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Open the Lines!
Sunday the 19th of July, is my birthday. “Let the bells ring out. Let the banners fly.” As birthdays go, I wake up and know it’s really just another day until the cake knives come out and the family shows up for lunch! I am grateful for all of the people who remembered and sent birthday greetings and wishes via “the socials” and snail mail. Thank you.
By this time in July, LOML and I are usually hungover from twenty plus, early mornings spent drinking coffee and watching Le Tour de France. Recently it has been almost impossible to find any coverage on regular broadcast television, so we have resorted to watching snippets and highlights of posted on the Internet through mainstream media sources. Not how we want to enjoy Le Tour, but it was what we had at our disposal. Yep, that’s what we’ve resorted to doing. We can’t be bothered with another channel subscription. We don’t watch a lot of sports and couldn’t see any reason to pay for one of TSN’s feeds. If you’re old enough to remember the feeling, watching three minutes of LeTour, here and there, is a bit like lunch bag letdown. We have decided to sideline the disappointment and quit cold turkey. We had been fans for over twenty years. This year we’ve each found other things to entertain us at 6 a.m. Yes, we did. This July we’re up at the crack of dawn wondering why we can’t sleep past 5:30 a.m. and asking ourselves if doing Wordle and The Star crossword puzzles are the direction we really want to take. And here we are. We’re up early. We quietly work our way through word puzzles and compare our Wordle scores with LOML’s brother. Now, in our eigth decade, that is what life in the fast lane looks like for us. Who knew life could be so exciting!
While I’m not quite ready to give in to “old age” I know I’m not a kid anymore. I’m certainly not the same person who arrived in the County in October of 1972. But I’ve grown up here. I may have been a twentysomething when we arrived but I feel as if I have had an opportunity to fill-in the gaps left from living in Toronto. Here I learned that cows don’t respond to the words “get off my lawn”. Farm equipment takes up a lot of lane space on the roads and that top speed for a tractor pulling a load of hay isn’t much more than fifteen or twenty kilometres per hour. Bats do live in attics and occasionally find their way into your living space. Not all corn is suitable for human consumption – don’t ask me how I know this. Farmers don’t have time to listen to anyone whine about the cost of food on the table unless you’ve got time to listen to the cost of putting food on the table. Drivers in small towns will stop in the middle of a street to have a quick chinwag with a neighbour going in the other direction. The day I found myself doing “just that” was the day I understood the internal workings of rural communication systems. Bartering is a thing. I’m not good at it but I do like a good swap, now and then. STOP signs are a mostly a warning to be cautious. While I still come to a complete stop at a STOP sign, the “rolling stop” seems to be an acceptable way to make progress on the road. Grocery shopping never is as simple as running in to grab one or two items. I have never, in fifty-four years, been able to go to the grocery without running into at least one person who has a story to tell or a bit of tea to spill. Someone always has too many zucchinis, green beans and/or tomatoes. Those people will find you and share the bounty from their plots and pots. There is usually someone in your neighbourhood who has a snowplough and won’t hesitate to use it one your drive or walkway. That person deserves zucchini bread or a green bean and tomato casserole, as thanks. When party-lines became a thing of the past, many of us thought that would be the end of knowing “who did what with which and to whom”. Rural communication systems did not break down because Ma Bell upped her phone game. Rural communicating was always on the cutting edge and never relied solely on one way of sharing information. Just get pulled over by the OPP and see how long it takes for RuralCom to get the word out! Your next door neighbour with the snowblower will be over for the tea before you’re out of the car.
Do I have a problem with any of this? To be truthful, I did at the very beginning. However, as I mentioned, I’ve grown up here. I get it. In rural living it’s all pretty tangible. Pour yourself a coffee, sit on your porch and keep those lines of communication open!
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