Small-town politics with a friendly smile

“Downtown” Queensborough was not immune from the election signs that have blanketed the countryside for the past two or three months. Happily, by the end of the day yesterday – the day after the municipal election – they were pretty much all gone. As it happens, every candidate whose sign is in this picture, which I took a month ago, was elected on Monday night. Congratulations to them!

Well, Ontario’s municipal elections are finally over. Yesterday morning as I was driving to work, I saw a man collecting election signs from the side of the road and loading them into his pickup truck, and I had to restrain myself from getting out of the car and racing up to shake his hand in gratitude. I think I speak for pretty much everybody when I say that after what seemed liked six months of looking at those signs all along the highways and byways of pretty Hastings County, I was thoroughly sick of them.

And then late this afternoon I had another very pleasant post-election experience, this one even more pleasant because it was unexpected. There I was in the fading daylight, raking up the leaves from one section of the Manse’s yard, when an unfamiliar pickup truck (I think I know all the pickup trucks in Queensborough by now) stopped in front of the house and a young man got out and headed toward me. I didn’t recognize him from a distance, but when he said, “Hi, Katherine!” I realized it was newly elected Municipality of Tweed Councillor Jamie DeMarsh. He’d driven up to Queensborough from Tweed, where he owns a small business, to say thank you to the voters!

People, I have to tell you that’s a first for me. Usually politicians, or would-be politicians, are all over you when they’re running for office, what with the telephone calls and the door knocking and whatnot. But to come around to the relatively small number of voters in our little hamlet, right after the election, and say thanks in person? How nice is that?

Brand-new Municipality of Tweed Councillor Jamie DeMarsh. I could tell from my conversation with him today that he is excited about his new responsibilities and is raring to get at the job.

Jamie and I had met at the recent all-candidates evening held at the Queensborough Community Centre, which I wrote about here. As I told him this evening, he spoke very well that night, and I am pretty sure picked up a few votes thanks to his obvious interest in the issues that matter to the people of our little hamlet, which is a very small part of what I like to refer to as the Greater Tweed Area. This evening he told me he’d been sick that night with a really bad cold, which to my mind made his performance all the more impressive.

We moved on from that to a fresh discussion about some of the issues that matter to the people of Queensborough. What a treat it was to have the ear of one of our municipal representatives! Right there on my front lawn!

Jamie told me he is determined to be an accessible councillor, and will make visits regularly to our hamlet and the others (Stoco, Marlbank, Thomasburg, Actinolite) in the larger municipal area to see what’s on voters’ minds and stay in touch.

At the end of our 15-minute conversation – when I had to get back to my leaf pile because it was getting dark – I was, let me tell you, feeling pretty darn good about rural politics. About one of my elected councillors knowing me by name, knowing the local issues that matter to me – and taking the trouble to stop by and say thanks. And obviously when he stopped by he didn’t even know whether I had voted for him.

But Jamie, I’ll let you in on a secret: I did. I was impressed by what you had to say at our all-candidates night – and I’m even more impressed now. Here’s to a good four years of municipal governance, with our politicians staying in touch with the people they represent!

The next big thing: our very own all-candidates night

Well! Now that the big annual St. Andrew’s United Church Turkey Supper has come and gone and we’ve all been well fed once again, it’s time to turn to the next major event coming Queensborough‘s way. That would, of course, be the all-candidates night this coming Monday, Oct. 6.

For those readers who live outside Ontario, let me explain that 2014 is a municipal-election year in this province – we have them every four years – and the election is taking place Monday, Oct. 27. (Here is a useful primer on Ontario municipal government and elections, courtesy of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.)

Now, as a journalist who spent many years covering municipal politics in Ontario, I can tell you with assurance that oftentimes municipal elections don’t attract much interest. For whatever reason, this year is different – or at least it is in our part of Eastern Ontario. For the past many months – since way before you’d expect people to be even thinking about this stuff – I’ve overheard and been involved in conversations with ordinary people about who might run for office and what issues need to be tackled. This extraordinary level of interest isn’t just being shown here in the GTA (Greater Tweed Area) of which Queensborough is a part; it’s also happening in Centre Hastings (a fancy name for the village of Madoc and the township to the south of it, Huntingdon), in Belleville (where there are seven candidates for mayor alone) – why, even in sleepy little Madoc Township right next to us here in Queensborough, all kinds of people have stepped up to challenge the incumbents.

Although our mayor, Jo-Anne Albert, has been acclaimed because no one challenged her, the race here in the Municipality of Tweed is not short of entrants. And that’s where the all-candidates night comes in.

Even our quiet little hamlet is awash in campaign signs, as you can see here at the main intersection in “downtown” Queensborough.

From 7 to 9 p.m. this coming Monday, the candidates are invited to come to the Queensborough Community Centre (our historic former one-room schoolhouse), say their piece, and more to the point answer the questions that we local residents have for them as we try to reach a decision on whom to cast our votes for.

I am tickled that this has been organized in Queensborough (no thanks to me, by the way, though you can be sure I’ll be in the audience). It’s one of only two all-candidates nights to have been set up throughout this whole sprawling municipality, which includes the village of Tweed (where the other all-candidates night is taking place even as I write this) and the townships of Elzevir (that’s us here in Queensborough), Grimsthorpe and Hungerford (where other hamlets, including Stoco, Marlbank and Thomasburg are located). I think it is outstanding that little Queensborough should show such interest in municipal matters.

As well it should! Because here in our little hamlet, we often feel estranged from the politicians and the decisions they make way off there in “urban” Tweed. We wonder whether we’re getting the attention we deserve from those politicians (hey, we pay taxes too!), or whether they take us into consideration when making decisions. (Why, for instance, couldn’t the politicians work out a cost- and service-sharing arrangement with next-door Madoc Township so that the Madoc Township truck that picks up curbside garbage and recyclables – and that drives right through Queensborough on its route – could pick up ours too? Instead, if we have trash and recycling to get rid of [and who doesn’t?] we have to drive 15 miles to the Stoco dump on the far side of Tweed, burning up precious fossil fuels [not to mention precious time] in doing so. That’s kooky!)

Anyway. I expect there’ll be a good turnout and some lively discussion, and I am wholeheartedly looking forward to it. I hope to see lots of fellow voters there!

Yes, I can (occasionally) throw old things out.

I post this photo only to show those of you who’ve been reading this blog long enough (or know me well enough) to suspect that I am a hoarder of things from my past. Sure, I’ll grant you that I tend to keep stuff that I think might be of interest at some point in the future, or that holds sentimental value for me. And yes, there are times when it does seem like our household has a few too many such things in it.

But I can throw things away! Sometimes. Witness our rusty, squeaky old mailbox, shown here just after Raymond and I had deposited it at the Tweed dump (which is actually in Stoco) and just before we drove off. I mean, talk about sentimental value! I am pretty sure this was the mailbox my father erected way back in the days when my family lived at the Manse and I was growing up here. That it’s the very mailbox that we kids had to shovel out whenever there was a snowfall, to make sure the mailman could get at it. And there’s not only the long-ago sentimental value; there’s also the fact that this is the mailbox that, in early 2012, first told the world (or Queensborough, at least) that Katherine Sedgwick and Raymond Brassard were the proud new owners of the Manse.

But like I said, the mailbox was pretty rusty and squeaky; when we opened it to check the mail I’m pretty sure everybody in Queensborough could hear it. And so we decided we should get a new one, and we did. And it too now bears the names Sedgwick/Brassard so that the world knows where we live.

The old one sat in the Manse’s back porch for many months, but about a month ago we decided its time had come. And off it went to the dump.

I am very proud of myself for letting it go, and thus clearing out the space it occupied. There’s a lot more of that kind of thing that needs to be done around here.

Do I regret it?

Of course I do. But only a little bit.

Tell us what you know about historic Thomasburg

The Slush General Store, which Carol Martin tells me was a longtime landmark in the hamlet of Thomasburg. The building is still standing, and is now a private home. Readers: might you have any other historic photos of Thomasburg? (Photo courtesy of Carol Martin)

Thomasburg, as you may or may not know, is one of five hamlets in the municipality of Tweed (or, as I like to call it, the Greater Tweed Area) – the others being Queensborough (of course), Actinolite, Stoco and Marlbank. All are tiny and pretty, though you can readily guess which of them is closest to my heart. Until very recently, Thomasburg was the hamlet I was least familiar with; I’d heard about it all the years I lived in Queensborough as a kid, back in the 1960s and early ’70s, but had never actually been there. One recent sunny early-summer day, though, Raymond and I made an excursion down Highway 37 south of the village of Tweed to Thomasburg and poked around it a bit.

