Kitchener airport

VIA workers did not strike, but I went to Walkerton by bus anyway.  It was fine.  Caroline took me to the station.  The seating was allocated according to the time the ticket was purchased, so I was the 20th person to board the bus and easily got a window seat. The system is slowly approaching the efficiency of Mexico's. The only hitch was traffic in Toronto at rush hour.  It took about 45 minutes for the bus to get from the station to the 401. Traffic seemed bad in Ottawa until I sat through that.  It must always be slow because the schedule had accounted for it.  We reached Guelph on time.  Cathy and Brian picked me up, and the last leg of my trip east began.

 I've been in Walkerton enough now to feel at home there.  I have the whole top floor of Brian and Cathy's house, know some of their friends and have seen the grandchildren so often that Alex remembered that we had gone swimming together last summer.  My birthday was all I could have asked for.  Mark picked me up in the morning and took me canoeing on the Saugeen River.  We went quite a long way quickly because we actually paddled; we didn't just drift.  With Mark in the stern I felt perfectly confident and only had to paddle hard when I wanted to for the exercise. We did have some wind against us at times. When we got to the dam near David's house, I got out and Mark shot the sluice.  We portaged around the dam in town, Mark with the canoe and me carrying paddles and cooler.  The day was beautiful, almost too hot by the time we landed and Cathy picked us up.  Cathy made her signature standing rib roast for dinner followed by strawberry rhubarb pie for desert.  The whole gang was there: Mark, Jen, Emily and Evan and David, Dana, Alex and Zak.  It was hot enough for the kids to run wild and wet in the back yard and the adults to sit in the shade and sip drinks.  Perfect.  So far 70 seems to be fine.  

I'm home. The flight was fine, but I don't like flying, trudging through airports that are huge and partly under construction and having your ears pop as you rise and descend.  I land feeling deaf and confused.  Fortunately, Jay was there to take me home in his truck.  It was great to see him and the sleepy May who stumbled, squinting into the kitchen to greet me.  I saw the girls the next day.  Jin Hee is still a dynamo and Min Hee has a pet Guinea pig she calls Snowball.  The garden was overgrown.  Now, after about 6 hours of joint-aching work, it looks managed again.  I love to work in it, but I ached all over until I had a hot tub at Mo and John's this evening.  May and I had one of our delicious lunches today in which we eat food that none of the others will touch like fish trimmings, skin and all, or chicken livers.  She cooks them both in oil and garlic and we eat them with sticky rice and lettuce and avocado, usually using our fingers.  Filipinos eat as well as the Lebanese.  It's enough to make me accept the fact that you can't get a descent shawarma in Vernon.   

Jay just got home from driving his truck in the mud on the back roads around Vernon, so I will eat a bit with him and have an early night.  

Mark about to shoot the sluice on the Saugeen River.

A cow with eye makeup almost as extravagant as Min and Jin's

A castle in Brockton, none of your castles in Spain

Getting around

I've been on the move and sleeping around.  For me, fortunately or un, the latter doesn't involve any awarkward wondering in the morning about who's head is on the pillow beside me.  I've been staying with Don and Mela for the last few days. Poor Don has spent the whole time wandering around, unable to sit for any length of time because of sciatic nerve pain. He's even had to eat standing up sometimes.  He hopes it will just go away, but if not he'll have to see a doctor next week.  Mela and I, on the other hand, have been busy in her garden and at nurseries.  We planted a beautiful crab apple tree in memory of Blake.  She's done a lot of work in the yard since they moved in and it's beautiful this June. We also went to a wonderful dinner with Miche and Paul at Les Fugères in Chelsea.  It has been remodelled since I was there with Jim.  Huge windows frame the trees and gardens that surround the building, so the interior is as bright and open as the outdoors.  The woodwork is all light and the bar is a sinuous line of pale coloured rammed earth that looks like a pastel wall of rock in a painted desert; the food remains delicious. Mela and Don will have lots of company staying with them in the next few months. Their house is suited for that because there are two spare bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. I have enjoyed being with them and hope that this time spent with family and friends will ease them into a new pattern of life. 

