalk and catch real speeders than by entrapping senior citizens nudging the speed limit just outside town.

In any event, cars don’t get it, nor apparently do pedestrians. The other day, I saw one poor soul standing meekly behind a parked car while a couple of pick-up trucks whizzed by. Having experience with crosswalks in bigger urban centres, I advanced with a toe into the gutter, raised my cane, waved it, fixed the motorist with my gimlet eye and began to cross the first lane.  This procedure has worked for me, at least so far, most notably with drivers I can make eye contact with. In fact, just this afternoon, I crossed twice — and both times I didn’t have to wait long before cars came along.

However, as the local paper points out, understanding how to manage a crosswalk has something of a learning curve. The editor implored readers to be careful, as she doesn’t want to see anyone get hurt using this new safety feature. 

Speaking of getting hurt, the 153^rd Parkhill Fall Fair got underway several Fridays ago. The highlight of the three-day exhibition is always the demolition derby held on the Sunday afternoon.   Leading up to this competition crescendo were baby contests (including baldest, most dimples and rolls, and craziest hair), mutton busting (a sort of demolition derby involving sheep), crowning the fair royalty (not just a princess, but also a bespectacled prince and several ambassadors) and of course, judging the hundreds of fair exhibits.  The judges, perhaps wisely, come from outside the community — in fact from as far away as London for the exhibits sponsored by the Hort.

I did not attend the fair’s finale, but one of our neighbours entered a vehicle, which I saw being carted off on a flat-bed truck a couple of days later. It didn’t look like a winner. Anyhow, to start the event, the fair’s karaoke champion, sang  O Canada, and you’d think she was standing in our back yard the sound system worked so well.  Engines roared all afternoon, and traffic was lined up at least 10-deep at the stop sign at the south end of town, as the crowd dispersed — not perhaps as “gathering swallows “ twittering in the skies, but there aren’t a lot of thatch-eaves around here either.   John Keats lived in quieter times, or at least they were differently noisy.