It’s a hamlet chock-full of interesting old buildings, including some very handsome 19th-century homes. A couple are so large as to suggest that they once served as hotels – a reminder of the long-ago days when a trip from, say, Belleville north to Tweed was a long and arduous affair, and people might have needed to stop for refreshment or, if it were late in the day, for the night.

One thing we agreed during our little tour around Thomasburg was that it would have been helpful had there been some sort of a sign, or brochures available at a central location, giving a bit of the history of what is clearly a historic little place, and perhaps explaining what some of the buildings used to be. And now, lo and behold, I have discovered – thanks to correspondent Carol Martin, who lives in Thomasburg – that the Thomasburg Beautification Committee is engaged in the project of erecting just such a marker at the Thomasburg Hall, with a short text about the hamlet’s history that Carol is writing, and some historic photographs. How great is that?

Now here’s where you come in, readers: the Thomasburg Beautification Committee has been able to unearth a few vintage photographs of the hamlet (thanks to the Tweed and Area Heritage Centre, and they’ve also checked with the Hastings County Historical Society), but they would love to have some more. So: do any of you out there by any chance have any old photos of that pretty little hamlet? Or do you know anyone, or any organization, that would? If so, Carol would love to hear from you at cjmartin.thomasburg@gmail.com.

And my thanks (and Carol’s)  in advance if you can help out with this excellent project that preserves and celebrates the history of one of the lovely little corners of Hastings County!

That is one shiny trailer hitch.

I bet you wish you had a nice shiny new trailer hitch like Raymond (Red Truck Ray) now has on his red truck. Next step: acquiring the trailer to go with it.

Okay, so we haven’t got the trailer for Raymond’s red truck yet. We still have trailer envy (I wrote about that here), which will get much worse the next time we need to take a big load of stuff (bags of yard rakings, for instance) to the Tweed municipal dump at Stoco. That said, neighbours have been kind enough to offer to loan us their trailer if we need it, and since it seems like everyone in Queensborough – except us – has a trailer, we should be just fine for that dump trip.

But eventually we will get a trailer of our own, and then won’t we be sitting pretty? And meantime, at least Raymond has taken the first step, which was to acquire this nice shiny trailer hitch from our friend and neighbour Chuck. Because Chuck just happened to have a spare trailer hitch on hand. That’s the kind of thing people just have in Queensborough. Which I happen to think is delightful. Not to mention convenient for neighbours needing trailer hitches.

 

 

Neighbours helping neighbours

A scene showing all the debris I raked up from one small section of the Manse’s yard. When we were finished, we had 20 of the big paper bags like you see in the photo full to overflowing. And now all that material has a new home!

We got an email from our Queensborough friend and neighbour Chuck late last week that absolutely made my day. It was just the perfect example of how people in a small community, where everyone knows everyone else, help each other out and figure out ways to do things that are mutually beneficial.

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts, like here and here, Raymond and I worked hard during our last visit to the Manse to get all the leaves and other fall/winter detritus raked up from our big yard so that it would be all set for when it’s time to start mowing the grass. And as I wrote here, our ending up with 20 big bags of yard waste stowed in the garage awakened a deep longing in me (and, I think, in Raymond too) for a trailer to hitch onto the back of his red truck. That way we would have been able to dispose of it all in one big dump run, rather than having to cover the not-insignificant distance between Queensborough and the Municipality of Tweed‘s dump near the hamlet of Stoco two or more times. But we don’t (yet) have that trailer, so multiple fossil-fuel-burning dump trips loomed.

But not any more!

Chuck was emailing to tell us that another neighbour is looking to collect all the yard waste he can to fill in some low, water-logged areas in his own yard. Could he have ours?

Well, he most certainly could! And not only that: Chuck volunteered to arrange to get the 20 bags out of our garage and over to our neighbour. So the next time we get to the Manse, it’ll all be gone.

