Red Kettle Challenge

Let’s not pretend I am a great worker-for-the-cause, but for the last few years I have managed a couple of shifts with the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle, the SA’s major fund raising campaign. Sure there are probably some negative experiences; yes, a percentage of money raised goes to administrative costs; no, the organization is not perfect. But, the Sally Ann, as we used to call it, is known for being first on the scene and non-judgemental, with a “see it do it” attitude. 

Last minute as usual I called in for 2 shifts. At Mayfair Mall, INDOORS, I took over from a military wife and her two very young daughters, and this morning I was back outside at Thrifty Foods Quadra/Cloverdale on a nice day of about 8C. I was dressed in long johns, down coat, down mitts and toe warmers in my boots but at about the 90/120 minute mark suddenly I was chilled despite bell-ringing and moving around a bit to avoid seizing up.

            The downside of the kettle is that 2 hours can feel like 20; you might be bored and no, you can’t bring a book, play solitaire, or text/talk on the phone; and the location might not be interesting, comfortable, or warm. You will also see people go out of their way to avoid you or at least avoid eye contact, which is kind of funny but sad, because I think it comes from not knowing how to handle saying hello without guilt or a donation.  

There are quite a few upsides to the kettle. I greet people, “hello good morning/afternoon, Merry Christmas” and they greet me back and smile despite themselves. I get outside my little bubble for 2 hours and see the world from a different perspective, and I get a goodly number of “thank you for doing this”, hugs, and “God bless you”, (which regardless of your faith or non-faith is nice). I also get stories: “The SA took in my father when he was very ill and kept him until he healed and was back on his feet.” “My mother was on her own with my little brother and a ham was delivered at Christmas – she didn’t know how it happened but it made a big difference to her”.

            In the 2 hours I was with the kettle today I probably took in $500.00 from ten cents to one hundred dollars. But here is the shock; I was the only person at that location today, the Saturday before Christmas. Expecting to hand off to another volunteer, I handed over to the route supervisor instead who closed the site with 6 hours left in the day. In my 2 hours this morning 4 people told me they had been looking for a kettle but there didn’t seem to be any around. Volunteers have disappeared and donations are down, both for a variety of reasons.

            So here is the challenge: next year, gather your family, bridge club, golf buddies, book club, neighbours, colleagues, or any random group of people and cover one full day on a kettle. It may not be a super fun activity but it is important and a great Christmas present to yourself. A kettle day is 8 hours long, from 10:00-6:00 and the campaign runs from late November till December 23 excluding Sundays.

            If you can’t do that, next time you see a kettle, chat with the person on duty; they might be bored, cold, tired, or hungry. Say hi, it doesn’t cost a cent.

More Maritimes News

We spent a few days with the Nova Scotia fam including Thanksgiving dinner for the first time ever. 

Rachel had Kings-Edgehill (KES) friends with her from Barbados, which added a fun element to the celebrations. We met several of the girls' friends over the weekend and were impressed by their intelligence and awareness of world affairs. Barak Obama is speaking in Halifax in a few weeks and Paul and Sue are hosting 6 young people to go to the event with them. 

Our visit to KES also left us feeling the future is in good hands with a faculty and student body fully engaged in the pursuit of excellence in academics, athletics, fine arts, and leadership.  

KES began as Kings College School in 1788 (the oldest independent school in the British Commonwealth and the genesis of Kings University in Halifax) followed by Edgehill School for girls in 1891 and they amalgamated in 1976.

The Maritimes provide an endless juxtaposition of old and new, for instance. the KES library built in 1863 and the new Halifax Central Library that opened in 2014, both housing up to date digital information technology.

the exquisite Convocation Hall library/museum at KES 

Halifax Central Library on Spring Garden Road

downtown Halifax

We love Mahone Bay for it's olde charme from the ship-building glory days. It has managed to keep chugging along, unlike many small towns, by attracting tourists and specialty shops like Amos Pewter. It also seems to have a thing for stuffed creatures, bringing people to town in the off-season. We've been to the Father Christmas Festival and this year the Scarecrow Festival. some were themed to the business that created them, odd but cute.

in front of O My Cod seafood restaurant

waiting for service outside a spa

advertising a wool shop

In the 30 years that we have “lived away” we have rarely “been home” in October. It’s not much different than British Columbia at this time of year though maybe a bit warmer on average until into December.We took the old road through the Wentworth Valley to enjoy the leaf colour, realizing that the trees are already dropping their canopies and it won’t be long until they are bare. With a high deciduous content the colour is spectacular but short-lived and if you hit a patch of wild blue berries it is breathtaking

Speaking of deciduous trees, while we tend to think Maritime trees are on the small side there are some that challenge anything the west coast can offer. This Linden tree has stood on the corner of Rochford and Grafton for at least a hundred years surviving everything nature and humans could throw at it.

