wordless wednesday (summer postcards)

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

Greetings from what’s left of holiday cottages, a dance pavilion, and refreshment booths that once graced the traditional lands of the people of Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, land that’s part of the Williams Treaties, aka, the Whitby shoreline of Lake Ontario!

The holiday resort existed from about 1900 to the 1960s, with steamboats bringing travellers from Toronto for weeks-long holidays, and locals coming by horse and buggy.

I interviewed an elderly man many years ago, who told me he lived near the lake (the old wooden houses of ‘Port Whitby’ are still there) and how as a boy he would be sent to the pier when the fishing boats came in. He’d bring a bucket and a few coins and the fishermen would toss in a couple fish, enough for supper. He said the horses and buggies from town would be lined up and down the street to do the same.

I would love to hear stories also of when the Mississaugas lived on the land, and how it was they (were) ‘moved along’. No dance pavilion for them…

**

A friend of mine has lived here much longer than I have and remembers things being quite wild and woody. Much building since I arrived, but I also remember fields and woodlands running either side of main streets. Many of those fields are gone, but loads are still intact. For now. We’re lucky in that the countryside is still just a spit away, that the town is built around parks and ravines and has a river called Lynde Creek that runs through it, complete with salmon. I feel lucky to be surrounded by farms and (honest to goodness) farmers’ markets and that the lake shore remains mostly unsullied and the downtown, all leafy streets of Victorian era homes and shops, is walkable from where I live and takes me backwards through a century of neighbourhoods, from the 1970s to the 1870s. If you pay attention you can see how the town was layered, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

It’s funny that we complain about the layering that continues. It’s nothing new, it’s been going on since we built towns and cities. It happens in cities too. It’s called condos. Still, it feels annoying, and whether here or there, the problem is the same, when there’s an imbalance of ‘building’, when too many houses/condos are built without thought to building neighbourhoods.

I have a thing about neighbourhoods.

I’m fascinated by how people live in them, how they make them home, how they adapt, how they’re different, and the same.

I have a thing about small and middle-sized towns, factory towns a lot of them, and those that appear, on the surface ‘to be not much’. Nothing against cities. I had to be dragged away from one. But even in cities, it’s always the less travelled side of the tracks, not the shabby chic side, but the authentically, downright seemingly dull side, the places where crowds don’t go, that I always discover the sweetest surprises.

I’m rambling.

But isn’t that what lazy summer days and postcards… and the sight of old concrete stairs at the beach… are for…

It’s too hot to overthink a postcard. Mostly just writing to say hello.

And happy summer.  (happy rambling too!)

#LoveWhereYouLive

#AndRememberWhoLivedThereFirst

 

♦

Other (not always) wordless friends:

Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman

 

 

 

 

 

trees R us

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

 

We had a couple of pear trees in the backyard when I was a kid.

And my dad had a movie camera. Super 8, I think. A big deal at the time. Fancied himself the Spielberg of home movies.

But the Spielberg of home movies he was not.

The pear tree and the Super 8 spent a lot of time together. My dad behind the lens and me up in the branches. Him on the lawn, red light flashing, yelling at me to go higher. This was before sound, so the footage more or less shows me shaking my head, mouthing noooo… looking terrified, then climbing an inch higher. And so on. For several minutes. (A kind of psychedelic bonus was the wobbling of camera due to his waving arms while yelling instructions.) (The fact that a pear tree is not very tall is insignificant to this story. Or is it?)

He had a thing for capturing the tree in different seasons. Blossom time, fruiting, fall colours. And what’s a tree without a kid in it? Climb high as you can. You call that high?? Higher!! Don’t be such a baby. HIGHER!! 

noooooo….

He grew up in the mountains, in a world of trees and, I think, felt most at home around them, so he planted a front yard full of evergreens and a backyard full of plum and apple, apricot and cherry. The pear trees came with the house, which was built on the site of a former orchard, the remains of which orchard was vast and right across the road, and probably the reason they chose that site.

He was in no way a slow moving person except when he went for a walk, then he’d ramble, take things in. My mother, the opposite, a snail in most things, but a fast walker. What’s the hurry? he’d yell from several feet behind.

I preferred his pace. It allowed looking and talking, imagining and what-if-ing. He was a magnificent what-if-er. The details of those conversations are gone but the essence of them linger and sometimes a bizarre what-if kind of question pops into my mind and it’s then I miss being able to say hey, dad… imagine this…

Occasionally he’d bring the Super 8, go all Spielberg and yell for us to stand here or there, to smile, pretend you’re having fun for god’s sake!

Not the best part of the rambles.

I often think of him now as I traipse about at my own between-fast-and-slow pace. Like him I usually have a camera in hand. Unlike him I don’t yell at people. Much.

I see things he would have loved, or things we might have wondered about. He was a great wonder-er. I imagine how I might tell him I’d still like to live in a tent, or a cabin, in the woods, and how he’d say who wouldn’t?

I’ve forgiven the film shoots.

And, remarkably, I have a great fondness for pear trees.

