Firsts

First times happen all the time.

For example, the picture below is the first I've taken of the geological formation famously known as the "Sleeping Giant". It's just a bunch of rocks eight kilometres offshore from Thunder Bay, but all the human eye needs is the shape of a chin in silhouette and the rest of the image just falls into place.

Another first, also in Thunder Bay, is this photo of a bunch of engaging and pleasant people in their twenties and early thirties come to town for some earnest talk about First Nations and their struggles with climate change.

The young woman second from the left, Jade, recounted for all of us gathered at the Valhalla Inn a story I heard for the first time of how people learned about the sweet sap that runs in the spring inside maple trees. It went like this:

A young girl who was supposed to be out gathering firewood had stopped to sit under a tree and enjoy a fine spring day. Happy in the dappled sunlight, she watched as a squirrel first chewed and then sucked on a small branch on the tree. The squirrel seemed to like this, so the young girl gave it a try. To her surprise and delight, she tasted a sweet liquid inside the tree! Knowing the elders back home would be hard to convince, the young girl used her knife to cut a small hole in the side of the tree. She fashion a spout out of a small piece of hard wood and found some birch bark to curl up and use as a bucket.

When she brought this liquid back to the village, so the story goes, her father had three hundred questions, one of which was "where's the firewood?"

I've been travelling a lot these days - generating many greenhouse gas emissions in my part of the collective pursuit of reducing same so as to prevent the end of our tenure on this planet.

Because I've been so tired from my travels, I thought there was this month another first in my family - my oldest sister was going to cross the hallowed threshold of sixty years old. 

As the most senior sibling, she had already crossed many other thresholds first, forging the way for the rest of us:

- first to commence her menses

- first to smoke cigarettes

- first to get a job that wasn't baby sitting (though she did that first, too)

- first to get her driver's license

- first to reach legal drinking age

- first to have a husband

- first to have kids (but not first to have grandkids - one of us got the jump on her there)

- first to be diagnosed with cancer and first to be successfully treated for same

- first to retire ....

The competition for first heated up in the middle years. My other sisters and I lapped my eldest sister on other important milestones such as first to be divorced or fired from a job.

But, she will always have that temporal edge. For as long as we are all alive, she will always be older than the rest of us, leading the way.

So this is an auspicious milestone, turning sixty. Which, I was gently reminded by my eldest sister this week when I sent her birthday wishes, is what she did last year.

Happy 61st Birthday, Carol!

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen