What a change from the travel from one place to another that we had been doing in the past while. This place was really close. All it took to get from one place to another was for one of our hosts to drive us to Foodsmiths in Perth, Ontario, and our new host to pick us up. Total trip time was under 2 hours. We were whisked through the countryside and regaled with interesting tidbits of historical information in one of Canada's most historical (colonially speaking, that is) areas. Our host and novelist, Merilyn Simonds, has an obvious interest and flair for history. Her novel, Convict Lover, relates to a bygone era of Kingston. While house sitting, I, too, went back and visited Kingston and found myself relating to a byone era of my past. I had been in Kingston for a brief period over 30 years ago when I (briefly) attended Queen's University. It was an amazing experience to recall the flavour of Kingston. This special house sitting time came to us because we met with Merilyn and her writer/environmentalist/translator/editor husband, Wayne Grady, and spent 2 days learning the ways of their household, their two cats, and their gardens. Lunch, work, dinner, work the next day, and the following morning, our hosts were on their way to their bird watching engagement on Pelee Island while Dave and I had time on our own and many things to do to assist the progress of the gardens in the springtime. It would have been such a treat; however, as luck would have it, the two week period of black flies was upon us, and it was bug jackets all the way. Even so, we managed to collect more than our share of bug bites, and I, once again, found myself rather sensitive and reactive to them.
Indoors, we had a chance to survey an impressive library of 5000 books, with a specialty in Canadian work. I chose to read some more of "Bringing back the Dodo", a book of Wayne's that I had borrowed from the library in the last year or two. (He was also the author of a book on coyotes that I had purchased at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature several years ago.) And we became very friendly with their cats whom I called whatever name inspired me at the moment, although their given names were Dionysos and Penelope, although they were actually son and mother.
Our neighbours, two retired history professors from Queen's university, had us over for a lovely spot of tea. They showed us their gardens and we were amazed at the amount of work they had to do to maintain them. Later, they confessed that it really was an awful lot of work and that they were openly considering downsizing.
Before you know it, Merilyn had bid us goodbye at the bus station at Smiths Falls, and we were on our way to Ottawa, and from there, out west. Our ticket was for all the way to Nelson, but we were about to take our next stop in our home town of Winnipeg, thus closing a loop that had been begun October 26th, 2007, when we boarded a bus for Regina.
