the Walnut Diary

The trouble with fall is that one is pulled in a dozen directions at once as the calendar ticks down to freeze-up.  That’s what fall is:  a mixed metaphor.  It is also the season which defines us as Canadians.  Our smug claims to winter hardiness are just the result of a fall of anticipation and hard work.

Despite the balmy weather of the last two weeks, snow is coming, and everything has to be covered up.  Six months of moving to a smaller house underlines a basic principle of physics:  everything has to be somewhere.  We are now moved in and the old house is sold, but three utility trailers still sit in the yard loaded with stuff, and I can’t think of what to do with it.

We dubbed the new greenhouse the Crystal Palace the first evening Charlie turned floodlights on inside it.  White plastic glows rather well when illuminated from within.  Now that the wiring is complete, maybe I can just screw in green and red light bulbs and write off the Christmas-decorations chore.

But all of the space is committed to boats and cars.  There is no place for surplus chairs, an extra laundry hamper, the remains of twenty-five years of socket sets, even the half-finished lapstrake dinghy Charlie and I planked as soon as he grew big enough to do his side of the rivets.  It has spent the last twenty years hanging on the wall in the garage in Smiths Falls.

Before I surrendered the pram to the pigeons in the haymow I took some photos and put them up in a scrapbook on the Net.  Yesterday produced a flurry of messages from a guy in Boston.  He wants the hull as a project to complete with his ten-year old son who wants to be a boat builder when he grows up.  The only problem is getting a nine-foot boat to Boston.

Advertisers have convinced us that we can’t drive a car past the first of December without new-fangled tires with bits of walnut shell in the rubber and lots of slits to enhance wear.  But that means new rims as well, and that’s expensive, so I consulted Kijiji ads for a week and then set off on one of my wild-goose chases.   In the pouring rain I explored a Kingston suburb – do you know they count by fours when assigning lot numbers nowadays? I finally broke down and knocked on a door.  The occupants directed me two houses down the street, laughing about the numbering system but apparently on good terms with their neighbours.

Now in the correct driveway at the appointed time, I discovered nobody home.

Princess Auto was only a couple of blocks away, so I drowned my sorrows in Friday-evening retail therapy for an hour or so, and arrived back at the tire place just as the young couple returned.

The tires and wheels were as advertised, and the owners recovered just over half what they had paid to equip their leased Camry for three months of winter driving last year. The moment of truth will come this week when I bolt them onto Bet’s car and take it out onto the highway.

But that doesn’t help the three trailers in the yard.  What’s more, I no sooner get the fishing boats tucked neatly away in the Palace than Tony comes along to take his out for one more fishing trip.

At least the fall plowing’s done.  But Bet wants her garlic planted before freeze-up…