The best part though, the gift of his tree-loving nature, unintended as it surely was, is that reminders of him are forever everywhere…

 

♦

Adding this, which I stumbled upon today and which so wonderfully fits.

“Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Love”

 

welcome!

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

 

It’s official.

We now live in Honey Boo Boo Ville.

All we need is a quick change of signage and some new stationery.

 

♦

Greed. Just greed. Lest we wonder how this happened.

Also, it’s a sign we need to seriously look at our values as a society… and maybe talk to each other occasionally, not merely at each other. The divide will simply become greater and greater until we learn to really see and hear The Other. Whether or not we agree is irrelevant. Respect is more important than agreement.

And less anger. More conversation, more questions, more listening, and maybe one day we can meet in the middle somewhere, or close to it.

There has to be something worthwhile that comes of this. It’s a yin yang world after all.

 
 
 

my view

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

 

It’s hot.

There’s much lunacy about.

I’m convinced animals are smarter than we are.

Here’s a cool green view from a red light earlier today.

Find something with *ice and hang on to any slice of sanity you can find.

*
Update: good news… suddenly cooler!
But lunacy continues.
Change ‘ice’ to ‘soup’  and continue as above.

 

this is not a review: ‘the triumphant tale of the house sparrow’, by jan thornhill

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

 

I was surprised and delighted by the adulty appeal of Jan Thornhilll’s The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow … technically a picture book (with wonderful illustrations) but the kind that bears reading by all ages for a sort of Coles Notes (do they still exist?) version of a subject that can then be pursued in longer form if you need/want more info. Though, honestly, there’s plenty here, enough that after reading it will surely be  impossible to look at this bird quite the same way.

♦

Given the title, and the opening sentence…

“Behold the most despised bird in human history.”

… we can (rightly) assume there will be some adventurous backstory to follow, i.e. how did it get from Most Despised to Triumphant?

Also, and not that I think about sparrows a lot, but I didn’t know they were so universally (and for thousands of years) disliked. I assumed some people just didn’t like them in the way some people don’t like clowns. (Which is completely understandable.)

But no. It’s much bigger than that and, most interesting of all, their dislikeability has a lot to do with us, with our lifestyle. Because what we know for sure is they love to hang around us, like those friends who think we’re all having such a good time that they forget to go home.

This wasn’t always the case.

What happened was, we invented agriculture.

We began growing fields of grain and the sparrow, a bird that used to migrate in search of food, suddenly didn’t need to leave town so it stayed and ate that nicely planted all you can eat buffet. It came into cities and towns too, because we had horses that were fed buckets of grain. And it hung around our houses because of crumbs from tablecloths shaken out the back door, and several other surprising sources. Long story short, it became a house sparrow.

And we got cranky.

In Egypt the sparrow surplus was handled by using them as pet food. (Often found in the mummified stomachs of beloved animals.)

In Germany there was a sparrow bounty, a required number of heads had to be handed in or fines were imposed.

In China people were encouraged to bang pots twenty four hours a day in grain fields to stop the birds from landing, which worked exceptionally well… so well in fact that zillions of birds fell from the sky, exhausted and dead, and the crops died from an infestation of bugs that would have normally been eaten by the sparrows.

In cities they were noisy and just plain bothersome. In one incident, a single sparrow found its way into a large hall where a Guiness-records-sized domino display had been set up with millions of dominos… the sparrow landed and over 20,000 toppled over before they could stop the domino effect. But the bird was still in the building and naturally they worried about the other ten trillion dominos so they hired a professional hunter to come and shoot the bird, which is now stuffed in a museum. (The bird not the hunter.)

In a way, the sparrow’s biggest crime is its adaptability and how its population tends to increase along with our own. (Though we seem not to complain the same way about people numbers.)

However, mysteriously, and for some very many years now, sparrow numbers have been in decline. The Netherlands, for one, has declared them a protected species and, as Jan Thornhill points out, this might well beg some attention:

“Because the House Sparrow normally lives its whole life in a very small area, it can be a living indicator of pollutants in that place. To scientists, it is just like a canary in a coal mine — except that coal mine is our urban environment. Since the House Sparrow lives where we live, wouldn’t it be smart to figure out why it’s disappearing? What if the culprit is something that is as unhealthy for humans as it is for the House Sparrow?”

I think this book, generally, deserves all kinds of attention, not only as it relates to house sparrows, but what it represents in how we so often look at nature, what’s taken for granted, the problems we ourselves have created and now blame on the natural world, much of which is merely doing its best to tolerate us.

♦

The picture book format works well because the amount of text is just right for that Coles Notes gleaning. Any less wouldn’t do the subject justice. But it’s also too much for a picture-book age child to absorb on their own, so it becomes ideal as a read-aloud-and-discuss. Followed, of course, by a sparrow finding expedition, photographs, drawings, and chirping!

So much to love here.

Also, would be brilliant in schools. (Do they still do nature as a subject?)

 

 

♦

Purchased at Books Galore, in Port Perry.

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