THE ANNUAL TRADITION

In Pamplona, Spain, every year, they have an event in the month of July, as part of the Festival of San Fermín, called L'Encierro, or The Running of the Bulls. Basically, what happens is that between six and twelve bulls are released from a corral and encouraged to run down the streets in a herd. The locals pay money for the dubious privilege of running in front of and alongside the bulls. So it's like a cross between the Boston Marathon and an all-ages entertainment event at the Roman Coliseum. It's dangerous, noisy and a big attraction for tourists and locals alike. In rural Erin, we have a similar event that occurs every winter, except it's really unpopular, cold, and nobody has ever come out to see it. The first time I noticed it was in early 2020, and I actually didn't witness the event, likely because I was snug in bed, but I certainly heard the scraping noise of the municipal snowplough coming down our rural road about 4:30 a.m. When I got up, I noticed that my rural mailbox, formerly upright, was now leaning so far to the south that it was imbedded in a snowbank. I'm not one to spring into action to fix something that the municipality might feel obligated to fix for me, so I waited. And then I waited some more. Pretty soon it was clear that the snowplough operator didn't feel a sufficient sense of civic responsibility to report himself to the municipal authorities, and that if I wanted the mailbox repaired I'd have to wait till spring. Spring came, along with my nephew Angus. He promptly drew up plans for a stronger base for the mailbox, arrived with all the materials in tow, plus his friend Matt's new circular saw, and by the end of the day I had a very superior rural mailbox installation. I was proud of it, and even more proud when neighbours commented on what a good, well-executed design it was. Winter 2021 came, and with it another mammoth snowfall. When I heard the scraping sound of the snowplough coming down the street, I leapt out of bed just in time to see a smaller snowplough turning into my neighbours' long winding driveway. Just before it turned, it hit my mailbox again, this time knocking the red "You've Got Mail" flag off the side of it and leaving the mailbox still attached but at a 45 degree angle. I straightened it out again, replaced the red flag, and began to wonder whether I should invest in an inflatable plastic police officer to stand sentry at my mailbox during the winter months. It's now February 2022, and the end of winter is nigh. But the other day, after a heavy snowfall, my mailbox took another hit. I know we're not much of a tourist attraction in midwinter, but surely the Tourism people at the Town of Erin can make some money out of the annual Running of the Snowploughs. Our Municipal motto is, ERIN: EXPERIENCE THE CHARM. In Winter, let's just knock off that C, and we can EXPERIENCE THE HARM instead.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL: WAITING FOR THE CROWS

I'm in a foul mood today. A car or truck must have hit a massive raccoon across the street from my place. It ended up deceased about a metre north of my rural mailbox. If you've never lived in the country before, here's an important piece of advice: never aggravate the mail delivery driver. One way of aggravating them is not to shovel the area around your mailbox in winter. If you do that, you're never getting mail. She'll keep it in her truck till the cows come home, and she won't tell you either. I like getting mail, so I try to be a good citizen and keep a wide swath of roadside shovelled. Sometimes it's a battle with the municipal snowplough, but since I'll never win that battle, I keep my shovel close at hand. Anyway, the raccoon. It appeared to be giftwrapped in red ribbon, which seemed unnecessarily festive. It took me a while to realize that raccoon entrails look like red ribbon. I began to notice more crows than usual circling over my property, and realizing that they could be my allies in this situation, I figured I'd give them space. But I haven't had mail for a few days, and I was pretty sure Vanessa, the Bringer of Mail, would consider a dead raccoon to be an offense against her as an individual, and against Canada Post Corporation as a whole. So I got out my snow shovel, walked several metres north of my mailbox, and dug a large flat section into a snowbank, a bit farther back from the gravel shoulder of the road. I walked back to the scene of the crime, loaded the deceased onto the snow shovel, and trudged back to the plateau I'd dug into the snowbank. Having deposited the raccoon onto its new resting place, I offered a brief but heartfelt prayer, trying not to breathe, and added a few words of thanks for crows....and for Vanessa. Because I'd really enjoy getting some mail this week.