Jim looking pretty tiny next to this Linden

It has been rewarding to have time to wander down so many memory lanes during this extended visit. There is nowhere quite like the Maritimes and Maritime people. Not to mention the lobster!

Winding down

My gym membership expired last week and rather than renew I tromped all over Charlottetown. Jim has had an Achilles tendon irritation so my walks have been solo and what I re-learned is that the old part of Charlottetown is compact. You can walk almost anywhere in about 20 minutes, not counting the burbs of course which sprawl as they do everywhere.

For context, we were 3 blocks from Confederation Centre and 4 from Province House. All the restaurants, coffee shops, amenities of every description including “my” gym are in that midtown area.

I went into the building that Used to be Prince of Wales College and found a photo of the 1930 intercollegiate rugby champions in the front hall. My father, age 15, was on the team; while the printing is faded, the names I could decipher were all very familiar. 

Dad, upper right

Our apartment was on the east side of the street and the house of Betsy’s and my teens is on the west side. Of the 8 houses on that side, one is a museum, one is an inn, one is being converted to a B&B, one is apartments, and 4 are single family homes. Those four houses are circa 1945-50 and modestly sized while the conversions are all the beautiful but huge and drafty Victorian mansions. 

And then there is this oddity going up at the end of the street...

While you might get all googly-eyed about the gorgeous architecture, that first house I owned had 11 foot ceilings on the first floor, 10 on the second, and 9 on the third in a cold climate. My grandparents had boarders on the third floor and when that era passed, the stairwell was closed off with heavy drapes backed by blankets. The house has 2x4 construction with newspaper for insulation and single pane windows and the fireplaces burned coal as did the furnace before the Grands retro fitted it for oil. We put on storm windows in the fall and took them off in the spring and it took 3000 gallons of oil to heat the place.
There are hundreds of viability conversions all over town: inns, vacations rental apartments, B&Bs, or long term apartment conversions.

Not a wise investment opportunity despite having a lot of bolts holding it together; a distinct bulge! 

It is October 10 and we are down to 10 days left in the Maritimes and we have moved out of the apartment and are in Nova Scotia for Thanksgiving weekend.

Today we went to Grandparents' Day at Kings-Edgehill School, the co-ed amalgamation of my alma mater and Kings College School (oldest independent school in the Commonwealth apparently). Rachel and Jillian started at KES this year as day students, about an hour from home for them. The school is a dramatic cultural and social change for them but they seem to be liking it. Hilarious is that the girls’ uniform is almost identical to the one we wore in the mid-sixties at Edgehill: a knee length tunic over a white or blue shirt, tie, dark knee socks, and “sober” shoes. 

Different is that when I was there the two schools, Kings and Edgehill, were on separate hills and only very occasionally did the twain meet.

Me, age 17 at Edgehill

Old girl and two new girls; Jill (15) on the left and Rachel (16) on the right

More History

Our family, like many, lived and breathed history. While I absorbed some of the stories, I mostly blocked them out as boring, as one does when the elders are going on and on and on. It is wildly amusing that suddenly I am interested at all. When I say the family breathed history, I mean that my mother's mother started the PEI Historical Society and wrote books, my father's mother, as I mentioned before, hauled us off to look at cemeteries. All old artifacts, especially if local, were revered. Some of you know the long case clock in our house?

I remember Mum coming home from an auction having purchased that 1840 Scottish beauty for $125.00, anxious what Dad would think of the extravagance. I was about 10 so we've had the clock for 60 years. And the blue and white Czechoslovakian canisters in the china cabinet? My maternal grandmother bought them at an auction in the 1930s for $2.00 so we've owned them for about 90 years. Seriously.

Like any other interest, there is a hierarchy and snobbery involved with history buffs. Our family snobbery was that "we" were United Empire Loyalists, meaning the Ives rellies bailed out of the US during the American Revolution. I'm sure the UEL status elevated Dad to almost acceptable in my grandmother's eyes; no one was ever going to be good enough for Mum but he at least had history on his side. On one of our cemetery trawls, we found the evidence and thank goodness someone added a modern plaque to the stone, proving the status because it is illegible; Isaac Ives, 4th great grandfather, born in Connecticut.