I just love that: one household’s waste turned into another household’s useful stuff. All thanks to conversation and co-operation among Queensborough neighbours.

A little history for a rainy day

Grey skies over the Manse early this morning – which meant it would have been a great day for staying inside and doing some historical research on Queensborough.

As you can see from my photo, it was an overcast (with gusts to drizzly) morning at the Manse today. And with more rain in the forecast, it would have been a perfect day to curl up in front of our cranberry-red electric fireplace with my treasured copy of the history book Times to Remember in Elzevir Township and do some research for a project I have volunteered to help with: the creation of a flyer outlining a walking tour that will give visitors to Queensborough information about its history and some of its buildings.

Instead, more than a little regretful that our week’s vacation at the Manse had come to an end, Raymond and I loaded up the car and headed back to Montreal, work, and non-Manse life. (But at least there were two cats at the end of the road! As I have mentioned before, the one thing the Manse is sorely in need of – aside from a large renovation, that is – is cats.)

Anyway, back to the historical research and the flyer, a project that I am quite excited about. So many people come through our pretty little hamlet – whether by car, bicycle, kayak, motorcycle, ATV or snowmobile – and stop and admire it, but at the moment there is no source of printed information for them to get answers to questions they surely have, like: How old is this place? Why do I see so many church steeples? What are those two big rambling buildings in the centre of town? (They are the former general stores, one of them also a former tavern and hostelry.) What’s the story on the old wooden building practically overhanging the river and waterfall? (It was a grist mill, and there used to be a very busy sawmill right beside it, both once owned by the man considered to be the founder of Queensborough.) Am I the first person to be struck by what great material there is around here for paintings and photographs? (Far from it. Queensborough has long been an inspiration for artists.)

It could also answer questions that people would never think of, such as: Did Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada’s first prime minister) once own several pieces of land in Queensborough? (Why, yes! Yes he did. Glad you asked.)

A related project that I also think is a splendid idea, and for which I have also volunteered to help with the text, is a marker at the centre of town, down by the picturesque Black River, outlining a little bit of Queensborough’s history. That way all those who stop to admire (and often photograph) the village will get some sense of the past and present of what they are seeing. The need for something like this was reinforced in my mind this past week, when Raymond and I did some touring around rural Hastings County. There are many interesting-looking little hamlets and villages (though none, in my very biased opinion, as pretty as Queensborough), but by and large there is nothing in them to tell the visitor a single thing about them. What’s the story on Thomasburg? Moira? Millbridge? Gilmour? Sulphide? Cooper? Stoco? Bannockburn? You go through them and you’d never know, and I think that’s too bad.

So I hope we will get these projects off the ground. And if I can just get some rainy-day time at the Manse to do my part, well – I will be very glad to do so.

“More to see and do”

“Come again – more to see and do.” That’s what you read on the back of the “Welcome to Queensborough” signs as you’re exiting at the east and west ends of the village. (The same slogan is on identically styled signs at the entrances to Tweed and the other hamlets – Stoco, Actinolite, etc. – that, along with Queensborough, make up what I refer to as the Greater Tweed Area.)

Now, if you were passing through Queensborough for the first time, especially on a midwinter day when not much was astir, I think you’d kind of scratch your head at the notion that there was more to see and do in our little village than what you’d already experienced. There are, after all, no places to dine or shop, the general stores having closed a long time ago. There are no obvious visitor attractions, aside from the picturesque nature of the village and its historic buildings, but you can pretty well see all of that in a very short time. If you knew when the next church supper at St. Andrew’s United was scheduled for, or a dance or other event at the community centre, there would be more for you to come back and do, but aside from that it’s a pretty quiet place, and the words on the sign kind of make me smile.

(That said, there are good plans afoot for more happenings and special events and ways to attract interest in, and visitors to, Queensborough. Nothing will happen overnight, but stay tuned.)

Anyway! My point, and I do have one, is this: Raymond and I have more than enough to see and do in Queensborough and area this coming weekend.

Our friends in the city probably imagine that our weekends at the Manse are nothing but rest and peace and quiet. And yes, there often is rest and peace and quiet. But there are also people to see and things to do – and this weekend happens to be a doozy.

