September 30, 2020

We live in an old house. In fact, it’s more than a century old. When we first moved in here, into this house on a corner lot, there was an elderly woman living kitty-corner from us who told us that when she was a girl, this house of ours had actually been a duplex. She knew this because she and her family lived on one side of it. He chuckled and told me that was how far she’d come in life—all the way across the street.

We’ve made some repairs and improvements to this house over the years, but an old house is an old house, and often features something that those who did not grow up in a rural environment might find creepy to think about—mice.

Our house in the country, when I was a kid growing up, always had an influx of mice in the fall—field mice coming inside for the winter. My mother would set traps, of course, but she also had one wise saying: mice are a pain, but as long as you have mice, you know you don’t have rats. Apparently those two rodents do not live together.

Now y’all are saying, “OMG rats?” Let me tell you. There were two times in my memory when rats were a real problem. Both occurred when we lived on that old road of ours out in the country. About a mile to the north of us was a chicken farm operation. The story, as I heard it from my mother was that one day they decided to fumigate their barn between shipments of chicks – and did something very wrong, because there ensued a stampede of a herd of rats down the road. It wasn’t a very busy road, so not many of them were killed by traffic. All the neighbors had rat problems for a good month.

I awoke with one on my bed, and I wasn’t much more than nine or ten at the time.

That said, I’m still not a fan of having any rodents here in the house. At all. Over the years we’ve tried standard traps and those small plastic box so-called humane traps. We’d catch a few each fall. But not all of them.

Over the last few months or so, I have endured two major irritants in my life: my family’s habit of leaving the doors open for extended periods of time, and the darn rodents. And then I discovered that those two irritants had merged.

I had the suspicion that we had a critter in the kitchen, one larger than a mouse. I caught sight, a couple of times, of something zooming fast in my peripheral vision. Something…furry. Just a wisp in the corner of my eye, but I knew what it was. I knew.

And then one day, I heard a sound…I swiveled my chair and looked, and I saw it! From my chair in my office, I saw it! I told the others, but they did not believe me.

What is it about one’s having grey hair that makes people discount anything you have to say? I swear, one of these days, I’m going to demonstrate why I refer to my cane as a whoopin’ stick.

But I digress.

Indignant that I was not believed, I formed a plan. It took some time but finally, I heard that sound again. I reached for my cell phone and ever so silently swiveled my chair around. I took a picture, one that proved that I had indeed seen…a chipmunk. Living under my kitchen cupboards but coming out during the day to see what he or she could scavenge.

We tried leaving the back door open during the morning—the Chippie’s active time of day—and it completely ignored the hint to be gone. None of us can move fast enough to capture the little varmint, and those dogs? Why would they hunt a rodent? They have kibble in their dish.

Finally, I went looking online, and found a small live trap that listed that it could accommodate chipmunks, mice, rats and even muskrats—so glad I don’t live near a marsh.

The trap finally arrived last week, and we set it up. Though we also knew we had mice we didn’t expect to catch any, but we did. A few small mice have been relocated to the far back yard atop the hill—as has our former, resident Chipmunk.

Poor Chippie was not a happy camper when the door to that cage slammed shut.

But I sure was.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 September 23, 2020

Autumn officially arrived yesterday morning. We felt that it had actually arrived several days before when we welcomed cooler temperatures to our area. I don’t care for extremes in temperatures anymore. I was never fond of extreme cold, but I used to not mind the heat so much. The last few years, however, rather than finding the heat comforting, the humid high temperatures of summer seem to aggravate my arthritis just as much as the wet damp of fall and icy cold of winter do.

I’m afraid I’ve turned into one of those clichéd humans who is never happy, no matter the weather. I hate being that person, but I won’t deny that I am.

Tomatoes and green peppers and beans are still growing, but they’ve slowed. David cleared out some of the vegetation that was just growing in the gardens but not producing anything. We’ll catch a break if the first few frosts are light. Since the gardens are not at ground level (they’re about three feet up), there’s a chance those first few chills won’t kill the veggie plants still producing.

In our part of the world, in our small part of Southern Ontario, we’ve had another surge in the number of virus cases, which doesn’t surprise anyone here. And I’m not complaining, because here in this county of Brant, and adding in the City of Brantford which is in the middle of the county and covered by the same Health unit, we have a population of 138,866 and 10 current cases of Covid 19. For those of you paying attention, in a previous essay I had cited the population as being 36,707. That’s the county, not the city. The city’s population is over 134,000. So therefore, mea culpa, I stand corrected.

