A few pics

We had a wonderful Canada  Day celebration here where I live. The gardens were magnificent, the barbie was great and the games were mighty and funny. Plus we celebrated the installation a a gorgeous big, fat greenhouse, more on that soon. We have an abundance of truly great gardeners who live here, some who worked on municipal gardens in the past. I must count all the gardens soon, my estimate would be ten. And yes, the property is magnificent.

PS Staying away from Da Nooz one day at a time. But I couldn't miss the posts about the T-shirts for sale celebrating the first concentration camp on US soil. Yeah, Alligator Alcatraz. All profits into the first felon's pocket.

Understated

 

I love my adopted country with all my heart. I was out on the beach today and I observed how discreetly we observe Canada Day which is today, July 1st. Little crests on polo shirts, grannies wearing red cardigans over white shirts, small maple leafs on beach chairs and umbrellas. Red and white beach balls, little girls in red and white pleated skirts and so on and dogs with small maple leafs on their collars.

We don't blast it from the rooftops. There's just this quiet pride in this beautiful country rolling from sea to shining sea and fact: our landmass is greater than the United States.

The land area of Canada is 3, 855, 103 square miles compared to America's 3, 794, 083, making Canada 1.6% larger that the States.

And we invented so many things - here's some you might not know about.

1. Paint roller
2. Garbage bags
3. Pager
4. Peanut butter
5. Road lines
6. Wonderbra
7. Search engine
8. Imax
9. The pacemaker
10. Basketball

Sometimes we're number one in the top countries in which to live but this year we're number two.

Round-up of the best countries to live in the world in 2022

• Switzerland.
• Canada.
• Norway.
• Singapore.
• Australia.

And oh yes, a picture of the beach from today. So many birds on the water following the capelin, a small fish (note granny in front of me in red cardie). It's been four weeks since I've been outside my door. I'm so grateful to be somewhat mobile.

Aftermath and Canada Day

Emotional experiences mingled with sadness, memory, fear of change, uncertain future (political, global, environmental) is stressful for many of us, not just elders.

I'll be interested to hear Grandgirl's take on it when she arrives to spend nearly 2 weeks with me tomorrow.

I know many are talking of the 'Good Ol' Days' and going back to them. I call BS on that. I turn a cold hard eye on my own past and would not revisit it for anything. Well maybe a quick revisit to the occasional short sweet times with my mother. But the rest of it? I was a religious refugee from the land of my birth, a victim of the judgement and condemnation of an unplanned pregnancy that would have shamed both my former husband and I along with my family in the eyes of the vicious Catholicism then. I've written about it many times. Escape to a welcoming Canada was our only option, far from the counting fingers of all around us. If we hadn't married, I would have been sentenced to a Magdalene Laundry in Killarney where my cousin was the nun in charge of it and have my child sold out from under me. Friends were caught in this horrific situation. They still bear the scars to this day.

More Good Ol'Days had endless repercussions in my new life in Canada. Isolation from family was a constant gnawing anxiety. Post partum depression after Daughter was born was something unrecognized then. I knew I was depressed. I had made only one friend who was supportive and loving. Father of Child couldn't understand what was going on and busied himself out at night partying and making new friends. I struggled on very much alone with Daughter and thought often of suicide, I was so utterly despondent and frightened by how my life had turned out. As my people say: "I'd lost the run of myself."

I had a supportive doctor for my baby and he recognized what was going on and told me it would pass. It was all hormonal, try and get out in the sunshine, make more of an effort, go swimming (our apartment building had a pool) or walking. I did. But I've never forgotten the awful gloom of that first year in a strange land, how I felt robbed of my family, my homeland, a supportive community, the familial joy that should have surrounded Daughter, a first great grand-child and grandchild to both our families.

So what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Stronger in the broken places.

I am grateful beyond measure to Canada, who accepted two young emigrants back in the day and helped us establish a life in this great country where I was able to blossom and grow and become my authentic self. This would not have happened in Ireland in that era where women were subservient to the church, surrounded by rattling rosary beads and the gossip of neighbours and who lost their careers upon marriage or unplanned pregnancies. Memories of any "transgressions" lived long and hard in the minds of neighbours and co-congregants ("Ah, she had to get married back in 1957, no wonder he runs around on her, who's to blame him?"). There was no moving on then. If your father was a communist, you were unemployable and judged so harshly one of my classmates joined an order of cloistered nuns to escape community condemnation, her brothers emigrated. I could write more. A very dark place it was then, finally coming into more sunlight now with abortion rights and gay marriage but still a long way to go.