THE GIFT OF REPARTEE

If I could choose a superpower, I wouldn't waste the opportunity on acquiring a skill as mundane as flying or X-ray vision. What I'd really like to have is the gift of instant repartee. Repartee, or as the French call it, L'esprit de l'escalier, or Staircase Wit, has two components: precise timing and a witty way with words. I already have the latter (after all, you're here reading my blog, aren't you?) but some of my best comebacks only occur to me after the moment to use them to greatest effect has passed. One of the best things about being around Ivaan was the fun of outdoing each other with wit. It didn't matter if the occasion to utter a funny retort had passed, because we lived in the same house and we'd trade quips any time at all, sometimes laughing so hard his head would start to hurt and we'd have to take a break. When you live alone, and especially when you live alone in the country, you talk to yourself more often than you speak to other people, and sometimes you find yourself saying something preposterous. Because time is so fluid when you live alone in the country, you may think of a witty retort hours after, or sometimes days after it's needed. And because you're there by yourself, you say it aloud and you chuckle to yourself, but later on you polish that retort and improve on it, so you tell it to yourself again and this time you laugh harder at your dazzling wit. Lately I've been thinking of incidents where my wit and my timing were in perfect sync. They tended to happen when Ivaan was around, and they were all the better because he got to enjoy them too. So I'm going to write them down in this post and add to the post as other incidents come to mind. Once I had to make a speech at a conference in a downtown hotel. If there's a skill I have in spades, it's the ability to speak to a crowd of people without a shred of stagefright (or an iota of knowledge about the subject). You could put me on a stage, hand me a microphone, and say "Go and speak to that million people in the audience about Astrophysics - or Mortgages, or Choosing Well-Fitting Shoes" - and I'd be off to the races. This speech was about Organ and Tissue Donation. I had picked a smart-looking outfit to wear: a short charcoal grey jacket over a matching sleeveless sheath dress with a very large thick zipper that ran down the back from top to bottom. As I was getting ready to go, I asked Ivaan if he'd like to come along and hear my speech. He was already using a wheelchair but the hotel was not far from our home, so I helped him get spruced up and we headed out the door and down Yonge Street, me pushing him in the wheelchair. Half way to the hotel, a nice woman came up to us and said to me, "That's a really nice dress!" I thanked her, and she continued, "But aren't you worried someone is going to come up behind you and pull down that zipper?" Without missing a beat, I shot back, "How'd you think he ended up in the wheelchair?" gesturing toward Ivaan. He howled, the lady howled, and even I couldn't wipe the grin off my face. A couple of years earlier, Ivaan was newly home from the hospital after his third stroke, and he was pretty frail. I'd just gotten him into bed and was reading to him in our second-floor bedroom. It was past eleven o'clock. Suddenly the doorbell rang. I went downstairs to see who on earth would be ringing our bell so late at night. It was a couple of acquaintances named Bernard and Julie, and they'd clearly been out for dinner and more than a couple of drinks. Overly animated with alcohol, they said they'd just dropped by hoping to see Ivaan. I explained he was already in bed, but they persisted. I went upstairs to ask him if he was willing to have visitors. He acquiesced, so I invited them up. Now, I should mention here that Bernard and Julie were an "opposites attract" couple. He was intelligent and humorous in a quiet way. Julie was dramatic and theatrical with a musical lilt to her voice. When they walked into the bedroom, in which we'd recently had leopard print broadloom installed, they were a bit startled to find themselves in a room that had a touch of safari about it. Honestly, I was irritated and just wanted them to leave, so when Julie said, dramatically, "Oh! I could NEVER sleep in a room with a carpet like this!" I turned and fixed her with a look that would have stopped a clock, and replied, "We don't do much sleeping in here". Bernard roared, Julie looked slightly abashed, and I thought to myself, "Check...and...mate!" and ushered them out the door and on their way home. I'll add more stories as I remember them, but those are two I remember fondly.

THE CHEAP PHYSICAL RELATIONSHIP

Don't even ask what got into me last week. A magazine arrived in my rural mailbox (which by some miracle is still standing, having twice been hit by snowplows in recent winters). This magazine, entitled In The Hills, is a large local publication, and when I first moved here and started receiving it, I confess I rolled my eyes, thinking it would turn out to be some third-rate magazine full of spelling and grammatical errors. With some retrospective shame, I admit that nowadays I really look forward to its arrival, four times a year. The articles are interesting, spelled well, and timely, the photography is good, and it has some of my favourite things: local real estate listings, together with colour photos. Needless to say, I dropped the rest of the mail on the kitchen counter, sat down and dug right in. And about half way through the magazine, there was a photograph of a beautiful stone building. I am a sucker for stone buildings, and for buildings that don't look all residential and boring.

This one ticked all the boxes. Old, a former schoolhouse, plenty of beautiful windows, stone, red trim, a bell on the roof...this building had curb appeal, which, in my books, is right up there next to sex appeal. I could just picture myself sitting out front on a spring day with a cup of tea and a magazine called In The Hills. Eventually I obtained the address and pulled it up on the computer. It was for sale. The interior photos did not have quite the same effect on me. In fact, they made me feel a bit uneasy. Why? Let's start with the kitchen. It was a sizeable room, recently renovated, but the layout appeared to be dreamed up by someone from a far-off galaxy where the inhabitants neither cook nor eat. It had a farmhouse apron sink (another box checked) but it was located on the far right hand side of a very long counter, right in the corner, with a window on its right side. At the far left side of the counter was a fridge, and directly to the right of the fridge was a stove. Who puts a fridge and stove side by side? At midpoint on the counter was a dishwasher and a cooktop. The cupboards looked like they had been dropped into place through the ceiling by a helicopter delivering unfinished kitchen cabinets from Home Depot, and then abandoned. It was the weirdest kitchen layout I've ever seen. Another photo showed a large bathroom that had a stone woodburning fireplace in it (another box checked). The main level of the house had 14 foot ceilings (yet another box checked!) But for every positive element the house contained, there was an equal and opposite element that made me suspect that the homeowners fancied themselves amateur interior designers: a very odd spiral staircase to a loft bedroom, for example. I'm pretty sure the bedroom furniture was installed before the staircase was installed. I talked it over with a few friends, but eventually concluded that I was infatuated with the idea of living in a house with curb appeal. Now, nobody would ever accuse Five Acres of having curb appeal. It looks much better from other angles than it does from the road. In fact, when I first came to see it, I drove right by, thinking this could not possibly be the house I'd come to see. And yet here we are! So, as a punishment for indulging in this fantasy relationship, I am now painting the interior of Five Acres. It's not going well, but at this rate, spring will be here before I'm finished, and once spring is here, it'll be as though I'd been shot out of a cannon. I will neither know nor care what colour the inside is painted, because I'll be outside on those five acres having fun.