Surges of the virus are relative, of course. We take this pandemic very seriously here. The premier of Ontario has announced new restrictions on private gatherings. Toronto especially has seen a real spike in cases lately, and he is prepared to do what has to be done in order to try and mitigate the spread. The limit now for private gatherings is 10 people inside, 25 outside. The fines for violation are hefty: a maximum of $10,000 for the organizers, and $750.00 for each of those attending.

David and I are both grateful for the Premier’s willingness to put the brakes on. Interestingly enough, this is a man we weren’t fans of before the pandemic. But for some people, events happen that bring out the leader in them; Premier Ford has done a good job, cooperating with the federal government (different political party), and seeing to it that the people under his aegis are taken care of.

David and I continue to remain very cautious in our “outings”. Face masks and hand washing and social distancing and yes, hand sanitizer as well. We go to the grocery store, and the market garden store, and sometimes, the pharmacy. We have not yet eaten out a restaurant, nor do we plan to in the foreseeable future. We have not objections to drive-through take-out, and we also have had a few things delivered.

Some things are just more important than going out.

Our second daughter is a nurse, and our daughter is a PSW (nurse’s aid). Our daughter, Jennifer, doesn’t have any contact with persons who’ve contracted Covid 19. All her clients are screened on an ongoing basis, and if there is a concern, those clients are not seen until the concern is cleared up.

Our second daughter mainly works on a forensic psychiatric ward, so she doesn’t deal with patients who have the virus, either. But she went for a Covid test on Monday, as she has been teaching medical students for the last week, and awoke on Monday not feeling well—sore throat and a runny nose. Fortunately, she tested negative. Sometimes cold symptoms mean you only have a cold.

We were ready to raise the drawbridge, as it were, if she had tested positive. We’ve done that before. Early last month our daughter learned that her former daughter-in-law had gone to a large weekend party. As a result, Jennifer denied herself time with her grandchildren. She monitored the situation and it was only after about a month that she spent time with her grandchildren again. As our Jenny has said, she has a responsibility to protect not only herself and us, but her clients as well. Most of them are older than we are, and with more risk factors.

Yes, we here in the Ashbury household take the Pandemic seriously. We understand that it is real—that we are not nearly important enough in the scheme of the world—us and our friends and our community—for the entire world to try and pull one over on us for unnatural and undefined purposes.

Nope, it’s just a real pandemic and our job is to do all we can to ensure that we do not get the disease and thereby spread it to anybody else. Not a terribly sexy goal in life, but it is reality—something none of us would ever have believed would one day become a shrinking resource.

Belief in reality, that is.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 September 16, 2020

Ah, the vagaries of the aging human when it comes to the art of remembering…anything.

I recall a time, must have been a good thirty years ago, when David and I were visiting his mother. She would have been about the same age I am now. On that day, she told us that she felt stupid. She held up a piece of paper. On it was her unsteady scrawl, “Phone Bill”. Then she said to us that she’d made herself a note a few days before to pay the phone bill. Then that morning, just before we arrived, she found her note, looked at it, and wondered who the hell Bill was, and why she needed to phone him.

To this day, those two words, “phone bill” have been a kind of a code between David and I as we have our own senior moments…moments when our memories tell us that they’re having a power brown out, and to check back later.

It’s not that there are a lot of those moments for either of us—yet. For me they happen a couple of times a week. Monday I had one, when I was making my morning coffee. I saw the soup pot on the stove and realized I needed to go over and turn it on to bring it to a slow simmer. When I got over to the stove I blinked and had to work hard to recall what I wanted to do there.

David has the same problem. He gets up from the sofa and heads out of the room, and then calls to me to ask me what it was he was going to fetch. I tease him when he gets back that he forgot two things: first, what he was going to get, and second, the fact that I can’t yell loud enough for him to hear me, because he didn’t put his hearing aid in.

Life changes as you age, and that’s no joke. I’ve sometimes said in these essays that aging is not for the faint of heart. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with the reality of getting older is to just try and adapt. There’s no sense in getting upset about what one can or cannot do any longer. That’s just the way it is. When I was in my forties, I could clean my entire house in one morning. Now I can do one thing a morning. Our daughter is here, and she’s in her early forties, and she can clean the entire house in one morning, and I let her. I still get a few things done on my own, and I still do most of the cooking. It’s as much effort now for me to do the few things I manage as it once was to do it all.

David having built those table gardens is another case in point when it comes to adapting. Instead of both of us grumbling about not being able to garden, this was a way of getting a little of that hobby back. Last night I went out and picked green beans for supper. No getting down on hands and knees required.