Not that Canada is perfect, but it is a country, still, where health care is excellent and universal, where the social safety network is in place to help the least advantaged of our citizens and women are equal in the constitution and dying with dignity and legalized
marijuana make us the adult in a house where in the basement a screaming orange toddler with a lit match holds us all in terrified thrall to his tantrums.

Canada Day

Canada Day in Newfoundland is crazy fun. Parties in every village along the shore, everyone wears red and white (including yours truly) and the musicians and dancers come out in full force. It is marvellous fun. You have to pace yourself as attending EVERY party along the way is de rigeur for many. All surfaces are adorned: face paint, balloons and hats and Canadian flags everywhere.

I took many pictures as it was a spectacularly sunny day. The one above is another clothesline shot. I took a similar ones years ago and it was a best-seller as a card and featured in both large and small calendars. There were clothesline full of clothes along my meandering route. A bit of a wind happening so the drying was excellent. And you haven't lived unless your sheets are run through with ocean breezes.

A friend sent me the video below, our national anthem interpreted by whales. And yes the whales are on their way. We get thousands every year.

Enjoy. It makes me cry. But in a good way.

By Their Boots Ye Shall Know Them

I promise I'll shut up about the G20 after this, which I wrote about here and here but finally, finally, as I suspected from all I read, the police provocateurs have been 'outed'. They are the much villified "Black Bloc" and used window smashing, fire starting, etc., to intimidate the genuine peaceful protestors.

Toronto is right now in the midst of a massive government / media propaganda fraud. As events unfold, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 'Black Bloc' are undercover police operatives engaged in purposeful provocations to eclipse and invalidate legitimate G20 citizen protest by starting a riot. Government agents have been caught doing this before in Canada

The undercover police were all wearing the same type of new police issue boot!

Read all about it here.

The public outcry is just beginning, there have also been reports of rape threats and inappropriate touching of a child by the police.

As Canada Day dawns I am ashamed of the scandal of the G20 which was funded to the tune of over a billion by us taxpayers. It is a sad, sad world when we cannot protest against the Theocorporatocracy that is trying to drown our voices even here in the supposedly "True North Strong and Free".

However, I am heartened that this police corruption is being exposed by We The People. What good will come of it I don't know. The police has the full force of the government behind them. We only have to look at the powerful lobbies, the true puppeteers, to see who will win this game.

Oh Canada!

TODAY IS CANADA DAY!!

I love my country of choice. I am so proud to be a Canadian.

Over the years I’ve taken the time to prowl around her, into all her provinces that make her what she is.

I’ve been from Cape Breton to Vancouver Island. From Thunder Bay to Bonavista.

I am awed by her beauty, dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the cathedrals in the villages of the Gaspé Peninsula. Enchanted with the Britishness of Victoria, the Scottishness of Cape Breton, the Irishness of Newfoundland, the Frenchness of Québec, the Polishness of Northern Ontario, the Ukraineness of Manitoba. It strikes me I would never have to leave here in order to experience the world.

I came here on one of the last ocean liners to leave Cobh in Co. Cork. We left on January 8th, 1967, my husband, our unborn baby and me, with trunks of our settler’s effects, my folk guitar and $210.00. All our worldly goods rocking, along with us, across the turbulent Atlantic winter ocean.

Our fare was paid by the Canadian government along with our first month’s rent for an apartment. Looking back, we were so young, frighteningly young. But full of hope, full of dreams, full of a life that could not happen in the Ireland that was then, pre-Celtic tiger.

And it all happened for us, for me, that emigrant dream.

A career, a home, advantages for my children, a long series of pets, travel, access to a rich cultural life, ongoing dreams that could be sustained and nurtured and realized. I’ve met and made friends with people born in all corners of the globe: Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Palestinians, Australians, New Zealanders, Iraqis, Afghanis, Jamaicans, Somalis and Ismailis and we all share one passion that seems to be missing from the native-borns here. To wit: we absolutely adore Canada:

Its freedom from bias, from prejudice, from religiosity and from misogyny. Its Charter of Rights, its universal health care, its access to education for all, its absence of guns, its honouring of ethnic diversity and gender diversity, its writers, musicians and artists. The overall unbroadcasted happiness and satisfaction of its citizens, its caring for the poorest and most downtrodden of us, and its unfailing generosity and innate courtesy and politeness.

We do not sing large and loud here of what we have. No propaganda is necessary. It is a private committed love, held safe in our hearts:

Oh Canada, our true north strong and free,
Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee!