We’ve arrived in Ontario, and my brother is now married. But before I go into those details, let me tell you about our final day of moving. Early Saturday morning, late July, cloudy: We are riding the elevator and lugging stuff into the U-Haul. At the same time, a well known homeless lady is talking to us. She won’t leave us alone. We don’t want to be rude, she means no harm, but she is turning what should be an emotional moment into a series of crackpot question-answering. Her voice is light, almost childlike, each question she asks turning up at the end like the inquisitions of
a child from England circa Charles Dickens. “Shine your boots? Tuppens a shine?” That sort of thing.
Anyway, she keeps asking if we have room for her in the car. She’s trying to get to Saskatchewan. She tells us she can squeeze into the back seat, no problem. She asks us if we’re camping. We say no. She still tells us we should watch for rattlesnakes. Finally as we are just about to pull away, she hands me something through my open window.
It’s a bus pass with writing on it (words like, “sunshine, radar, beautiful, love, angels, miracles”) and a hole punched in the corner. Through the hole she’s looped a blue ribbon. At the other end of the blue ribbon is an empty McDonald’s salt package wrapped around what I think at first is a pebble. “It’s a papaya seed,” she says, “plant it at your new home and you’ll have good luck.” After we pull away, I open the salt package. It’s just a pebble.
And then the drive. Six days, amazing heat. Through the Prairies it was like death. I’m sure I could post a whole other thing here about the small towns we went through, like the one with the murals of country stars all over its buildings— The massive features of Alan Jackson hanging over you as you walk down the street. But those are tales for another time.
I will talk about the wedding though, the hot day in August when my brother said the words and did the deed. The wedding was in Alymer, Ontario, which for those of you who don’t know is one of the smallest communities in Ontario. Lots of farms, lots of fields. Lovely, really. However, I was taken aback by the friendly-ness of everyone. Like the lady in the shoe store who followed Ann (my brother’s bride) and I out the door saying thank you a million times. She stood on the stoop of her store and WAVED to us as we headed down the street. There was even MUSIC playing: speakers wired up to the street lamps. People had pep in their step. I kept looking around for
Sheriff Andy Taylor and Opie to come skipping down the street with their fishin’ poles.
It freaked me out.
The day before the wedding Ann said we had to get melons for the fruit salad. Little did I realize that this meant going to her friend’s melon farm and driving in the passenger seat of a dusty truck, up and down rows of melon fields, stopping to pick melons. I never knew there were so many different kinds! I actually enjoyed myself quiet a bit, bouncing around in the truck, the wind hitting my sunglasses as I leaned out of the window.
Anyway, there is much more, but this post is long enough already, so I’ll post some pictures on
Flickr instead if you want to see more details. It might be a day or two, but they’ll be up there soon.
