Saturday, 23 November 2019



Allan kindly agreed to help me get more maple leaves from the Ilwaco fire station.
We went to the post office first (which all the local townspeople must do for mail delivery as we do not have home delivery here—and how I miss home delivery, 27 years after leaving Seattle!).
Every leaf lying on local pavement or lawns calls out to me.

I sometimes cast my thoughts to that lawn and think how lovely it would be to expand our volunteer garden… Perhaps when we semi retire….
At the fire station, we raked some leaves off of grassy area but not off of the narrow garden beds at the south side of the parking lot.
The house to the southwest of the station is empty. I think it is available to buy from the city for a few dollars…but it must be moved, a complicated matter as it has asbestos siding (or asbestos inside, or something like that).




The weather was quite chilly.

Home is so close to the station that I could fetch leaves in a wheelbarrow, on foot…if that did not make me feel too eccentrically conspicuous.
We spread out the leaves on the Nora House back lawn for chopping.
Meanwhile, Allan blew alder leaves off the rougher lawn of the Nora House back yard.
He mowed them up for me.
He then did the last lawn mowing job of the season at the J’s Cottage across the street.


Still not out of energy, Allan decided to do a nice thing for our good friend and neighbour Alicia, Nora’s granddaughter.
That Lady With a Tractor had recently chopped down a big barberry on the front lawn whose thorny stems stuck out over the sidewalk.

Even though I valued the privacy from the street in my own front garden that the barberry had given me, we don’t want it to grow back. It had probably just volunteered there. Once upon a time, Nora had had a rose garden running along the side of the driveway.

One hour later:
My bounty of leaves has filled three receptables.
A basket waits to be added when the piles sink down….as do the leaves stored in a tarp.
Rather to my surprise, I had found the oomph to drag and chop the big pile of waiting compost from the back driveway bed….

…into compost bin three.

I have an exciting new batch of books from the library.
Because I cannot read the Susan Wittig Albert mystery until the one before it in sequence arrives, I picked this one to read tonight.
I wish that era would end already.
While it had many takeaways too gloomy for this blog, here are a few.
About classism and racism:
…men.
About the plight of farmers:
I found this interesting article which states that the book has been reissued with a new forward, pertinent to current events.
If the weather forecast is right, tomorrow should be a full reading day.