I was lucky enough to be the high bidder on this apron, which was inspired by the Madeline books. This weekend it’s time to go pick it up

First in the lineup is visiting the grand opening of an exciting new shop in Stirling (about 40 minutes from Queensborough) called Chickadelic Salvage and Design. Why? Well, first of all, Chickadelic looks to be a very cool shop and a great addition to an already-blossoming village. But secondly, we have merchandise to pick up! You may remember a post I did back in March, about an online auction of literary-themed aprons that Chickadelic was holding to raise money for books for the young-adult section of Stirling Public Library. (Pretty neat civic-minded thing for a business that hasn’t even opened yet to do, no?) Well, I was the high bidder on two beautiful aprons in that auction, and it’s time to claim them and bring them home to the Manse!

Next: we are having some friends for dinner. Now, our limited kitchen facilities at the Manse mean our dinner parties are not exactly exotic or elaborate, but we have high hopes that a nice evening will be had by all. But preparations will have to be made, so in addition to our excursion to Stirling we’ll also be doing our food shopping and other regular errands.

On Sunday morning it’s of course church at St. Andrew’s, and I’ll be reading the service prepared by our minister, who will be occupied with services at the other two churches on the pastoral charge. And we will be welcoming our nephew Timothy, who has very kindly and generously agreed to take a break from studying for his university exams in Toronto to come and play the piano for our service.

We may also have a chance to visit a maple-syrup-making operation and see some old friends there. More on that (complete with photos) when and if we get there.

And meanwhile, going on in the background (and quite possibly the foreground) of the whole weekend will be a very big annual event in Queensborough. It’s the Marmora Area Canoe and Kayak Festival, MACKFest. Last year around this time I did a post about how the participants paddle down the runoff-swollen Black River and go right over the dam at the historic Thompson Mill in Queensborough. Well, this year Raymond and I are going to get to see it first-hand. It is crazy! And if you don’t believe me, skip ahead to about the 2:20 point on this video and see for yourself:

As you can imagine, many of the kayakers are cold and wet when they come out of the river below the dam. Fortunately for them, volunteers with the Queensborough Community Centre are there to provide hot coffee and great treats to eat, a fundraiser for the centre. The place will be hopping.

So yeah, all in all I guess you could say there is a lot to see and do in Queensborough. This weekend, anyway!

A perfect day.

This photo gives you a sense of what a glorious day it was in Queensborough and environs yesterday, but I took it for another reason: these are among the row of maple trees that my father used to tap to make maple syrup way back in the day (the mid-to-late-1960s and early 1970s). My siblings and I (and many other kids from the neighbourhood) used to help gather the sap each evening, and it is a very happy childhood memory. More on that in a future post, but you will understand how driving past these old maples on Queensborough Road west of the village was a great start to a perfect day.

Raymond and I spent a grand total of 36 hours at the Manse in Queensborough this weekend, from our arrival a little after 10 p.m. Friday night to our departure a little after 11 a.m. (which is really 10 a.m., but 11 given the !#@*& imposition of Daylight Saving Time – better not get me started on that – this morning). You might think that such a visit is so brief as not to warrant just under 9 hours of driving there and back again, from and to Montreal. But you would be wrong. Because our one full day there – yesterday, Saturday – was: a perfect day. (And Friday night and Sunday morning were very nice too.)

What constitutes a perfect day for us in Queensborough and environs?

Well, it begins with glorious weather. The forecast the night before had been for a cloudy day Saturday, but we awoke to brilliant sunshine, not a cloud in the sky, and pleasantly warm temperatures (which proceeded to get even more pleasant as the day went on; we spotted guys doing roofing work in T-shirts, and people sitting outdoors enjoying the sun).

After coffee at the Manse, it was on to our errands. In order:

Things were going full speed at O’Hara Sugar Maples on Hart’s Road Saturday morning; the warm sunshine was making the sap run like crazy. Note the smoke from the wood-fuelled fire boiling down the sap to make delicious maple syrup.