BATS IN THE BELFRY

Recently, I noticed some round holes high up on the loft wall, just below the roofline. They looked as though four golf balls had perforated the wall, and slightly lower, there was a fifth hole, which may have been an oval shaped knot in the wooden exterior that had fallen out. Soon after, I was outside at dusk and happened to glance up at the wall. I was astonished to see 13 small birds fly out of one of the round holes. They were like a synchronized swimming team. I am no ornithologist, but wondered if they might be swallows. I do know it's illegal - and mean - to harm migratory birds, so I waited until they had plenty of time to abandon their nest. Meanwhile, I started to hear weird scrabbling noises in the ceiling of the loft early in the morning. It sounded like squirrels at a rave. So I called in the big guns: Wildlife Control. Ken came to the rescue, armed with a 40 foot ladder. He closed off three of the holes with metal plates and installed one way doors over the other two holes. Ken got a kick out of the Holzhausen, and joked that I had bigger problems than birds and squirrels, if the beavers had built such a big dam on my driveway. If a red squirrel has invited you to a rave tomorrow morning at Five Acres, don't bother showing up with your glowstick. It's been cancelled.

NOT JUST A LEGEND. NOW: A DESTINATION

When the City of Toronto named a lane after Ivaan in 2017, I figured it wouldn't be long until someone built a laneway house on Ivaan Kotulsky Lane, thus turning Ivaan into someone's home address. Well, it's happened. The new owners of 1067 Shaw Street, a semi-detached house right around the corner from ATELIER IVAAN, took down the garage that backed onto Ivaan Kotulsky Lane and replaced it wth a two-storey house with a built-in garage. The address is 26 Ivaan Kotulsky Lane. It's a very sweet modern house. I have no doubt that in the next year or two it will be followed by a few more laneway houses. Ivaan would have been thrilled to know he's become a destination. I know I am.

THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Recently I was chatting with a neighbour about projects I'd like to complete on the property. Living in relative isolation on a rural property teaches you many lessons, and if you don't learn them in a hurry, you're not going to manage well. I've always prided myself on being organized, knowing where things are, remembering details, and having my to-do list close to completion. I don't mind not knowing what I'll be doing next. In my previous life, making jewellery, I've often had to sleep on a problem to come up with a good solution, and I've come to trust that the solution will present itself when I need it. Out here, the problems tend to come at you in bunches. Sometimes you're busy being proactive on one thing, and feeling rather pleased about being so on top of it, when a crisis occurs somewhere else. Invariably, this intervening problem is going to be urgent, expensive to fix, and very unsettling to live with in the meantime. There have been a few occasions where I've so badly needed some distance from a problem that's cropped up that I've nearly gone and booked myself a hotel room somewhere else. My most important principle living here is "you're going to fix it yourself". That doesn't mean I'm going to take up plumbing, though I did repair a leak from a bathtub into my basement ceiling. It also means I'm not going to become an electrician, though I do move electrical outlets around when required. I've learned pool maintenance, though I live in perpetual fear of forgetting everything I know over the winter. I once fixed the propane furnace myself, and if you ever want to feel powerful, fixing a furnace will give you that. But I digress. There I was chatting with a neighbour about something-or-other that I wanted to get done, and she asked, "Where is that on your Five Year Plan?" I was gobsmacked. I've been here for over two and a half years, and it has never occurred to me to develop a Five Year Plan. I have vague aspirations about removing the rest of that gravel down there, dumping a ton of soil and compost and stuff where the gravel used to be, and growing a field of lavender in its place. I want to dismantle the old solar heating array for the pool and plant something in its place. Something that requires a lot of sun. I'd like to replace all the eavestroughs and downspouts on the house. But it's a big house and it's a big expense for something that is not strictly necessary...yet. I started the project this summer, replacing everything on the south wall, and my intention is to do a section every summer, till one of us - me or the property - is done. I'm genuinely delighted with how much I've accomplished so far, and I love using my winters to plan what I'll do next summer. What I now know for certain is that, whatever I have planned, what I'll actually be doing is something bigger, unexpected, more urgent, far more expensive, and well above my pay grade when the summer of '22 rolls around.