Moving!

After posting on this platform for ten (!) years, I have decided to move on…that is, to move onto a new platform where I can transition to voluntarily paid subscriptions.

It is a decision not lightly made but does make sense for several reasons:

1. I’m not getting any younger and the very physical labour involved in gardening will not be kind to my body indefinitely! Although I am still happily working on gardens that I have developed over many years, I am strategizing about ways in which I can begin to generate some revenue through writing…again.
2. Many of you might know that I had a prior writing gig … it was as the gardening columnist at the Ottawa Citizen newspaper and I did this bi-weekly column between, I think, 2011 and 2016 — it was a while ago so my memory is fuzzy. Although it didn’t make me rich – indeed, the failure of print media meant my pay cheque was halved during that time – I loved doing this column and met a lot of really generous, interesting and enthusiastic gardeners, both experienced and amateur, in Ottawa and beyond.
3. Before this I ran a garden store called Hortus Urbanus for ten challenging years between 1997 and 2007. This store was really a vision of mine, full of plants as well as the original work of very talented artists — from statuary to pots to fountains to ironwork and beyond — and I loved every minute of it! I’m glad I had the presence of mind to keep some of those treasures and am reminded of my store, even to this day. I know many of you still miss it and for that, I’m touched and honoured.
4. I love writing but have found contributing to this blog a challenge over the last couple of years. That’s because it was meant to be a “garden” blog and in the last few years, my life has become much more than simply gardening. Aging, losing a parent, reflecting over one’s life, embracing the wild in nature apart from the cultivation of gardens, and much more. I feel that moving to this new platform, as well as having readers who come from a wider realm, will help me produce more and more frequently.

As you might know, WordPress began as a free platform for those who wanted to try blogging but didn’t want to be tied to a plan that cost them money. It was great but then suddenly they started requiring payment and by that I mean a LARGE annual payment to keep your beloved blog going. I continued to pay because I didn’t want to lose this archive or the platform that I had built up over so many years. But now I want to find new ways to make money, not to spend it LOL! This new platform on Substack will allow me to transition from free articles to the opportunity to have readers voluntarily contribute toward their subscription, for a small fee. I think it’s a win-win.

So, please come and join me. You can subscribe to receive email notices when I’ve published a new post. I hope that the community we form there will be dynamic and broad — and I promise to write with passion and commitment for you. It’s called Minutiae of Daily Life.

Click HERE to go there.

See you there!

Covid, cat, coyote & corvid

Today I visited my mother for the first time in months.

She has been “living” in a long-term care residence for the last ten months and for almost all of that time, visiting has been verboten.

My mother has been in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease for a couple of years now, and before that, she was aware enough of her muddled mind to say to me, “Ailsa, you don’t want this.”

This photo shows her and my father at our last Christmas together in 2018. Dad, who was 100 years old, was hamming it up, as usual, but would be dead in 43 days. Mom had become increasingly less talkative but was still clearly enjoying the festivities, even though she couldn’t participate in much of the conversation.

Now she is confined to a wheelchair and only ever speaks one or two words: “Yes” or “Hello” or “I’m fine”. It is a good day when she smiles and laughs, and a better day when she shows some recognition of a name, a phrase or a picture.

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Today I drove a cat, an orange and white beauty, on one segment of its journey out of a kill shelter to a volunteer run cat rescue in Toronto. Several kind-hearted souls acted as a convoy to move this cat, as well as other discarded animals, to people who would care for them.

I named this cat Marmalade.

Had she not been removed today, she would have been destroyed. I’m glad I helped get her to safety.

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And today I read that Charlie the coyote had died. That might not mean much to you but it made me cry. You see, Charlie was a coyote who lived in Wyoming with his adoptive mother, Shreve Stockton. Shreve is the author of the blog Honey Rock Dawn (http://honeyrockdawn.com/) and The Daily Coyote (http://www.dailycoyote.net/) where she has chronicled not only Charlie’s 13 years of life alongside her but also the whole crew: dogs, cats, cows, bulls, bees, horses…the “farmily”. If you have followed the life of this remarkable wild animal, you will understand why his death is so incredibly sad and earth-shaking – animals that become iconic can never die. But if you live with a coyote in cattle country out west, it is likely things will end badly. Shreve would be the first to say that she likely feared this every. single, day. Miraculously, Charlie did not meet his end at the hands of a rancher or hunter; rather, in Shreve’s words, fate took him:

“The next morning, Charlie slept in. He went outside at 8:08 am. I know this because I checked the clock to give him ten minutes to come back inside before I went out to be with him. When I joined him, he was curled up on the sunny eastern-facing hillside, nestled under a big rabbit brush. I sat down near him, watched him and talked to him. And then, just before 9, he was gone, as light and quick as a dandelion seed lifting off on the breeze.”

When Charlie became a celebrity (check out her book The Daily Coyote and her new book, The Daily Coyote: Ten Years in Photographs – https://shop.dailycoyote.net/product/the-daily-coyote-ten-years-in-photographs), we saw not only what a talented photographer and writer Shreve is, but what an incredible being Charlie was. Charlie’s face was all over her Instagram feed, in calendars, in books and in every one of her followers’ psyches.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Shreve Stockton (@dailycoyote)

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Today I saw a silver white crow. I hear that they are rare. But it was perched on one of the maples behind the house, with a sidekick, all black. As it lifted and its’ wings unfolded, it was a shock of white.

Of course, this made me look up this phenomenon, especially what the meaning of seeing a white crow might be. And this is what I found:

“Signifies something exceptionally good or extremely bad is going to take place in the future due to your past deeds.”

Well, that made me laugh out loud.