Most plants have pretty much given up on growing by now, but we had one rose bush that managed to put out one last bloom. (below).
Invasive tree roots had invaded before, and in the spring of 2019 I was determine to eliminate the problem, so I dug all of the soil out of the bed, and lined the bed with some old metal roofing I had. I figured that barrier would keep the tree roots out, but I guess I was a bit too optimistic. Below is a photo showing some of the sheets of metal roofing I buried in the greenhouse.
Those trees were sure determined to get to the water in my tomato bed. They found the narrow crack in the corners in the metal roofing I laid down, and entered and spread from there. Tree roots are killed by copper, so I will try to put some small copper sheets at the corners to see if that will discourage the roots in the future.
Over the last week, I dug up half of the bed and pulled up the roots I have found. They are shown in the photo below.
To the Tuesday Night Jam Session participants
c/o McBride's Heritage Railway Station
Main Street & 1st Ave
McBride, BC
Somehow the letter found its way to my mailbox. I wasn’t sure what to expect inside as I opened the envelope, but it was very gratifying to read the animal-covered card that was inside. It said:
Dear Musicians!
Pete and I are most anxious to thank all of you for the best evening. It was absolutely one of the highlights of our trip this fall.
You were all so welcoming and inclusive.
We had such a good time and the music was all so familiar. Your enthusiasm for music was all in your faces. It was contagious.
Thank you all!
What a gifted group,
Sincerely,
Ann and Pete
When our jam meets every Tuesday Night, we sometimes do get tourists that hear our music and stop to listen, particularly during the summer, when we play outside on the Train Station porch. I remember Ann and Pete, they were tourists on fancy three-wheeled motorcycles, that where traveling west to Prince Rupert.
At the time we were playing inside the lobby of the train station, and they came to the doo. I saw them and waved them in. We handed them one of our songbooks, so they could sing along and pick songs, and they stayed the whole time.
They told us their trip was to celebrate their anniversary. When we closed up and said goodbye, they were putting their biker helmets back on, and starting up their motorcycles. I didn’t expect to ever see them or hear from them again.
When I read their card to the jam, everyone was very touched that they took the time to send us a card to tell us how much they enjoyed our playing. We just play music for our own fun, but it was sure nice of them to tell us they liked it too.
Take a look at my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
The hornets are now gone. Male hornets develop from infertile eggs, laid by workers in the nest. The males mate with the new queens that hatch. In the fall the the queens leave the nest and burrow in the forest floor litter. Only the new queens survive the winter. They produce eggs, feed the larvae, who then emerge in the spring to build a new nest.
A friend told me that if you leave the old nest up, the hornets will avoid building a new nest close by, so I guess that’s what I’ll do.
Take a look at my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
As the congregation grew the historical old Salem church building (yesterday’s blog) became too small. Money was raised to build a much more spacious church building with a larger sanctuary and “Social Hall” for all of its activities. Sadly, that old traditional looking brick country church building where I had spent so much of my childhood, was demolished. While the new church building was much nicer and much more spacious, it never really provided the intimate feeling of the old one. It could have been that I was just getting older and I was starting to see things more maturely.
Religion was not just the realm of church, it was also part of my family life. While my parents were religious, nothing could compare with the religious fervor of my grandmother. She was constantly giving us kids moral stories and scaring us into being holy. We all hated her constant moralizing when we were just trying to have some childhood fun.
At Christmas when our family would gather at my grandparents house to give and open presents, Grandma always insisted that we patiently sit through the long Bible verses telling of the nativity. She made us kids take turn reading the Bible passages aloud, while our minds were entirely focused on opening our presents. Proselytizing to us kids at Christmas, certainly didn’t make any of us more religious.
I will always remember my surprise when I was in my teens, visiting with my grandparents, when my religious grandmother started criticizing my grandfather for something he had done. Shockingly, he told her not to give him a lecture.
She countered by replying, “It’s not everyday that you can get a free lecture.”
Grandpa rebutted, saying, “Yes it is, It’s every day.”
That is exactly the feeling that we kids had the whole time we were growing up.
In Grandma’s defense, I did learn an awful lot about Christianity from her during my childhood and youth. I often used that knowledge of the Bible later in my life as an atheist, to discourage the Jehovah Witnesses that came to our door.
In the summer during the middle grades, we always attended “Bible” camp which took place, surprisingly, in Santa Claus, Indiana. It was something we always looked forward to. It was a whole week of swimming in the lake, making crafts, and sleeping in dorms with my friends and the kids from other places, who we soon got to know. There were good meals, followed by the singing of songs in the cafeteria, and of course the obligatory religious lessons.
I was quite surprised during one of those lessons, when the minister who taught it, told the group that we Methodists, unlike some other denominations, didn’t believe that everything that was in the Bible was factual. He explained that a lot of the things written there were stories told by the Hebrews, or written to make a point, and those things were not to be taken as something that had actually happened.
While I was shocked to hear such frankness from a minister, at that young age I was already starting to have doubts about some of the things in the Bible, although I believed in the underlying morals it presented. I always appreciated that minister’s candor. It give me permission to think for myself, without being considered a “sinner.”
You can take a look at my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
My family was very church-centric. It was the organization that provided most of our social activities. We were members of Salem Methodist Church. I was always thankful that the church was not a “fire and brimstone” type church, but instead our domination of Methodists a taught a very liberal type of Christianity, things like; “Be kind to everyone,” “Do good works,” and “Help those that are not a fortunate as you.” I took those moral values with me for the rest of my life, even though I lost all religious dogma that was taught.
