Made Me Smile

Fall.

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Today the leaves are positively dive-bombing off the trees. 

  
The sun is shining again and the sky is azure blue, but yesterday’s snow has caused the autumn leaves to give up hope and cast themselves to the ground. 

  
Roads, garden beds and grass are carpeted with those who have already fallen, while other more hopeful souls still cling desperately to their tree. 

  
It’s easy now to understand why North Americans call this season Fall as well as Autumn. 

Even on a still, sunny morning, leaves dive and drift, collecting in rather tragic piles beneath the increasingly bare trees that only a week ago were vibrant with colour. 

In Australia, I never really had the perception of so many leaves falling and fluttering, or languishing in the breeze. Most of our trees stay green, and the occasional ornamental maple or elm shedding its leaves in a garden or the main street of a country town doesn’t really have the same impact, as beautiful as it may be. 

This sad abandonment of Autumn splendour has a beauty all its own. I’m very privileged to be able to sit here in the sunshine and witness it. 

The Perils of Trampolining.

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Watching Family Feud this afternoon, the question was “Name a part of your body that might hit you in the face when bouncing on a trampoline.” 

After the regular answers such as hand, arm, leg, knee, and fingers, there was just one answer left. 

One guy suggested “your butt”. Hysterical. Not surprisingly, though, it wasn’t on the list. 

The opposing team suggested that a man’s junk might hit him in the face. 

Then this conversation happened between the three of us watching together.

V: “Do you want to tell me how a man is going to get whacked in the face with that?”

J: “You mean that’s never happened to you?”

Me: “If men could work out how to make that happen, they’d never be bored again.”

Those ten seconds were more entertaining than the whole show.

Vermont Teddy Bear Company.

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Occasionally, I like to throw caution to the wind and do something dangerous. Intrepid and adventurous, that’s me. Completely aware of the perils ahead, I put my sassy pants on and set out for an adventure that has long been on the bucket list for this holiday. 

The Vermont Teddy Bear Company makes hand-crafted, fully customisable teddy bears that are unbearably adorable.

   
 
The bears all carry the trademark labels and eyes which distinguish them from other bears. The eyes have “Born in Vermont” imprinted in the iris. Too cute. Being from Vermont, the Bears all have a chubby tummy that is known at the company as “the belly that Ben & Jerry’s built”. 

   
   
There are hundreds of different outfits that can be purchased for the 15″ bears, reflecting seasons, occupations, sports and significant life events. Most of the bears have brown eyes, but can be customised with blue, green or hazel eyes. Paws and outfits can be customised with embroidery. 

   
   
The factory tour is fun and entertaining for all ages. I was really pleased to see the tour being led by a delightful guy who has a disability but is obviously living joyfully despite it. 

The bears are very reasonably priced in comparison to other top-quality, hand-crafted collectible bears, such as the Charlie Bears which I also collect. 

All in all, I had a wonderful day here. I made the experience complete by adopting a 15″ Maple Bear with blue eyes. It’s fair to say that he had a pretty good day, too. 

Postcards from the Past #2

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This gorgeous postcard from Niagara Falls, dated 1949, is another that I found in an antique store in PEI. 

    
 
Anyone who reads my blog knows how much I love Niagara Falls and how excited I was to go on the Hornblower cruise on the river below them. 

I am so happy to have this little piece of memorabilia. I have no idea who wrote it or kept it before now, but I will keep their little memory safe. 

 

Postcards from the past #1

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Last weekend I found myself in an antique store in Summerside, PEI. 

I commented to my friends that it was a very good thing that I had to fly home, so that I could not buy all the lovely things there. I did pick up some old postcards, including a couple that depicted places that I had recently visited. 

The first card I chose was an old black and white picture from Port Dalhousie, Ontario. It clearly depicts the part of the beach where Sean and I sat and ate our picnic dinner a couple of weeks ago, and the carousel which we rode. 
   
I was so excited to find this lovely memento from the history of a place that I so enjoyed. 

There is no date on the card, and the postmark is incomplete, so at first I thought there was no way to know when it was written. 

 
Then I had a thought: the stamp! Surely that would give me a time frame, at the very least.

   

This is a George V Scroll stamp issued between October 1928 and April 1930. This places my Port Dalhousie beach card as most likely dating from somewhere between those dates. 

Of course, it’s possible that someone might have posted it with an older stamp, but given that these were the years of the Great Depression, it does not seem likely that one would spend money on a stamp that was not going to be used right away. The handwriting certainly does not suggest someone with an expensive education, given that penmanship was still highly valued back then. 

