This was a three part day for me: first weeding the front bed so that we can plant this year’s new strawberry plants. We only had one visitor to the house: the census taker, trying to pick up packages of census he had not received. “No, while you may not have received it yet, I know my husband has mailed it in. He is very conscientious. He would not have missed a deadline. You can trust in him to be prompt.” She went on and on extolling his virtues and in between accolades about Joaquim, she asked him where he lived and why he was doing this census. Mr. Small said, “I retired five years ago, to Canoe and thought this might keep me busy but I am finding it is not lucrative.”
“But you are seeing all of the homes built in your community.”
The ones off in the woods at the end of a 2 mile walk, with a locked gate and a dog barking make me nervous. I am afraid I have run . I am afraid I have run into a grow up”, I heard him say and I knitted my brows. “Oh, a grow-op,” said Bonnie. “That would make me nervous as well.”
As the man left, I said, “That is an interesting job.”
“Yes,” said Bonnie. “He sees a lot. I just wish he hadn’t drive up while I was inside the garage its door wide open, getting into my out door work clothes.”
The second part of my day was then a work party with Joaquim, trying to clean up the slash around the south end of the garden. One of the logs he tossed in the wheelbarrow had been the home for a colony of red ants. Now they were crawling over the bucket of the wheelbarrow en masse. Next he found a bug the shape of a rhomboid, its out casing a beautiful green fuchsia colour with chocolate brown markings. I picked it up and put it on different colours of trash – it was perfectly camaflouged wherever I place it. “Do you know the name of that bug?”, asked Joaquim. “No. I need to buy a bug book.”
He went on, “Why are we doing all of this work up here.”
“To find a place to plant the corn seeds David bought. I know. A lot of work to save seeds that cost $1.99. but some parents will do anything when their child is busily engaged in Science Club.”
The third part of the day was spent cleaning out the brush in the Skunk Cabbage Reach of Campbell Spring. The job started small, but morphed into 6 wheel barrows of underbrush for the trash pile. As well, Joaquim pick-axed an old rusted ½ culvert out of the ground. “Everytime I felt like quitting, I thought, just one more whack of the pick-axe and I will get this out,” and that kept me going until I finally unearthed it.” We are going to have to rake in the gaping hole that left in the earth. David spent his time under a cedar tree, one whose long under branch had touch the ground for such a long time that it had re-rooted itself to the nutrient rich soil underneath of it. The skunk cabbage was was still in flower 10 days ago is now lush and green, its beautiful elephant-eared leaves upright in the stream and along the bank. David spent his time making a small bridge across the stream whose banks are now overflowing with spring run-off. “I have on my cousin’s crocks. My feet are big enough to wear them,” but my feet are so cold I can’t feel them any more,” He changed footwear when he went back to the house, but the trip was mainly to get out of his sopping wet sweats, since he finally took a full fall into the stream.
David is getting bigger. So big that he can’t ride the lawnmower with Glen anymore. That news hasn’t been broken to him yet, a telling that will make a sad day for him. I remember, myself, the day my dad, laying on his back on the floor, telling me that now I was too big to sit on his feet and have him toss me over his head and his head and back. I remember the longing for that fun, did not diminish as I grew older and watched him do it to successive babies.
We spent a long day outside. When I came in I said to Bonnie, “Let’s all go to bed hungry tonight. I am too tired to cook.”
“Tossing a squash into the oven and frying pork chops is not really cooking,” she said. “And a piece of the new fresh bread baked today would be sufficient.” We wound down our evening looking at a recipe book called The Brownie Lover’s Bible: 100 Ways to Make Brownies, all the time eating the fudgey brownies she had made from the back of the circular, yellow Fry’s Cocoa tin. That recipe is not one either of us would make again (I looked in one of my books and I had tried it as well.) Lucky that we have that book one of my roomers gave to me as a parting gift. We have 150 more variations to try, though I doubt any of them will match the splendour of the one I find in the Johnson Manna from Heaven cookbook. The relatives on that side of the family really know how to cook.