Editorial: no mention of his wife Sarah Thompson coming with him with children in tow and also UEL. Chopped liver apparently for the sin of being female.

Walking around downtown I am driving Jim crazy with "Tom lived in that house, Dick was there, and Harry was around the corner". Aside from all the personal memories (Jim is from AWAY) there are some gorgeous Victorian era houses in the city.

Bets and I had our first decade in one and the first house I owned, purchased for $17,000, was another. It was 4500 square feet, 3 stories, clay cellar, built in 1877, with knob and tube wiring, and an original 1920 furnace when I bought it from my grandmother's estate in 1970. Clearly this was not a sensible buy for a 21 year old and a few years later the house and I parted ways.
We toured Beaconsfield the other day, supposedly the pinnacle of fancy Victorian houses, built in 1877, and I have to say that, beautiful as it is, my house of the same year, built as a wedding present for an adored daughter, had better bones. Snobbery again. 

Half a block from Beaconsfield and facing across the cove to Government House, is the house of our teenage years, a modest one-of-three built in 1947 on the property of a Victorian mansion (the Heartz house) that had burned down.

I am amazed at the details and factoids that still manage to find the way to the surface of my memory!

Connections

Here’s a typical PEI story: we were on the board walk at Tignish Run and started an idle conversation with a woman visiting from Vancouver.  She was touring the Island with her family having just sold their summer house in Wood Island; down east and I hope you have a map in front of you because by now you should be lost. Her husband came along and with further chat we introduced ourselves and I thought his name was familiar, Roger Larrabee. We shared our ages and realized we went to the same high school in the same class; Betsy, his brother Eldon would have been in your class or at least your grade. When I started rhyming off names of fellow class mates we got into that excitement you feel in those random and happy connections and parted with a hug. What are the odds of that meet-up?

 

not a relative!

Another day we were in a restaurant/diner in Crapaud, the Red Rooster, and I swear our server’s mother or grandmother was a student when I worked at Bluefield High School, she looked so familiar. I restrained myself and did not interrogate her on her ancestry which I would have done had she been a bit older. At her age she might have thought I was bat-crazy, justified of course.

I see people all the time that I almost recognize but not enough to remember a name or even be confident of the identity because everyone is at least 30 years older.  Or I’ll see someone I’m sure I know and then find out, no, I was wrong.

There is a “look” in PEI, probably from genetic crossovers because like any pioneer area there were only a few families and they had to intermarry for lack of choice. 

Luckily they had lots of kids, 8 or maybe 20 in one generation so the gene pool got mixed up fairly quickly. We know a woman of Acadian background who has 97 first cousins just on her mother’s side of the family. No one has tried to count them on her father’s side but there are many more.

I recently sent my DNA to ancestry.ca which coughed up all kinds of interesting connections. I share a double great grandmother with a Victoria friend, born in South Lake, PEI and the great grandfather of another friend from South Lake was the brother of a different double great grandmother of mine. Did you know you have 16 ancestors at the double great level? We know someone who traced his family back about 1000 years and told us there are 17,000 in the direct line if you get back that far! Good grief! It gets very complicated very quickly with immigration mis-spellings (Jim’s mother’s last name had three versions), repeated names through generations, and here’s a good one – if an infant died sometimes the same name was given to the next born.

And occasionally there is a complete surprise like this one, the Ives name in the Acadian territory of Miscouche otherwise known as Lot 7 from the time the Island was partitioned to favoured friends of whatever King was on the throne.

On the other hand, we spent the weekend at the PEI Shellfish Festival with kitchen-party entertainment on the main stage and an international chefs competition on the kitchen stage, and I didn't know a soul other than Michael Smith who is VERY tall and Andrew Scheer, also tall but not as.

I also stopped by at a big-ish street market on Queen Street and no known faces jumped out at me. It can happen.

the Shellfish Festival tent

Michael Smith

$5.00 Caesars

Queen Street market

Western Prince County, PEI

More photos than anything in this post because we were touring around.

The Halifax Griffiths have a beach house in Ebbsfleet and you can’t go much further “up west” than Ebbsfleet. 

It is a big house and set up as a summer rental so we booked it for three days of bonding with the senior Griffith siblings (Jim, Pat, Peter) and spouses (me, Ed, Betty).  We think it is the only time the 6 of us have spent time together other than big family events like weddings and funerals and I am happy to say we had a good time. 

