Fire?!?

There's nothing more disconcerting than seeing fire trucks blocking your street entrance when you arrive home!

Fortunately, my panic was short-lived... They were leaving. As I drove down the street, I could see no damage.

A wrong turn? A false alarm?

I never did find out if there had been a 9-1-1 call, or if they had simply taken a wrong turn up our dead-end street.

Appreciating... Snow!

I'm really no fan of winter.

To enjoy winters in Canada, you really need to enjoy winter sports, I used to tell my immigrant students, who often had never seen snow.

Then I'd urge them to learn to skate or ski.

Unfortunately I do neither - and winter walking (on ice) is risky business for me.

But I do have a new appreciation for snow.

California has had a drought for several years now. I was there a few weeks ago, just after a major rain storm had hit.

Does that end the drought? I asked.

No... Unfortunately, heavy rain on hard dry ground, tends to wash away, I was told.

But snow - water suspended in frosty flakes and ice crystals - melts slowly, allowing the water to slowly penetrate the soil. Amazing!

I still may not enjoy winter walking - but I view snow a little differently now!

Preparing to Become a Grandma...

In a few week's time, I'm expecting my first grandchild! This stage of life has been a while in coming. One of my childhood friends (two years older than me) is a great-grandmother twice over!

I'm not sure what grandparents do, apart from love their grandchildren... I guess I'll find out soon enough. But recently the nesting instinct hit me... and I headed out to shop! That's always fun!

Talking to a few first-time grandmothers-to-be, I've discovered that there are now courses on grandparenting, the goal being to bring the older generation (that must be me!) up to speed on the 21st century way of doing things.

Babies are laid on their backs now, instead of their tummies. Baby car seats now have expiry dates...

Do we really need a course?! My three survived childhood. Now that they're adults, we still enjoy hanging out together.

Enjoying your children - isn't that the goal of parenthood, after all?

"Geography" Happens

In my first year at university in Vancouver, my favorite course was an introduction to "physical geography." I found it fascinating to discover how rivers meander over time, as they carry silt downstream, depositing soil at turns in the river, obliterating sharp curves, eventually depositing the remaining silt at the mouth of the river, forming fertile deltas.

That's how the Vancouver delta was formed, the rich farmland at the foot of the mountains, we were told. The geography was all around us. It was amazing to see what happened over long periods of time.

Then mid-way through that school year, after our Christmas break, a landslide obliterated part of the highway between my hometown of Kelowna, BC and Vancouver, where I was now studying. In fact, I had traveled that highway just a few days before. Now that stretch of the road was impassable. (Eventually it was re-built around the slide.) Again, our geography instructor explained how a mudslide like this could happen, showing us that geographical change sometimes occurs very quickly.

I thought of this recently when reading about a spring landslide that occurred a few weeks ago not far from Ottawa. On our recent trip to Arnprior, as we were admiring the river view from a park, a stranger commented on how muddy the Ottawa River looked.

Part of it was blue - but a brownish stream ran right through the middle.

I've never seen it like that before, he told us. We assumed he was a local.

A few days later, Terry pointed to a story in the Ottawa Sun, one of our local papers.

Here's the cause of all that mud in the Ottawa River, he said. A large landslide had deposited a hillside into one of the rivers that flows into the Ottawa River, blocking part of its flow. Ten hectares of land had been washed right into the river, causing local flooding.

The mud we had seen in the Ottawa River had originated  in that washed-out hillside. Again, in a brief moment, geography had changed!

Some Thoughts on "Sabbath"

Living in Jerusalem in my 20's made me more keenly aware of keeping the "Sabbath" day of rest than all my years growing up in Canada before "Sunday shopping" became the norm.

During my growing up years, few if any businesses, including restaurants, were open. In Jerusalem, things were taken a step farther: no buses ran on the Jewish Sabbath. No businesses in the Jewish part of town were open. If you drove your car there, you risked having stones thrown at you in protest. Resting on the Sabbath was taken very seriously.

Over the years, I have thought a lot about how I should be spending my weekly "seventh day of rest" mentioned in the 10 commandments. In my Sunday School years, we teenagers discussed the modern implications of trying to keep the Sabbath: Should we be going to the beach on Sunday? What about sports? 

"Keeping the Sabbath" isn't mentioned much in Christian circles anymore, but it is one of the spiritual practices mentioned in the book, An Altar in the World, which I read with great interest during Lent. Barbara Brown Taylor widens the discussion of Sabbath by reflecting on how, by not resting, we have changed our world. She reminds us that resting on the seventh not only refers to the seventh day - but also the whole seventh year - when the land was to lie fallow (with laborers taking a sabbatical rest as well)!

I found many of her observations very interesting. Here are a few:

There is no talking about the loss of the Sabbath... without also talking about the rise of consumerism...

Where there is money to be made, there is no rest for the land, nor for those who live on it...

In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch [and resting on the Sabbath]... Each year's harvest must be bigger than the last...

Sabbath is not only God's gift to those who have voices to say how tired they are; Sabbath is also God's gift to the tired fields... the tired land.

Spring Visit to Arnprior

I enjoy the convenience of living in the city - but from time to time, I long to get out for a change of scene.

A week or so ago (before our last big snow storm) Terry and I headed for a country drive.

In some places, there was still a bit of snow.

We ended up in Arnprior, a beautiful historic town less than an hour away.

It's on the Ottawa River, which separates Ontario and Quebec. The river is wide here - in summer, a ferry crosses not far from here.

It also seemed a little muddy... Spring run off?

Some winters, the river freezes over - but not this year. The day we were there, most of the ice had melted, but we could still see some, floating near the shore.

One of the most impressive sites in the town is the hydro dam, built on the Madawaska River (which drains into the Ottawa River)

We stopped to watch and marvel at the powerful surge of water flowing over the dam, now that the snow was melting.

Then we took a walk along the shore.

The air was still chilly, so we drove down historic main street, stopping for coffee in a cute cafe...

It's attached to a book store...

... and a gift shop.

No trip to Arnprior is complete without a stop at Wes's French fry stand.

That's all they make - and they do a good job! Customers come from miles. There was a line up the whole time we were there!

April Snow

All the snow in our yard had melted...

I was enjoying our first spring flowers.

(They're called "helleborus" and they're amazing! They bloom as soon as the snow disappears. I only wish they wouldn't face downwards.)

Then, two days ago, an early April snowstorm dropped a pile of snow on our area.

Our little white flowers are now covered in snow! No protection for our car, either! Terry took down the plastic cover one windy day a week or so ago. He didn't want our garage to fly away!

The upside of it all? The snow shouldn't be here for long. With above-freezing temperatures, within a few days, it will hopefully all be gone.