In a little while, Caroline will pick me up. I will spend the last days in Ottawa with them before taking the bus to Walkerton on June 14th. I was supposed to take the train but received an email from the never-to-be-counted-on VIA Rail this morning informing me of the fact that they are presently in negotiations with their employees' union and hope to avoid a strike. If unsuccessful, the latter could be out as of noon on June 13.  My ticket was for around noon on June 14.  As I have no faith in VIA's ever being on time, I was not about to count on their settling with their workers by Monday.  The email informed me that I could get a complete rebate if I cancelled, so I did. Then I went through the necessary hoops of phone calls and on line stuff to get a Greyhound ticket to Guelph.  I emailed Cathy about the changes and as she has no objections to meeting me at the bus instead of the train station, I'm back on track/highway for Walkerton.

It sounds as if a whole chaos of grandchildren await, so the last week of my visit in the east will be very different from the first.

Barb Steers delighted by her birthday cake at the surprise party Crofton and Nick organized for her at The Mill in Wakefield

One of the boats at the races in Gananoque that I went to with Miche and Paul.  We got right into the pits.  Note that the prop. is covered; they all were.  

Caroline and Mela at the Stoney Swamp nature trail.

Me with Mela at the same spot in front of the beaver house.

Back east

I'm sitting on my bed in a B&B, Les Jardins de L'Achillée Millefeuille, in Les Laurentides. Micheline is reading in the Jacuzzi-type tub that took us a while to get used to last night, mainly because we didn't read the instructions clearly posted on the wall before using it. We biked on Le Petit Train du Nord yesterday when we arrived and again today. We had intended to do more today than we did but we stopped in Val David to visit a potter that Maurine knows and stayed so long with him that it was well past lunch, so we went to a cafe in Val David for a revivifying café alongé followed by pizza and salad.  By the time we were finished, 

rain was threatening, so we decided to ride back to Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts where we had left the car. By the time we got there it was raining. We waited a while at the station to see if it would stop but it didn't so we racked our bikes and drove to Mont Tremblant. The weather was fine when we got there, so we walked around.  Then we bought some food and wine, drove home and had a great meal and talk. It's now 10:35pm, and we're relaxing. We've 'shut'er down' as Jay says. Anyone who knows this area will realize that our bike tour today was only 14 kilometres in total, but the time we spent visiting with the potter, Kinya Ishikawa easily compensated for our lack of physical activity.  He spent well over an hour walking with us around his Jardin de Silice, a project he has been working on for the last 9 years.  It's a testament to his love of pottery and the community of potters. Every summer he hosts a three-week gathering of potters on his property. It's called '1001 Pots'. He knows that making pottery is solitary work and this gives them a chance to get together, socialize, see each other's work and sell some of theirs.  The works of these potters and many others are incorporated into the walls of the garden that he continues to work on every summer and plan every winter.  His imagination is vast and the work he has done to realize his vision of a huge instalation of steel and pottery, boulders and vines is impressive. It really was a privilege to walk around his creation with him as he explained how he had envisioned and executed it. 

My time in the east has been spent with good friends, Pollocks, Baughans, Don and Mela, Barb Steers and now Miche. Gardens seem to be a feature of this visit. I've helped in both of Caroline's gardens, admired Micheline's, relaxed in the Baughan's and Barb's and next week I hope to visit with Don and Mela and help her in her garden. The reason for my coming was a sad one, but things grow in the spring in spite of everything. Life carries on. 

Micheline in her chicken house with three eggs. 

Kinya in front of his Jardin de Silice in Val David. 

A view down the length of the Jardin

A small portion of one of the walls of pottery encased in steel mesh in Kinya's exhibit, 1001 Pots.