We’ve had a successful year of tomatoes and beans; the rest—well, frankly I knew the carrots and beets wouldn’t take. They should have been thinned, and they weren’t. We’re not sure why the Swiss Chard failed—it might have been something in the soil. We had one small green pepper, with three more still growing and three medium sized cucumbers. The zucchini squash? They were planted in the tomato box, (two plants of squash and please don’t ask me why he put them there) and while they bloomed, several times, there was never any squash that formed. I think that the bees couldn’t get in to pollinate, and the breeze didn’t touch them, protected from it by the tomatoes as they were.

Next season, we’ll be less ambitious with what we plant. A friend is planning to send me some beefsteak tomato seeds, and I am looking forward to planting those next year. I’ll start them out early, and in cowpots—we have a wonderful window in our living room with southern exposure. It did wonders for that old Yucca we had. I’m certain it will do well for those tomato seeds.

Also, next year David is planning to build one more table garden. This one will be a bit longer and narrower than the other three, but it will be deeper. In it, we’ll plant potatoes. He argued about getting seed potatoes and whether we could find any, when we first hit on the idea a couple of months ago. I just shook my head. At the time I had a bag of potatoes that had sprouted. That was what my mother often used. So to prove a point, I planted one. He then planted a few more.

On Monday, having seen a chipmunk digging in the vicinity of one of those potato plants, I went to investigate and found 2 potatoes. David dug around and found a few more. Not much of a potato harvest, enough for one meal. It was an experiment after all. I believe the Chippies got a few and had themselves a feast. But it’s all good. This year was a learning year. Next year has to be better, right?

I’ll add a caveat to that. It’ll be better, provided we don’t forget the lessons we learned this year—and memories rediscovered in the aftermath of mistakes made, this year.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 

 

September 9, 2020

Each day I take some time to cruise around social media because even though I should know better, I still do that little thing. Sometimes you find things posted online that just make you shake your head. It amazes me the things some people put out on the clothesline of public discourse for all to see. That practice gives an entirely new meaning to the term about airing one’s dirty laundry.

Despite that, I still turn to social media because it really has a great value these days. It is a good, socially distanced way to check up on friends, readers and even family members. It’s a good way to discover how everyone’s doing and feeling, and if there’s anything that needs my attention.

As you know, for reasons I have never understood completely, I feel compelled to do what I can to give virtual hugs and words of commiseration and/or encouragement. Life is hard, and sometimes it helps to know that it’s not just hard for you, it’s hard for most everyone, especially in this year of 2020.

Almost every day, there are people asking for prayers for loved ones who are ill, for those who are worried about the results of their latest Covid or other medical tests, or about pets who have departed. These are all tense and sometimes tragic events for the folks who are experiencing them, and I do take them seriously. I believe in the power of prayer.

I also love to give congratulations to those celebrating good news, because the truth is, we all could use a bit more good news in our lives.

There have been more prayers offered up lately for friends who have lost family members, or dear friends. There has been far too much death in recent weeks and months. That is sadly a sign of these times that we are all in, that we are all struggling with. I don’t have any magic methods of coping. We really are all in this together.

Clinging to a sense of humor has never been more difficult, nor more crucial. Fortunately, if you are in need of an emergency smile, there are still laughing baby videos on YouTube. Baby goat videos are good for a chuckle, too.

There seem to be a lot more sites lately that offer good, credible advice about how to cope through stressful times. One of the best things about the internet, especially in these days, is there are a lot of options to choose from, and in most cases that choosing can be done anonymously. The days of reaching out for help with stress being a taboo are long past. No one needs to know your business. If you need help, get help.

In a very real way, that’s what I do…I help people cope with the crap in their own lives by weaving stories that hold the reader’s attention and, for a couple of hours at least, lift them out of their every-day life. I’m grateful that I have the ability and the privilege do that, and that for those people who buy my books, the world I give them is a gentler place to visit. I don’t fool myself into believing that what I do is of great importance—but it is something, at least.

David is no longer quite as enamored of the road-building project beside our house as he was when it began. The paving company arrived last week, and in a very short period of time, laid the first layer of asphalt. Then, on Saturday morning, a two-person crew arrived to fix a mistake the pavers had made—they failed to raise the manhole covers, and the cover to the catch basin. Then, Sunday night a wave of intense thunderstorms with heavy rain rolled through our area…and rolled some of that asphalt and underlying roadbed down the hill.

