My father has become quite adept at reading to his grand children in his old age.
It makes me happy.
Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Mont Ham, Parc Régional du Quebec
For my birthday I took the kids out of school. I do this every year because, as far as my kids are concerned, my birthday is more important than any national or religious holiday. It’s true for them, of course. They’d be fine if Christ never rose or fell or if Quebec was still a French colony or if women never got the right to vote. But if I had not birthed them? Woe! My children are realists. Martin is the most likely (read: only) candidate for father, but, again, without the advent of genetic testing in the 1950s (and you can celebrate National DNA Day on April 25th!) there’d never be any proof of this. Therefore, despite his unconditional love and utter devotion to their health and well-being and his wonderful presence, he’s just simply not quite as important as I am. Yes, here I am, the most important person on planet Earth, a densely-peopled planet three rocks out from the Sun. I don’t actually do anything to encourage this feeling in my kids. In fact, I think all kids feel this way about their moms.
So, for my birthday, I took advantage of the fact that I’m an important person. I took my children up Mont Ham. We went up the steepest way— the red trail on the map (below)— and it was wonderfully steep. Due to the steepness, I had planned on taking another trail down. However, due to the late start, we were still on the mountain side when the sun began to set in the late-afternoon, mid-November way it does. For this reason, we also went down the not-as-wonderful-on-the-way-down-extremely-steep red trail. We were, in fact, still on a quite steep part of the mountain side when the sun was well over the horizon. That’s when I turned on my head lamp and gave profuse thanks to whomever it was who decided to mark the trail with reflective trail markers. That was probably the best surprise of my birthday. In fact, I’d say that reflective trail markers were the best surprise of the entire year. Heck, reflective trail markers were quite possibly the best surprise of the decade. What a wonderful, wonderful birthday present.
Here are my two side-kicks at the summit. It was quite windy, as summits are.
There was a lot of snow blowing around, but it didn’t seem to land on anything.
Weasel in the wabbit house, go weasel, go! We don’t want a weasel here, no no no!
A weasel got in. First ate attacked some small round bunnies. After that, it ate an entire litter of babies. When it got a large rabbit, leaving a hole at the back of the neck and leaving the rabbit intact inside the fence, we knew it was a weasel. There is no way of weasel-proofing the colony. Most of the largest buns went off to freezer camp. Tucker is now a single papa of seven small porch rabbits. Clover and one female rabbit remain down below, to be taken in to a secure location at night and let out during the day. I don’t know what we’ll do next year. We shall see what happens when the time comes.
House of the Candy Faerie
It was dark by the time Iris located the perfect place:
west down rue King, through the woods, across the creek where the bones were,
up the ravine, over the field, into a ditch, and under the root of a fallen tree.
Perfect. It was perfect. The lollipop lamps illuminated when we pushed them in the earth.
Previous Candy Faerie Houses:
Whatever became of Iris’s turkeys, anyhow?*
In the above photo,
the little girl has a look upon her face that suggests she has just learned, mid-mouthful,
that she eating a friend of hers.
In the original 46-year-old photo, below,
the expression on the face of the little girl shows that she is completely oblivious
to the fact that her mother may have just fed her the leg of one of her playmates.
*Due to a series of unfortunate events, this year’s American Thanksgiving Turkey was, instead, consumed the day after Halloween, making it a Day of the Dead Turkey.
Waterville Skate Park
Jump!
Jump!
Autumn, L’Île du Marais
When we get there, we walk across the boardwalk to the island. On the west side of the boardwalk, turtles bask in the setting sun. I did not buy my camera for the purpose of photographing far-away turtles. I chose my camera for the purpose of photographing children. The binoculars are for the turtles. If there are still turtles when my children are grown, they will still look like turtles. We will still see them with binoculars in that future. If there are no turtles when my children are grown, we will look at photographs of turtles that other people have taken. We will say, “Remember when there were turtles in the ponds? They sat on logs in the sun and we looked at them.” A world with turtles is a happier place than a world without turtles.
In the middle of the island there are rocks with moss on them. There are trees. If there is a time in the future when there are no turtles and no people, at least for a while there will be rocks with moss. For a while, there will be trees. Everyone will wish they could be there.
My favorite part of the walk, at least at the moment, is around the back side of the island. There is the edge of the island. There is the still water, the marsh, the hill, the silver steeple of Canton-de-Hatley. There is the sky. There is the moon. The world is everywhere we look.
Bouquet—
—of rabbits.
Kiss @ Johnville Bog
I tried to take some photos of the kids on this log in mid-September, but the lighting was lousy.
Fortunately, I come here often enough to try, try again.
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