Trying hard to keep a routine, but sometimes it slips away – and oh, I missed lunch. I am doing OK. How are you? The garden is under construction and the sewing machine has been rehabilitated to make cloth masks and my English muffin recipe is in high demand! Bread is filling ovens all over the Gumboot Nation, and as I rub my belly, I can think of another curve I need to flatten.
An important new resource for our seniors and those who want to help is BC211. Dial 211 on your phone, or see the online version at www.bc211.ca – it’s chock-a-block with great help for those in need. Administered by the United Way, it compiles all the separate resources into one location.
I am trying also to live in the real world because I have nearly gotten to a “Tron” level of online existence. I played cards with my sister in Vancouver and my brother in Cumberland a couple of nights ago, and it was a real hoot! Zoom meetings and ironing out the tech glitches for the web-based music jamming sites has taken an appreciable amount of my waking hours. And I am nearly done my Netflix series and on the lookout for the next one. I better get some of that gorgeous sunshine; the vitamin D boosts our immune system, I am told.
I will share with you one of the most terrifying moments in my life. I went back to New Brunswick about 10 years ago for a family reunion. My mother, aunt Lydia and uncle Tony were the last of 11 kids left at this point, so we gathered to honour them and their parents and siblings. I was staying in a trailer on my late uncle Stan’s property in Richardsville just beside where the CNR tracks cross the 134. Every couple of nights about 11 o’clock, a train would approach the level crossing at a good clip and let rip with the air horn. After an exhausting day of herding the cats that are my family on and off a lobster boat over to the island my mom was born on, I collapsed into the bed in the trailer. I remember the troubling dream of the trailer being on the tracks and being paralyzed, unable to do anything with the train barrelling down on me! I somehow yanked myself awake only to realize that the train was real, it was blasting its horn and it was close! I threw open the trailer door in a panic to escape and was confronted by the light of what I could only assume was the 3,000 tons of freight train about to squash me like a bug. Full panic mode! Then the horn passed behind me and the light revealed itself as a floodlight on the front of the house. As the train rumbled on to Campbellton, I could still hear my heart over the clackity-clack of the steel wheels.
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