It may just be an old postcard to most other people, but for me this is part of the real history of a beautiful place, and it’s very exciting to have it among my souvenirs. 

Oh deer! 

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Sitting in my friends’ living room in Quebec this evening, I glanced up to see two young deer in the yard, calmly eating the grass and flowers. 

    
I watched for quite some time as they wandered around, quite at peace with their surroundings. They were there  for about half an hour before darkness fell and we could no longer see them. 
What a beautiful end to a lovely day! 

A different kind of baptism.

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This evening, Sean and I stood on a flat rock, polished smooth by the ocean, and stepped into the cold water together. 

   
 
We only got wet up to our ankles, but we did it! Neither of us had seen the Atlantic Ocean before last Friday. Now, we’ve had a little ritual of wetting our feet in it together. 

We weren’t born siblings, but we did this together to further cement our mutual adoption.  It’s safe to say that we have really bonded in the past five days. 

  
We’ve experienced many firsts together on our short vacation in the eastern provinces of Canada. It was the first time for both of us to visit Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Sean had his first lobster. I fulfilled childhood dreams with Sean by my side. We have laughed and talked and taken photos and blogged and got rained on and visited many new places together. And the meals we’ve shared… Oh my. 

This trip out east has been sensational in so many ways. 

It’s going to be really hard to leave him tomorrow and go back to instant messaging. But we will. It’s so much better than nothing!

Lower Bedeque School, Prince Edward Island. 

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While sharing lunch with my friend in Summerside, PEI, sour server mentioned that we were not far from one of the schools where Lucy Maud Montgomery had taught in 1896-1897. 

We decided to go by and see the school house, which now serves as a museum. It wasn’t open, but we did peek in the windows as well as taking photographs of the building. 

   
  

  

How delightful to see another part of Montgomery’s own history on PEI. 

The story of her time here is quite poignant. While teaching at this school, Montgomery boarded with the Leard family. 

Lucy fell in love with the eldest son of the family, Herman, but he ended the relationship because he was less educated than her and believed she could do better. 

Montgomery’s grandfather died suddenly and she left Bedeque before the school year was finished to return to Cavendish and take care of her grandmother. 

When Herman Leard died of influenza in 1899, Montgomery was distraught, even though their relationship had long been over. 

Anne of Green Gables. 

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One of my dreams since childhood has been to visit Green Gables and see the places I had grown to love ever since reading my mother’s old copies of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. 

Those books were formative for me. I loved Anne for her feistiness, her wordiness, and her ability to get herself into trouble. Her imagination was inspirational to me. I learned valuable moral lessons. Most of all, I got lost in Anne’s world as the story unfolded from one book to the next. 

Today, I fulfilled that dream. 

I arrived at Green Gables in Cavendish on Prince Edward Island and stepped into the world created by Montgomery in her books about Anne Shirley, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, Anne’s “bosom friend” Diana Barry and a host of other delightful characters. 

I found some time alone to shed some tears. It was quite an emotional experience for me. I had dreamed of being here since I was a girl of 7. 

When I joined my friends, I thought I was over the emotional response, but I blinked back tears several more times during my visit. They were all happy tears, though. 

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. The house has been painstakingly restored and maintained.  

  

  

Other places featured in Anne’s world, such as Lovers’ Lane and The Haunted Wood, are also carefully maintained and can be freely visited by visitors to Green Gables. 

   

 
I so loved visiting Anne’s Green Gables today. It is a day I will never forget. 

Charlottetown, PEI.

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Oh my goodness. 
I don’t think I have ever seen a prettier city. Vintage brick buildings, gorgeously painted shop fronts, charming houses and a beautiful harbour combine to make Charlettetown absolutely picturesque. Every way you turn, it lookalike a postcard. 

City Hall is magnificent. This building tells you that the people of Charlottetown are proud of their city and the province of which it is the capital.  

   
Another noticeable feature is that it’s clean. Every corner has bins for recycle, waste, and food/organically for composting. There’s no litter, no mess, no smelly embarrassing places. Clean. 

The harbour is also a sight to behold. Boats bob gently, the water sparkles, and the lighthouse on the island in the middle of the harbour stands boldly, as if it were making sure all the boats were behaving themselves properly. 

As the sun sink slow in the sky, we leave the harbour and head to a restaurant nearby where we are meeting friends for dinner. I have been looking forward to meeting these wonderful people for a very long time. 

At this moment, my heart is so full of happiness. I have already seen such beauty on this island, and I’ve only been here a few hours. I know there is more beauty and more happiness to come.