On my way back to Toronto after spending time with my mom and dad in Thornbury Ontario. If I have time I like to stop by the grave of my great great grandparents Mungo Dand and Catherine Ann Munro who are buried in the cemetery of Burns Presbyterian Church in Feversham Ontario.
My great great great grandparents William and Marion Dand are also buried here, but their graves are unmarked.
These two are a tragic story. Catherine died in childbirth delivering her fifth child who himself died two months and 20 days later. Mungo remarried but lost his second wife too and stricken with grief he shot himself in the head with a shotgun in 1902.
Mungo was a hewer of wood and a barnraiser and a farmer and was a well loved neighbour. On my great great grandmotjer’s stone he put this little poem:
Beneath this stone I’ve placed in trust
Not the immortal but the dust
Of one on earth to me most dear
Who learned in youth her God to fear.
I get the sense they were a pious family and his suicide must have been a shock.
Subsequently in 1918 his son William Gordon Dand died tragically as one of the first flu victims in Regina, Sasaktchewan. I have visited his grave too in Regina in the flu section of the city cemetery.
I love connecting with my ancestors.
There are conversations I don’t want to have and there are conversations I show up in and where I don’t like how I show up there. How to change these?
We are always inside the conversations we don’t want to have. We cannot leave them. We always have to host from inside this place.
At some level you can never leave earth. You belong here and to every conversation that is happening here. You are invited to host it all. That is your obligation for being given the gift of life.
Spring in full flight in Howe Sound. Blossoms and sun and birdsong and light and a warm shower or two on a grey afternoon.
Got a bunch of work done today so to celebrate I headed out on my SUP for an hour long paddled from Tunstall Bay to Cape Roger Curtis across pristine shoreline teeming with life. Gulls eating starfish and anemones, oystercatchers with their high pitched calls skimming the top if the way. Eagles soaring over the trees.
Only the slightest hint of a headwind outward bound but glassy still on the return leg. It’s so quiet out here today.
And the beauty of living on the South Coast of BC in winter is that Sunday I will go skiing with the kids over at Cypress Mountain.
Beach in Friday, ski hills on Sunday. Winter ain’t so bad after all.
Thus morning, at the entrance to Howe Sound where I live.
We are entering early spring here in the south coast. I call it herring season. Daffodils are a couple of inches above the earth, redwing blackbirds are calling in the Cove and the rain and the sky are both lighter.
Herring will be coming soon and with them perhaps the dolphins that feed on them. It’s quiet at this time of year. And we are waiting.