For Blackfly Gazette May 16/18
NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY
No going to Mars for this puppy!
by Robert LaFrance
Sitting in
my easy chair and watching television after a 2-hour brawl with my garden, I am
hearing an astronaut tell an interviewer that she would like to be among the
first to travel to Mars.
I recovered
quickly enough to avoid dropping my mid-afternoon snack (two chicken
drumsticks, a big bag of Storm Chips and a big piece of homemade bread with
banana) but I was still flabbergasted – not to mention gobsmacked. Why would
anyone in her right mind want to take a 7-month space journey with almost zero
chance of returning? I phoned my friend the Perfessor.
“Some
people are crazy, Bob,” he said. “They will do anything to get their names in
the newspaper. Quite often it’s for the wrong reason – a suicide bomber is an
example of that – but the main thing is fame or even infamy.”
As usual,
the Perfessor was spot on, as they say in Liverpool. I looked in the mirror and
asked the guy there what he thought about the idea of my getting in a zillion
dollar spacecraft and sitting with my bum on top of enough explosive material
to obliterate Minto and Jemseg.
“Don’t do
it, Bob,” said my mirror. “You just turned seventy; don’t ruin it. If you want
to be turned into space dust, that’s one thing, but the problem is you will be
taking me with you and I have plans for this weekend.”
******************
Like many
New Brunswickers, I went fiddleheading last weekend after the weather had been
sunny for several days, meaning the ferns should be starting to show their
faces (at least their heads).
I drove
down to a little brook near here – I am not telling where – and I found the
same thing I had found the first times I went out in 2017, 2016 and other
years: I had waited too long. Three-quarters of them had grown out. I picked
for half an hour and seemed to be doing well – my cloth bag was doing nicely I
thought – until I got home and found only 81 fiddleheads. The rest had escaped
through a hole in the bottom of the bag.
That was
enough for supper though, although my (long-suffering) wife and I had to count
every one to make sure it was all fair. Even then, she had 41 fiddleheads and I
only had 40.
Refusing to
tell where a person finds fiddleheads is a long-time tradition. I grew up in
Tilley, where people have been known to indulge in fistfights over their
fiddlehead zones. On one occasion two of the St. Peter brothers and two
LaFrance brothers chased each other through the poplar woods for an hour until they
were all exhausted and forgot why they were mad at each other.
After the
recent flooding in the lower St. John River Valley, we the consumers were
warned not to eat fiddleheads from that area and that was another example of
the hidden costs of such a spring freshet. I know people in Maugerville who had
sold thousands of dollars of fiddleheads every spring and this ban, or
‘suggestion’, must be costing them big-time.
The first brilliant thing that
came to my mind was: “Geez, all people have to do is wash the fiddleheads and
once they are boiled for twenty minutes all will be well” but for the first
time in my life I was wrong. A government website listed the number of extra
items that might have been in that backed-up water: sewerage, toxic sprays from
farms and businesses near the river and any number of things I wouldn’t want to
take home to meet my mother. As the Russians might say: “Nyet to that,
tovarich!”
******************
This spring I have ordered from
no fewer than five seed companies, all located in eastern Canada; some of the
companies have an interesting shipping policy.
One company, that shall go
nameless, said there would be free shipping for any order over $30, a discount
of 10% on all orders over $80 and a $25 bonus on all orders over $100.
I ordered $101 worth of garden
seed, which, I assumed, meant that I would get that all for $68.40 once that
10% discount and the $25 bonus were taken off.
The company emailed me two days
later to say I didn’t qualify for that $25 bonus because that took my total
down to $76, which meant I also didn’t qualify for the 10% discount. Are you
with me so far? I’m not sure I am.
-end-
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