Parliament of Leaves

Last week the temperature here went up to 18 degrees. All the snow melted. Then the next day it rained heavily, pretty much the whole day. Then the next day it snowed.

I looked out the back window at one point and realized the drainage ditch was completely full of water. Like an inch from overflowing. The opening to the pipe from the sump pump was completely submerged. Now that the snow has melted I can open my back door again so I went to have a look, and the walls I had built up with broken concrete had collapsed and there had been several clay landslides into the ditch.

I should have expected that really. Lesson learned. I have some pea gravel I had intended to dump on the top, now I realize I should have been using it to fill in the gaps between the larger rocks, both to give them support and to try to keep the silt from settling in the cracks. When the soil is dryer I'll dig it out and re-do it properly. Fortunately Facething Marketplace has tons of people giving away left over rocks from their landscaping projects because I'm mostly out.

On the plus side, the drainage ditch did operate entirely as intended in that there was no flooding of the rest of the yard. The basement stayed bone dry and the pump didn't get any backwash.

***

Saw a rat back behind the shed while I was out there. I kind of figure rats are like the coyotes, they're always there, just sometimes we also see them.

Still. He was a big fucker.

***

Left the house today to go to a seed swap that was happening a couple of blocks away. Didn't swap any seeds but I did have a lovely conversation with a man from a local group that runs workshops on things like pollinator gardens and composting. There were also some people there from the Anishnawbe food & medicine garden.

I remember walking past a storefront on my way to the gf's place last week and passing what used to be a big art supply store. It's been divided in half, part of it is now a medspa and the other half is a thrift store.

That kind of encapsulates the current state of the neighbourhood perfectly, we have condos and gentrification and chic designer stores. But we also have the Community Centre with the needle exchange program and the lawyers who will give you advice about your immigration case or your lawsuit against your landlord. The slumlords who own the highrise behind me lost an attempt to shut down a food bank that was started in a couple of empty units by the tenants. There are signs on every light pole supporting the latest rent strike against yet another slum lord.

There's also a goth/industrial club right at the end of my street, and do you think I've managed to drop in there even once? No I have not. Maybe when it warms up and the wastewater numbers are less dire. I know about a half-dozen DJs who hold nights there, so I should get one of those straw holder thingys you can fix to your mask.

Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a good idea for the days I have to go into the office and it's too cold to eat outside.

My goals for this weekend were to get my tomatoes & peppers seeded, and to get my income tax filed. Both have been accomplished. Go me.

The weather has gone into above zero temperatures for the last couple of days and snow is melting everywhere. The sump pump is holding up magnificently. I went for a walk yesterday to enjoy it, and I obviously need to do that more often. The physio means all my tendons and connective tissue are fine, but my skin is coming up blisters because it's out of practice.

***

Two stories.

When I was very young and my parents were very broke one of the few vacations they could afford with three kids was to take us all camping. The first time they tried this they just packed the car and drove north but it was a long weekend and all the provincial sites were full. I remember that they found one spot the first night, but it was basically a parking lot for RVs and it was baking hot and awful. So the next day they packed up and kept driving. They ended up following some hand-painted signs stapled to the power poles on the side of the road and found a farm where the owners had mowed down part of the field closest to their house and were renting out spots to campers.

And it was perfect. It had lovely shade trees and a couple of swimming holes. There was a fence separating us from a wide grassy field full of cattle that also frequently spawned rabbits and other fascinating creatures and the owners had a roadside vegetable stall and gave all the campers a discount. We ended up going back year after year. My dad would sit on the porch with the owner and have a beer in the evenings. (If my dad had a superpower it was that he could make friends anywhere. He has a story about visiting Spain and watching the World Cup in a cave with a bunch of refugees.) I remember when my youngest sister was a toddler my parents set up her bed in an inflatable dingy inside the tent because she couldn't get over the sides and potentially wander off while we slept.

When I was in my twenties and going camping with my friends I inherited all of their old camping gear. The tent is long gone but I still have the camping stove, which is rusty and wobbly and a pain to light but still works. I also have their old cooler, a massive heavy thing with a metal body. It's scratched and dented and looks like it fell off a cliff at some point, but the metal is still solid. This thing has to be fifty years old.

Alas, parts of it are made out of plastic. My ex broke off one of the handles because it was jammed behind something in the trunk of our car so they just... pulled harder. (I have made it very clear they will NEVER be forgiven for that.) And just yesterday I realized that the little plastic stopper that used to flip down and plug the drain hole has snapped off.

***

The second story.

I mentioned here that I host my family for Christmas dinner in January. I bought too much food because that's definitely an Irish tradition and then people brought things I wasn't expecting. So I had leftover potatoes and carrots and onions, things like that.

I have a cold room under the porch, so I figured they would be fine down there. And I threw the bags into my big metal cooler and then kind of forgot about them. Yesterday I went downstairs to get a single potato and discovered my miscalculation. One of the potatoes had decided that it really wanted to be soup.

(That saying about one bad apple spoiling a barrel, btw? Could also be applied to potatoes.)

So about hrm, 60% of the potatoes were rescue-able. The carrots tried to get in on the act, but mostly when a carrot goes bad it just gets hairy and sprouts greens so I didn't lose anything there. The onions are fine. Onions can survive anything. But holding the metal cooler on it's side to tip the soup-from-hell down the drain was how I found out that the drain plug no longer exists.

So right now it's sitting on my porch to see if I can force myself to put it in the trash pick-up.

And even now I'm fantasizing about taking the lid off and turning it into a planter or something. I don't have a ton of good memories of my childhood. The memories won't go away if I throw out the fucking cooler! I know that. But I'm still wrestling with it.

This is ONE of the reasons why my house has so much crap in it.