The Old Man, His Wife and the Skunk

Bob, when he joined the canvass on Thursday night, did not smell bad. So, when he offered to give me a ride home, I had nothing to tell me that there was anything amiss. 

Tired after two hours of climbing front steps and knocking on doors, I said yes. 

On the way to the car, Bob talked about his skull collection. He explained that in his role as the executive director of the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy he takes the collection to rural fairs and uses it as a conversation starter. "Kids come running over to the table, and then I get to talk with their parents. We have over 200 properties under the land trust now."

I assumed Bob wasn't talking about human skulls.  

"Can you smell the skunk?" Bob asked when I opened the car door. Trying to be polite because he was giving me a ride, I said, "yes, but it's not too bad." 

He told me that he needed a skunk skull for his collection because he'd been told that what he thought was a skunk was actually a cat's skull. 

Then Bob was in the market for a dead skunk. Soon enough, he found one, lying in the middle of the road.

He'd pulled over, retrieved the flattened skunk, and put it in his car. The dead skunk is now both hanging in a tree in his back yard and, essentially, still in his car. "My wife's not very happy with me," said Bob. 

To help him with that, I offered him the unsolicited advice that a product call Bad Air Sponge would likely remove the stench from his vehicle.

I got to test my advice that same night. When I got home, standing in the front hall, I told Bruce the story of the old man and the skunk and he said, standing three metres away from me, "that explains the way you smell."

I put my shirt, my pants, my jacket and my knapsack in a small closet with an air sponge. Two days later, they were good as new. 

For the sake of his marriage, I hope Bob gives it a try.

Thanks for reading!

Next week, dispatches from Pittsburgh!

Karen

Also famous for mistaking cats for skunks.

Creepy Season

Common garden spider and its lunch,
Ameliasburgh, Ontario, September 20, 2022.

Garter snake, Macaulay Mountain Conservation Area,
September 21, 2022.

Al Purdy's ghostly feet (and the photographer's),
Grove Cemetery, Purdy Street,
Ameliasburgh, Ontario, September 20, 2022.

Apologies to all arachnophobes and ophidiophobes. I needed illustrations to accompany my observation that Hallowe'en is morphing into "creepy season", I assume in a systemic effort to make everyone feel welcome to festoon their homes in synthetic webs and fabric witches.

This week's canvassing for Dianne Saxe was complicated by houses that had covered up their numbers with creepy season decorations. Another complicating factor was we were back in Rosedale, Toronto's toniest neighbourhood, where houses sit on acre lots and you have to wait and wait and wait at the door to give anyone home the time they need to answer your knock. The time and distances involved neutralize the impact of a large canvassing team. In two hours, six of us barely managed 100 homes. A third as many could have done twice as much in any other neighbourhood.

The houses are huge, and grandly appointed, but, in a lot of respects, are like everywhere else. Some are immaculately kept. Others are a mess. Some have been subdivided into flats. Two grand homes on Glen Road are obviously vacation rentals (obvious, that is, if you knock on the door and offer information about a local election). At the west end of Roxborough Drive, most of the properties are decrepit.

Sometimes it feels as if I'm in the same campaign as just a few months ago, when I also folded flyers into the door handles of non-responsive addresses, and asked strangers nosey questions about who they'd be supporting in the election.   

There's really only one big difference between the municipal election and the provincial election. Dianne may actually win this time.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen 

Ever seen a frog poop?
A grey tree frog, on the
back deck of our PEC Vrbo.
Terrified by two giant
beings bathing it in light and 
alcohol fumes, it let loose
its little bowels.

The Missing Middle

Prince Edward County sunset, from the back porch of our Vrbo.

In Toronto, you can build single family dwellings or you can build fifty-plus-storey towers. If you want to build something in between those two extremes, like a three-storey infill, well, best leave those plans to your children in your will, because they'll never see approval in your lifetime.

The extremes in Toronto planning policy - ultra low density on the one hand, ultra high density on the other - has given rise to what is called the "missing middle" -- affordable, mid-density housing -- which, among many other things, is often blamed for the perpetual housing crisis in Toronto.

This is another maddening example of how a public policy problem is well understood, and the solution ridiculously obvious (just repeal antiquated restrictions on mid-density development), and yet, somehow, nothing changes, and the only new development you see is fifty-plus-storey towers.

Toronto planning policies are like contemporary politics. Everything is at one end or the other. People at the extremes dominate the conversation. Any person with a proposal in the middle hasn't got a hope.

The current state of political polarization is, among other things, the excuse used by people who have decided not to vote, to free ride on democracy and let elections be decided by the ones who show up.

This is another maddening example of how an obvious solution seems beyond our grasp.

Speaking of a person in the middle, Dianne Saxe is running for office again, this time as councillor in Ward 11, the same arbitrary set of boundaries on the map that she ran for in the provincial election.

Back then, she was a Green Party candidate. Now she's running on a non-partisan platform, pushing for action on climate change, reconciliation with First Nations and housing. 

I can't vote for her, but I'm volunteering again for her campaign. 

If you're in her ward, check her out. You don't have to vote for her if you don't like, but, wherever you are, vote for somebody for goodness' sake.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

The frogs of Prince Edward County. All northern leopard frogs, each with its own colour scheme. 

