by Robert LaFrance
That first snowstorm is always a shock, isn’t it? My friend Henri Henry from out back of Bath says he can smell Florida from where he is. Henri owns a garage.
He said that people started phoning as soon as the forecast came up on the Weather Channel. After the weather person had given the weather report and then the forecast for every street corner in Toronto, she said: “And it looks like the Maritimes are going to have some snow too.” By the time the word ‘too’ emerged from between her capped teeth, Henri’s phone was ringing.
“I figure I have made enough money now to get me to Richmond, Virginia,” he told me Saturday evening down at the club. All day Friday and all that day he had been putting on snowtread tires. “The thing is, most people had perfectly good all-season radials and they had no need to panic. Unfortunately, on short notice like that, I have to charge double. I also plan to stay open on the Sabbath, which I would say should get me to southern Georgia. By Monday evening I will have made enough money to get me into the Day’s Inn Motel in Kissimmee, Florida for a week.”
Henri is very cynical, I find. I wish I’d thought of buying a garage instead of planting an orchard, long since abandoned as a money-making project. If I were still working at that, my profit MAY have gotten me to Fort Fairfield, Maine, or possibly Mars Hill.
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Fall is supposed to be the time when you relax, sit back, and contemplate a winter of rest and watching reruns of shows that weren't good enough for you to watch when they were on the first time back in the 1960s, but now that they're ‘nostalgia’. All my stovewood is supposed to be piled and drying for winter, the house is supposed to be winterized (if that's a verb), winter clothes should have come out of the closet, so to speak, and all should be relaxed and ready for the season about to hit.
Did I leave you with the impression I had done all those winter preparations? Guess what?
There are three cords of stovewood relaxing outside the shed window, the oil tank is gasping for a refill, and I have yet to put away a leaf rake or lawn mower. I did have good intentions about the wood, but you know what the road to hell is paved with. Other signs of the season: Baseball is over and the Cards won the “World” (Translation: U.S.) Series, the soccer players still playing all have goose bumps, and the avalanche of Christmas gadgets has begun falling on us.
The mighty (bird) hunters are blasting away as if they were moving (on four-wheelers) toward Hanoi, halfton loads of stovewood go by here hourly, my apples are picked for the year – by the bears, who leave their calling cards - and I have put manure on my garden, as well as my column you are thinking.
Fall is okay, it’s what comes next that I dread.
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Every week I read - via the Internet - a certain British magazine that rarely fails to have a whole whack of interesting items such as this: "A woman who picked up a bunch of bananas in Birmingham was stung by a scorpion".
Could this sort of thing happen here? I'm advising all food consumers in Victoria County to avoid picking up bunches of bananas. We must take all precautions to avoid scorpion stings, on our constant guard. But who can blame the little critters for wanting a change in scenery? It’s a fact that scorpions like democracies.
Still talking about wild creatures, mating season takes its toll on raccoons, skunks, moose, deer, and rabbits, does it not? The roads are littered with their remains. As they say on the Red Green Show, these animals have already been grilled, so they don't even need to be cooked. Ask any of the ravens feasting out there on the highway. Last Tuesday I drove to Woodstock for the annual Earthworm Festival and as I drove near the community called Connell I noted the corpses of: A raccoon, a skunk, a rabbit, a cat, a rabbit, a skunk, a raccoon and a pheasant. It is brutal in Carleton County.
-end-
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