David went out to inspect the damage and said that there were a couple of places where the newly laid surface was cracked and felt “wobbly” when he walked on it. Later that day, when the a team of men came to clean up some of the debris at the bottom of the road, he went out and told them about the state of the road, and their response really got him annoyed. They said those words that are all too common these days: “that’s not our job.”

He was out there again, earlier this morning talking to the job supervisor, and the man agreed that the pavers had done a horrible job. He had reported the problem “up the chain” and the powers that be decided just to lay more asphalt on top of the substandard first layer. This is a small piece of road, from the street behind us to the one we’re on, about the length of two city blocks.

David has been grumbling about pride of accomplishment and giving an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, and that nobody gives a damn anymore, and I just agree with him. He understands, as I do, that there are days and situations when you can make a difference, and days and situations when you know you can’t.

As we all await our new normal, there are some truths that are truths on whichever side of the great divide you find yourself: the times, they are a changing…and not all the changes are good ones.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 

September 2, 2020

Yesterday, as I often do, I went to the Weather Network online to have a look at the day’s forecast. It seemed a bit chilly, and I wondered if that was going to last for the day. I checked out the seven-day forecast, and sure enough Tuesday was going to heat up in the afternoon, into the eighties, and the next two days, according to the chart, called for high humidity. For example, looking ahead to today, it predicted a temperature of 77 that would feel like 93—and the same for Thursday.

But on Friday, and going forward, according to the chart, the temperatures will be much cooler—it will be 70 and feel that way. And then a headline on the website caught my eye: “A typhoon thousands of kilometres away will flip Ontario’s weather pattern on its head.”

Of course, I had to look. Apparently, the typhoon is tracking toward Korea, and is disrupting everything…and the result is that my little town here in Southern Ontario will have autumnal temperatures sooner than is normal. And what was the first thing I thought of as I was reading this article? I’ll tell you.

Let’s consider isolationism. Suppose I was to say, “I reject globalism. Only Canada!” That can be my opinion, and my desire, and as we all know, everyone is entitled to their own opinions and desires. The reality, though, is that life here in Canada can be affected by global jet steams and typhoons, hurricanes and even El Niño. Global influences are absolutely unavoidable.  

          

Opinion, or belief or even desire is not the same thing as truth or reality.

I can deny the relativity of a typhoon a world away near Korea; but my denial of it has nothing to do with the reality of what is. I can deny its relativity but that won’t change the drop in temperatures we’re about to experience. No man—or woman—is an island.

Years ago, if you had asked me, what one thing above all others do I hate more than anything else in this world, my answer would have been “lies”. That is still true today.

We’re not supposed to lie. Just like we’re not supposed to kill. I can hear a voice now! “Morgan, you simply cannot equate lying with murder!” My response is that I didn’t equate them. Someone Else had those two on the same list of ten—God’s top ten of what we ought not to do. Now, if you tell me that “bearing false witness against our neighbor” is not the same as lying, my response would be to take it up with the original Author of that list.

But I digress.

The movement to put one’s own country first isn’t about putting it first, it’s about isolationism. And isolationism is not natural. Yes, that’s my opinion. But wait, there’s more.

The hurricane that hits the south-eastern coast of the United States, or pounds the Gulf coast, originates off the coast of Africa; the dust storm that envelops the Saharan desert in Africa clouds the skies over Florida, the Caribbean and South America. And this year it reached up toward the Midwest.

The explosion of the volcanic island of Krakatoa in Indonesia was heard in Perth, Australia and the entire globe was affected by the ensuing Tsunami and the chilling of global temperatures.

A new virus springs into being in Wuhan, China, and the entire world is infected—with the possible exception of American Samoa. As of July 27, 2020, they still had no cases.

Isolationism is not natural. What is natural, is that this is one world, and what happens on the other side of it from us can affect us. If being connected, then is natural, could it not be said that being isolated is unnatural?

Well, I just made that argument, briefly yes, but not unartfully, in my opinion. And I didn’t even remind everyone that viewed from space, our planet has no borders. I guess that means that borders are unnatural as well, but that is another discussion.

There is yet one more way that I could frame this argument which is, perhaps, more whimsical, but no less true.

We are all made of star-stuff. All of us, every one of us. We have all been created by the same Creator. I happen to believe that we are all beautiful, all special, all talented, each of us in our own way. And that if one of us is treated unjustly, then we all are treated unjustly.

Go ahead and call me naïve. I will wear that label, and proudly. And I will hope and pray that in the coming months, more people will believe as I believe and do what must be done to take a big whopping chunk out of cruelty, injustice, greed, and yes, the lies that are plaguing our 21^st century day-to-day lives.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury