a summer song

work crew

The work crew was out yesterday, easing out the bumpy parts at the bottom of our driveway. They’d eaten blueberry pancakes and bacon and had energy to spare.

Trees swayin’ in the summer breeze
Showin’ off their silver leaves
As we walked by

Later in the morning we drove to Egmont and some played football on the field. Then the Egmont Heritage Centre, one of our favourite small museums. It’s surrounded by old logging equipment, a vintage fire engine, a Pelton wheel, and filled with exhibits of antique Easthope engines, chainsaws, fishing floats, albums detailing the families of Egmont, Indigneous and other, the fascinating history of Doriston, and a bench where kids can handle wrenches and other tools probably unfamiliar to them. Forrest, who worked at the Canadian Museum of History for 4 years, then the City of Ottawa Museums, and is now a curator at Library and Archives Canada, observed that the Egmont Heritage Centre bats well above average for display and interest.

Last night we ate barbecued lamb and garden eggplants, green pie made with kale, lambs quarters, chickweed, some miner’s lettuce, and arugula, yoghourt green with dill and laden with garlic, and a bright salad of garden tomatoes and cucumbers. After the kids were in bed, we talked in the kitchen, drinking little thimbles of damson gin.

Sweet sleepy warmth of summer nights
Gazing at the distant lights
In the starry sky

Tonight it’s steak and spot prawns and I’ll take the kids to dig some red potatoes. Just now they’re getting ready to walk over to the Iris Griffith Centre with their parents who knew Iris well (you can read about Iris in this excellent book) and were once babysat by her while her husband Billy (who donated the Easthopes to the Egmont Museum) and I attended a meeting when we were on the board of the Pender Harbour Health Centre. When they woke the next morning, they were so eager to tell me that Iris could juggle! (Could she ever!)

in the old orchard

Tomorrow everyone leaves, apart from Grandad John and me. We’ll clean the house and put things back in place and sit in the quiet and wonder where the weeks went.

They say that all good things must end some day
Autumn leaves must fall
But don’t you know that it hurts me so
To say goodbye to you
Wish you didn’t have to go

The summer isn’t over, of course. There’s still the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival coming up and all sorts of other things to fill the days and weeks. But this? The sound of children shrieking and crying, their parents soothing and coaxing, all of us laughing at dinner? It’s felt like everything.