by
Robert LaFrance
Be warned: I’ve been thinking again.
Why is it that when I was growing up, the ‘old
fellers’ knew everything about everything, and now here I am, an old feller,
and I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’?
Grampy even had his own way of defining
specific words. The word ‘foresight’ meant: “When you go to the outhouse and
check before you sit down whether there’s an Eaton’s catalogue there.” He was the foreman of forensic
definitions.
I did warn you.
As I write these immortal lines, it
is one of those wonderful late spring days that defy description by either
poetry or prose and I should be out in the garden planting carrots. I’ve had
peas, lettuce, radish, potatoes and tomatoes planted in my garden for weeks
now, but I always dread planting carrots because I have to actually work and
make raised beds, and later on I have to thin them. I looked all over for those
seed tapes everybody else seems to be able to find, but no furniture store had
them.
Fiddlehead season – at least down
along Bubie Brook near here – is over for 2012, as is maple syrup season of
course, but the rhubarb (spring tonic) is ‘just a-jumpin’ outta the ground’ as
Uncle Harry says. My wife made a rhubarb crisp the first thing and I ate all of
it in the first sitting. They say rhubarb is good for the joints and if so, I
should be ready to play soccer at a high level, like on Real Madrid.
Apparently this is also a good time
of year for shingling roofs. Last week a crew descended on our house and
shingled everything in sight – the porch, the shed, the back side of the
kitchen part of the house. I had to tie the dog Kezman out in the orchard so
they wouldn’t start on him. They were a fast bunch; the area they shingled was
about 10,000 square metres and I think they were finished in 26 minutes. Back
in the 1970s I and a bunch of other Tilley gangsters helped the late Byron
Paris shingle his garage roof and it took us just a bit less than two weeks.
Our wages were nil, but our beer bill was…large. As they say on the Red Green
Show: “In the long run, volunteers can be the most expensive construction
workers you can hire”. I believe Red was referring to the ones who helped him
shingle HIS garage.
Still on the subject of volunteers –
good ones this time – I can’t help but be amazed at the thousands of hours
people have donated their time to helping get the village of Perth-Andover back
to rights. And it WILL be back. Meanwhile, I have information that al-Qaeda (of
9-11 fame) has been hired to do something useful for a change – blow Beechwood
Dam into the middle of next century. No, that’s not far enough; how about into
the year 2039?
Just kidding of course, but
Beechwood Dam is indeed the baby that needs to be thrown out with the
bathwater, or in this case floodwater. It’s almost amusing to see and hear the
reaction of NB Power and government officials when someone suggests that
Beechwood Dam caused the 2012 flood, not to mention the floods of 1976, 1987,
and 1993. Or should I use the word ‘event’ as the bureaucrats are so fond of
saying?
I see the point though; if I had
been a Perth-Andover homeowner two months ago and saw the water reach up to the
doorknobs of my living room, it would indeed be a comfort to know that I wasn’t
being flooded, I was being ‘evented’. They say that water from an event is much
less destructive than water from a flood.
Back to the reactions I mentioned:
NB Power and government say they are absolutely certain that Beechwood Dam
didn’t have any impact on the flood. As Grampy would have said: “Yeah, but on
the other hand, she wore a glove.”
I do not have even a vague idea what
that meant, but I am guessing that a healthy dose of scepticism was involved
there somewhere. For a person who purports to be an intelligent human being to
stand or sit in front of a microphone and say that Beechwood Dam wasn’t a
factor in the floods would be the same as saying that a certain iceberg had no
effect on the fate of the Titanic.
-end-
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