We poked in and around western Prince, up to North Cape on a cool and windy day, and into various harbours and towns. There is not much left of what used to be Elephant Rock, water and wind have a strong impact on the sandstone.

Elephant Rock then

and now

North Cape is the longest rock reef in North America

The map was not quite aligned with the road configuration, an intersection on the map was actually a curve in the road, but that resulted in an interesting stop at this large church in Palmer Road (a very small community) which we would have missed.

Fishing is a big industry in PEI: lobster, tuna, mackerel, crab, mussels, oysters and, as one fisher told us, anything that’s out there. The western fishing harbours as well as some “down east” are called “ponds” Skinners Pond, Seacow Pond, Nail Pond, Miminegash Pond, etc. Essentially they are coastal lagoons protected by sand dunes, and they have “runs” out to the sea. The runs have been dredged time and time again and are often lined with steel, usually very rusty steel, or wood. We saw a couple of man made ponds, notably the one at West Point and it also had a long storage shed with fun doors that identify the contents by the boats’ names.

Sea Cow Pond

Tignish Run

Why worry about colour matching?

West Point Light House, now an inn.

 

Speaking of Skinners Pond, Islanders have made hay over the connection to Stompin' Tom Connors who was fostered to a family in Skinners Pond for four years. We went to the STC for a dinner theatre and it was really a lot of fun. We thought it was sold out but dropped in to the Centre to check about an afternoon entertainment and discovered they always hold seats for drop-ins even if the website says no tickets are available. Here’s the question: why would you drop in if the website says Sold Out?

Stompin' Tom impersonator.

PEI weather chapter 2

And another few things...

I had forgotten how all-encompassing the weather is here and how much conversation about it. It’s too wet and the farmers can’t get on the fields, it’s too dry and the farmers need rain, etc. It’s a volatile climate for sure.

Dorian left quite a mess in its wake, more evident after a few days. Massive poplar trees were uprooted all over the province and we are amazed that very few of them hit buildings turning them into pancakes. Other scrub spruce sections are a mass of toothpicks and more than a few people were without electricity for a week. 

Gary and Lesley had a good weather day or their cruise stop but the day after, with another 3 ships in port, it poured rain all day.

And I mean poured; misery for the passengers trying to make the best of their one day stop. Sunday past, the temperature got up to 21C, yesterday the high was 10C, today 11, and it’s been very windy for 24 hours. Tonight there is a frost warning for the province and Sunday it is supposed to be 22 again. It keeps you on your toes!

Meanwhile w'eve been seeing the sights around town and country as well as eating far too much.
This gorgeous garden is in Rochford Square, about half a block from where Betsy and I spent our first years. Charlottetown was a planned development, laid out on a grid pattern, and there are four of these heritage squares meant to be gathering places.

A bit of family history is that that first house, built in 1878ish and that Dad & Mum paid $6000 for, was expropriated in 1962 by the province to provide for the the construction of the provincial office buildings. As I recall PEI paid about $35,000 for the big beautiful Victoria house and for $25,000 M&D were able to buy a smaller house about 2 blocks away, on the water, facing Government House with no mortgage. Not a bad deal and it also financed our very first "modern" washer and dryer, a fancy Amana refrigerator and a new car!

My mother and her mother were great auction and flea market fans and while my adrenaline picks up at the thought of an auction or an antique store I'm only lukewarm about garage sales. But I broke a pottery chowder bowl in our apartment and the potter closed out her business in 2004, so now we are frequenting thrift shops, flea markets, and other replacement possibility sites. There's nothing like a search mission to get you out and about despite the improbability of success. I've been looking for a particular coffee mug for at least 2 years, to no avail but I keep trying. 
We overheard in a cafe that the last Rustico flea market of the season was the next day and I hauled my friend Marg off to check it out; no chowder bowl or mug but it was a lot bigger and more interesting than I expected in the North Star Arena (rink).

Another day on a tip from other friends we went to Cape Traverse to the Ice Boat store (site of the terminus of the ice-boat ferries, a method of transportation not for the faint of heart.) A well heeled  prairie transplant with a passion for collecting bought first the Masonic lodge and then the about-to-be-torn-down church, sunk a big pile of money into them and filled them with his personal accumulation. Who da thunk? They are both beautiful buildings filled with interesting artifacts, all for sale. :-)