During the first years that I can remember, the church building was an old brick, traditional-looking country church, whose sides where lined with vertical, arching stain-glass windows and its roof featured a steeple pointing toward heaven.
It was fairly small with an interior featuring rows of hard wooden pews, separated by an aisle that ran down the center of the church. There was a pulpit for the minister on one side of the alter, and an organ off to the other side. Just behind the pulpit, I remember a wooden sign, where each Sunday the number of attendees from the previous Sunday was posted.
Attached and behind the 100 year old church building was an addition that consisted of a basement with a darkish hallway that led to the handful of rooms that were used for Sunday School. We kids always attended Sunday School where we were taught Bible Stories, and life lessons.
One memory I have of a Sunday School Class happened when I was in the forth grade. Dennis, one of my friends, came in with his face all swollen and pink. I asked him what had happened and he explained that someone had told him that if you ate a poison ivy leaf, it would prevent you from ever suffering the terrible itching of the plant for the rest of his life.
He tried the “Cure” and his face was the result.
On the main floor above the Sunday School rooms was a large open “social hall” with a stage at the end, and one the side was a kitchen. The hall was where big gatherings would be held.
It was in the social hall, where the “Family Night Suppers” (potluck dinners) and weekday kindergarten classes took place. We always looked forward to those Family Night dinners, because of the delicious variety, and sometimes “exotic” types of food, that we never got at home. It was at the family night dinners that I first got my first taste of shrimp and also pecan pie. The varied dishes of food that people brought were laid out on the tables that ran down the center of the hall, with the dining tables along each side.
The Family Night Suppers also gave us kids a chance to chase each other around through the hall, weaving through the tables, up the stairs, across the stage, and down the kindergarten “slide” that had been pushed to the side.
Each Sunday, once our Sunday School lessons had ended, we had to go to the sanctuary where we had to sit quietly and resist squirming on the hard oak pews, while we endured the regular church service. My mom and uncle were in the church choir, whose songs and hymns did animate the service a bit.
The minister knew all of us kids were bored out of our skulls, so after the hymns, the announcements, and musical presentation by the choir, we kids were invited to walk up to the front of the church and stand at the alter, while the minister gave us the “Children’s Sermon,” a short talk with a moral. Then we walked back to join our families on the hard pews.
With the circulation of our legs somewhat restored from the walk, it was time to numb our brains through the adult sermon. After the singing of the last hymn ended, we were free to go outside and again talk to our friends.
Periodically, there was an escape from the church service provided for us kids. A church group of elderly women that belonged to the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) once a month, put on a program for us kids. Not only did their programs allow us kids to escape from the boring Sunday sermons, but also enticed us with Kool-Aid and cookies, so we were always happy to attend.
Once there, our little minds were pummeled with anti-alcohol, anti-tobacco, and sometimes, anti-drug propaganda and endless examples of people who destroyed their lives and the lives of their families through addictive drink. The propaganda they espoused certainly scared the bejesus out of my little brain, and made me a teetotaler for the rest of my life.
View my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
We climbed around on the “mountain” made of ears of “horse corn” in the corn crib. We made “highways” and dug holes in the dirt for our trucks in the empty “beds” of the greenhouse.
While my grandfather’s farm was the most exciting place for us to play, it was unfortunately, sometimes dangerous. One day Dan and I decided to make an “elevator” on our favorite climbing tree; a Maple in front of my grandparent’s house. We had had found a small square piece of wood that we could use for the floor of our elevator, we had scrounged a rope from the greenhouse shed, which we attached to our floor, then swung the rest of the rope over a limb.
It all seemed good, until we tried it out, then when one of us stood on the floor, and tried to pull down on the rope dangling from the limb, thinking that would lift our elevator, we discovered that the muscles on our small arms were useless in our attempt to lift us or our elevator off of the ground.
We came up with a brilliant solution however; if we could add a heavy weight to the free end of the rope as a counterbalance, that would probably help us pull ourselves upward. We knew of the perfect heavy counterbalance. It was a solid iron ball with a very short chain attached that had been used to hobble horses, preventing them from wandering away. The iron ball was a bit larger than a softball, and very weighty.
After a search in the well house, where old rarely used items were kept, we found ball and struggled to carry it over to the Maple tree. We tied it so it dangled from the end of the rope and then I took my place on the floor of the elevator, reached high on the rope and began to pull. Unfortunately, the elevator still didn’t work. More unfortunately, my pulling on the rope caused the heavy iron ball to swing, smashing into my face.
It not only busted my lip, but more seriously, broke a big section off of my permanent front tooth. (My other front tooth had already been similarly chipped when playing “Blind Man’s Bluff.” I was blindfolded, seeking my playmates when my mouth ran into the trunk of the family’s parked car.)
One September, on the afternoon of the first day of school beginning the fourth grade, which was actually only a half day of school, Neal, my neighborhood friend and I had assumed the dramatic roles of pirates and where chasing each other through the various levels of the barn. In my attempt to escape, I jumped onto the wooden ladder that led to the upper level of the barn where the bushel baskets were stacked.
In my rush to quickly scramble up the ladder, about halfway up, my hand missed grabbing the side of the ladder, and down I tumbled to the floor. As I fell, I stretched out my left hand to break the fall, however it was not my fall that was broken when I slammed into the floor, it was my left forearm. I had broken one bone and fractured the other.
While these injuries slowed me down for a while, they didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for hard and energetic play at the farm.
Take a look at my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