Kay Pfahl

Ed Pfahl, me, Kay Pfahl, September 2009

Six weeks ago, around the time of my sister's birthday, she and I drove to Ottawa to see Kay Pfahl and her family. Kay had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She didn't have much time.  

On September 23rd, my birthday, we drove to Ottawa again to see Kay's family, who greeted us as always with warmth and hospitality, but without Kay. She had died on 20 September. 

L to R, back row: Kim Clark, Kevan Macrow, Ed Pfahl, Alan Pfahl, me, Bruce Clarke.
L to R, front row: The Pfahl sisters Debbie, Kerry, Sandie; Carol Myers. 

The Pfahls were our next-door neighbours in Winnipeg, and lived around the corner from us in Edmonton. Armed forces families say "you never say good-bye, just see you later." But most of the folks we knew back then, we never did see again. The Pfahls were the exception.

Kay and Ed and their kids were a few years younger than my parents and their brood. We kids played backyard games. I recall tag, red rover, statues, and cap pistols. Indoors there were board games, an ant farm, and a rock collection.  

The families' deepest bond was the abiding love between Kay Pfahl and my mother. After they left Edmonton, the Pfahls moved around some before finally settling in Ottawa. We were never neighbours again, but in 1979, when my father was in an Ottawa hospital for six months, mom took the bus from Trenton and stayed with the Pfahls every weekend so she could visit dad. 

Some years later, as my father lay dying in the same hospital, Kay and Ed opened their home to an endless stream of Clarks.

My mother died in 2005, but Kay's love and the Pfahl's special place in our hearts abides. 

In that strange way of memorials, it was inexpressibly sad on the 23rd to be mourning Kay with her family but also wonderful to see them all together, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

The world has lost a caring, compassionate, deeply lovely human being, but all of her love survives in the lives she touched and the family she made.

Rest in peace, Kay. You were absolutely awesome.

Karen

Peace and (Almost) Quiet

Sunset, Georgian Bay, September 2022.

We're on an island in Bayfield Inlet, about halfway along the Alexander Passage on Georgian Bay. In terms of mainland landmarks, we're west of Point au Baril Station on Highway 69. Still have no idea where we are? Neither do we. But it doesn't matter. 

Cottage country after Labour Day is quiet. The few boats skimming the inlet are loaded with contractors headed to work on properties left empty now that the season is over.

The real locals, the ducks, crows, fish, turtles, spiders, slugs, crickets, mosquitoes and hornets are back to being the boss of the place.

A mess of Mergansers, Georgian Bay, September 2022.

Our presence disturbs the peace when we call to one another to say we've found something, or when the dogs, Golda and Lester, bark their fool heads off.

The nighttime quiet and perfect darkness make me aware of how used I've become to the permanent luminescence and shaking hum of the city. I don't miss these. I just get the occasional start when I notice their absence, like when a bad smell you've become accustomed to is suddenly gone. 

We're here a couple more days, then off to another cottage rental on the shore of the much smaller Ameliasburgh mill pond. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Cardinal flower, on the island with no 
name, Georgian Bay, September, 2022.

Flights of Angels

June 2021: impressive weather, Georgian Bay

I assume the Queen's death means something to me. Like increasingly few people these days, she was around long before I was born. Her picture's on the money. Her offspring often cause a stir.

I watched King Charles's speech on YouTube. In the comments people noted the beauty of his last words, "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Not a single one seemed to know Horatio speaks these words to Hamlet's still warm corpse in the blood-soaked final scene of Shakespeare's best-known play.

Which means to me that the power of Shakespeare's words has outlasted his fame. 

That's a trick few achieve. Her late Majesty was known more for her works than her words, but most of all known for her determined constancy, her dedication to her role. Even without paying much attention, or caring one way or the other, I understood that.

Seventy years of consistent effort is worthy of respect, and some sadness now that it's done.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

We're headed back to Georgian Bay this week.
We will be keeping an eye out for bears.

 

Trouble

I found someone living in my crawlspace. 

After binge-watching Hoarders episodes, I decided, for the second time in two years, to clean out the half-height cubby hole above the kitchen.

The last time I'd gone in there, I'd found file boxes full of old documents. I didn't have the mental strength then to sort through them all, so I just put them back.

This time I pulled those boxes out, lifted the lids, hauled out the contents. And started to read.

And that's how I found the person in my crawlspace. She's in the box with twenty plus years' worth of journals extending from 1976 to 1998. 

It's me, but an exotic, unfamiliar me from so far in the past that she might just as well be a different person. But that was the point of writing those journals ... I left a record for my future self, so I could look back on the details of my life and perhaps find meaning, maybe solve the problem of the inscrutability of existence.

Maybe.

I did throw out a lot of what I found. Eight boxes' worth. But I kept the journals, put them in order and affixed a fresh label on the box so I can find them again when I'm ready to complete the assignment I set myself.

Even if that's just looking for trouble.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Labour Day Weekend!

Karen

Also found/almost unrecognizable. My sisters and
I circa 1963 in Winnipeg. Guess which one's me.