Try to find some new-crop maple syrup. We’d read in the local papers the night before about an event held in late February, bringing together local syrup producers and local politicians and whatnot to officially launch the 2013 season, so we thought some new product might be found. We stopped in at O’Hara Sugar Maples on Hart’s Road, and were enormously fortunate to be able to buy a litre of the first batch – two bottles of which had just been set aside for entry in “The Royal” (that’s the prestigious Royal Winter Fair in Toronto). We were offered a small sample, and it was as light and delicious as any maple syrup you’ve ever tasted. And the syrup inside the bottle we bought was still warm! It doesn’t get any fresher or better than that.

Here’s a little video showing how crazily fast (in the warm sun) the sap was pouring in from the pipelines connected to the tapped trees to the sugar house, where it would be boiled down to make syrup:

Next, do the rounds of Madoc:

• First stop, Hidden Goldmine Bakery, to try to buy one box each of their awesome cookie selection. (Successful on the cinnamon-sparkle, peanut-butter, and chocolate-chip front; Raymond’s new favourite, cranberry-oatmeal, was sold out, but clearly we had no shortage of cookies when we emerged.)
• Next: Kelly’s Flowers & Gifts, a delightful shop that doubles as the Sears catalogue outlet – and we needed a Sears catalogue because we need old-fashioned spring-roll window blinds for the Manse, and Sears seems to be the place to get them. And a bonus! It turns out the proprietor, Kelly Declair, was a classmate of mine at Madoc’s Centre Hastings Secondary School back when we both were teenagers (I have got to dig out my old CHSS yearbooks) and now lives in – Queensborough! So Kelly and I compared notes on several things, including how much we love Queensborough.

In the afternoon sunlight, our new Mission-style table, purchased (on sale!) at Kim’s Kollectibles in Madoc Saturday, between the leather-and-wood rocking chairs in the Manse’s dining room.

• Then: Kim’s Kollectibles, a fun antiques-and-collectibles place that was having an end-of-winter sale to make space for the new stuff sure to come in once auction season starts, which will be soon. (Antiques-and-collectibles sellers get a lot of their stuff at auction sales. I’ve written here and here – among other places – about how much Raymond and I enjoy going to the auctions in Hastings County.) We bought a nice Mission-style side table for the space between out two vintage leather rockers in the Manse dining room, along with a bunch of books (right; there‘s a surprise), a Bunnykins china cup and bowl (I am a sucker for Bunnykins, since I had some when I was a wee girl and well remember how easy it was to be coerced into eating my supper thanks to my eagerness to find out what the Bunnykin Family was doing in the picture at the bottom of the plate or bowl), and a few other things that you may hear about anon.
• Last stop in Madoc: the car wash, so Raymond could rinse the mud off the car. And while he was doing that, I opened up my new Sears catalogue and was transported back through the years by the smell of the ink on a newly-opened mail-order catalogue. Try it and see!

The footbridge leading you to Kelly’s Restaurant, a cool little place that’s been serving good food (in a pretty setting off Highway 37) for four decades.

The rustic and cozy interior of Kelly’s is filled with vinatge advertising signs and whatnot. Yoo have to love the Supertest memorabilia; remember Supertest?

Then it was on to Tweed. We’d collected enough recyclables in the past few Manse visits that we had to make a run to the municipal dump at nearby Stoco. But before that we stopped for lunch at the funky and delightful Kelly’s Restaurant on Highway 37 between Tweed and Actinolite. Kelly’s has been around since the early 1970s, and has a cool kind of patina about it. You walk across a little footbridge to get to the slightly hippie-looking frame restaurant located in a pastoral setting. Inside, the walls are covered with vintage signs and photographs. The welcome is friendly, the ambience is great, there are lots of fellow diners, and the food is excellent: I had one of the best Caesar salads of my life (restaurants so often mess up Caesar salad – for one thing, using the unpleasant bitter dark-green outer leaves of the romaine lettuce instead of the hearts, which is the proper way – but Kelly’s gets it right) and Raymond had a splendid burger.

Late Saturday afternoon at the Manse, looking out the window at the back yard: more evidence of visits by the local wildlife.

We had a few errands to run in Tweed: food shopping, etc., nothing too exciting but perfectly pleasant. Then on to the dump, and then back home – all still under glorious sunshine and amid temperatures that reached 9C. We unloaded the car, installed our nice new (to us) little table, and had a long(ish) refreshing nap. That evening, we enjoyed lamb curry that we’d bought at The Old Cheese Factory in Tweed, a good bottle of wine, and a long session of reading in our rocking chairs. And then bedtime, in a place where one sleeps very soundly because the pretty little village around us is so quiet.

