March news

Not much has happened in the last week, either that or my memory is shot to hell and I just don't remember what has happened.

My neighbour told me that the trees behind our houses have been full of Cedar Waxwings so I have been keeping an eye out for them and sure enough they arrived when I had my camera ready. They twitter like a crowd of grasshoppers. From a distance they don't look like much, easy to mistake for starlings. but up closer you see their crests and bright yellow bits, they are very pretty birds that like to hang out in large groups. They also are not that shy, they didn't mind me coming close to the trees they were perched in.

March came in like a lion, cold and blustery; let's hope it leaves like a lamb. I managed to get in a bit of skating, highly unusual for March, but the area of the pond that is skatable is so small that the time it took to put on and take off my skates was probably longer than the time I actually spent skating.

Remember B, my friend in the nursing home? Well, she finally got her first vaccination shot this week. They had promised it for early February. She has an appointment for the second shot in early April, just days before she plans to attend her daughter's funeral. Yes, her daughter died, cause not really known, she was found dead in her apartment. She was probably as unwell as B and she had stopped taking her insulin about a month before she died. Very sad. Also very hard on B, they spoke on the phone dozens of times every day. 

B's daughter was not mobile so she couldn't visit B even before the pandemic except on major holidays (Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving). The funeral is being held in the small village where B raised her family; a local funeral director is taking care of all the details and it will all be done at no cost to B. The daughter wanted to be buried with her husband but she will be buried with her father instead, since B could not make arrangements in the town where her son-in-law was buried. They are one hard-luck family.

My brother sent me a couple of photos that he had scanned of the house my parents lived in right after I was born. One photo shows me and my parents (and their two dogs, Gunner and Tigger) in front of the house, probably around 1949, and the other is what that house looked like in 1986. At the time I lived in Ottawa and on a visit my parents showed me where the house was. So, looking at the more recent photo and knowing that it was somewhere near the river shore in that village, I used Streetview to find it by following all the streets that were close to the water on the map of the area. It's still there. It looks a little bit like the house I live in now.