Is that not the perfect day? In Queensborough or, maybe, anywhere else?

A year’s worth of adventures in Queensborough, at the Manse

Raymond and me at the community skating party at the millpond in Queensborough in January 2012, a few days before we became the official owners of the Manse. A lot has happened since then! (Photo by Elaine Kapusta)

This is the last day of the year. Not the calendar year, obviously, but the year that has gone by since Raymond and I bought the Manse – the house I grew up in – in Queensborough, Ont. Tonight’s post will be No. 314 – one for every day of the past year (minus Sundays, my day of rest; but including Feb. 29, since 2012 was a leap year). That’s a lot of writing! Though since it’s about a subject very close to my heart, it hasn’t seemed like work. As I often tell people, this blog practically writes itself.

Anyway, year-end being often a time for reflection and looking back, I thought I’d take a trip back through the past 12 months and a few of the adventures Raymond and I have had as we’ve adjusted to the idea that we own this historic house – that needs a lot of work – in tiny, pretty Queensborough.

(We are, by the way, still adjusting.)

Okay, here we go, month by month:

January 2012: We visited our new acquisition on a cold, grey winter day. We took measurements of rooms, and wondered: what on earth have we got ourselves into?

February 2012: Thanks to some demolition work by my brother John, the turquoise colour on the kitchen’s original plaster walls – the colour that I remember from my childhood – is revealed, for the first time in about 40 years.

March 2012: As the weather turned nicer, Raymond and I started taking drives along  the rural roads in the area. And soaking up the fact that old, evocative things like split-rail fences were still to be found as part of the landscape of central Hastings County.

April 2012: On a gorgeous spring day, we finished raking all the leaves and debris from the Manse’s expansive lawn. And it looked beautiful in the afternoon spring sunshine. And we were very proud of ourselves.

May 2012: Raymond buys his long-dreamed-of red pickup truck, especially for service at the Manse. Now all he needs is a beagle named Kip to ride shotgun.

June 2012: We attended our first Hastings County auction, near Stoco, featuring the amazing and popular local auctioneer Boyd Sullivan (here holding up – well, a china chicken). We took in several more auctions as the year went on, and can’t wait until auction season starts again in spring 2013.

July 2012: A zen moment at the Manse on a hot summer day, looking out from the shade of the side lawn to the intersection of two of Queensborough’s busiest streets – “busy” by Queensborough standards, of course.

August 2012: The annual summer service at beautiful and historic Hazzard’s Corners Church, where my father, The Rev. Wendell Sedgwick, was once the minister. We were all joining in as the featured performers sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Perfect.

September 2012: On Labour Day Monday, the last day of summer before the school year began – and a scorcher as the great drought of 2012 continued – Raymond and I paid a visit to my beloved Madoc Township Public School, where I attended Grades 1 through 6 from 1966 to 1971. The bell rang for recess just as we were leaving.

October 2012: A new painting on the walls of the Manse – a landscape showing the Hazzard’s Corners area by Vera Burnside, a wonderful teacher, Sunday School teacher, artist and friend whom I remember so fondly. I bought the painting at – of course – a local auction.

November 2012: The last of the late-fall sunshine shining (after a storm) on the trees and the Black River at the heart of Queensborough.

December 2012: Raymond’s Christmas tree made of books in the Manse study.

January 2013: One of the most fun of the many links and interesting tidbits that readers have sent over the year: a song celebrating (sort of) Highway 7, the Trans Canada Highway, as it runs through the little villages in Queensborough’s neck of the woods – like Actinolite, which is only 10 minutes away. You readers find, and know, and send, the most amazing things.

And I hope you will continue to, as Meanwhile, at the Manse heads into Year 2. Tell Raymond and me more about renovating a Victorian brick house; tell us more about historic linoleum and plaster; tell us definitively how to get all those layers of wallpaper off the walls; tell us how to grow a garden. Tell us your Queensborough stories, your Hastings County stories, your North of Seven stories.

It’s really all about telling stories, isn’t it?