POSTING # 24

Fewer Ships Using the Welland Canal; The Dream of Owning a Vermont Bed and Breakfast; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


Fewer Ships Using the Welland Canal

In last week’s posting (Posting 23, June 7, 2009), I noted that the Virgil area had not really felt the impact of the recession until GM announced that it would be closing its dealership in Virgil.

This week there was another sign of the recession.

For a couple of weeks Pat and I have been thinking that there have not been as many ships using the Welland Canal as last year. I checked with someone at the Welland Canal and they said that there are definitely fewer ships this year. They said that some ships have been tied up until there is an increase in cargo to be moved.

Unlike people who have to get somewhere on time and get frustrated at having to wait at a lift bridge while a ship goes through, we are usually in no rush. Often we get out of the car, watch the behemoths slide past, and wave at the crew.

I suppose one could say that we should ‘get a life’, but we enjoy it.

Our still-working neighbours are happy that there are fewer ships (and fewer delays on the way to work), but we miss the sweet interludes at the lift bridges.


The Dream of Owning a Vermont Bed and Breakfast

Last week we told about a problem at a Vermont B&B that didn’t want Canadians in its bathtubs, a problem that was amicably resolved.

During our stay, the owners, an attractive English couple in their early ‘40s, told us a great story about their introduction to running a B&B.

Although they both had good jobs in London, they had a dream of owning a country bed and breakfast, not in England but in New England. They would be their own bosses, living in an attractive, historic house in a picturesque village surrounded by wooded mountains. In the winter, they would entertain skiers; in the summer, hikers and cyclists; and, in the autumn, people attracted by the fall colours.

After studying listings of B&Bs for sale, they identified a handful of possible businesses. Ultimately, they settled on the Vermont B&B---it and the town were exactly what they had been dreaming about. They found a lawyer and began the process of offer, counter-offer, counter-counter-offer and so on.

The negotiations dragged on, with lawyers, real estate agents and bankers. Then one Saturday morning, their lawyer asked if they come back to his office. They thought this would be yet another meeting but when they arrived the lawyer told them that the seller was coming and it looked as though the B&B could be theirs by noon.

The seller came, the documents were signed and they all shook hands. The B&B was finally theirs.

The husband and wife were thrilled. They couldn’t wait to get into their new home, explore it, prepare menus, and plan some small renovations they felt were necessary.

As the seller was leaving the office, he said, as a kind of after-thought, that a cycling club with 12 members would be arriving at 5 P.M. and they were expecting dinner at 7 P.M. He added that they would have cycled some 50 miles and would be ready for a big meal.

“Oh”, he added, “we had a full house last night. We stripped the beds but didn’t have time to make them or clean the bathrooms.”

The couple streaked to their new home, made the beds and cleaned the bathrooms.

Then going down to the kitchen to plan meals for the new group, they noticed that the morning’s breakfast dishes hadn’t been washed. They decided that the wife would do the dishes and clean the kitchen while the husband raced off to the supermarket for groceries for dinner (they decided on pasta with a meat sauce and lots of bread and salad) and breakfast (lots of bacon and eggs and toast).

The cyclists arrived, sweaty and tired, at 5 P.M. and headed for the showers.

Dinner was ready at 7 P.M and the cyclists ate huge amounts of pasta, and then talked and laughed until nearly 10 P.M. After the cyclists had finally left the dining room, the couple washed the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen and set the tables for breakfast.

When they were finished, the wife poured two glasses of wine, looked at her husband and said, “It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was rather fun,”

He nodded but said that he wouldn’t have any trouble sleeping.

The wife looked across the kitchen at a door and asked where it went.

The husband opened the door, “It’s a back staircase and…oh, look what’s here.”

The stairwell was full of dirty sheets and towels from the previous night---the seller had just thrown them down the stairs.

The wife checked the reservations book, found they were full the next night and then checked the laundry closet.

It was empty.

At midnight, they started washing and drying sheets, pillow cases and towels.

“So”, the husband told us, “that was our introduction to running a B&B. Now, three years on, we can say that a lot of crazy things have happened to us, but nothing to touch that first day.”


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We liked the couple and admired the warm and friendly way they ran the B&B.

But there were some disturbing signs.

We learned that the wife was working part-time at a high-end clothing store in a nearby town and that the husband was working as a barman at a hotel in town most nights.

It was obvious that the B&B wasn’t bringing in sufficient cash to make ends meet. We wondered how long they would have the energy to run a busy B&B and still have part-time jobs.

We called the following year to reserve a room but were told that the number was no longer in service. We later learned that they had sold the house and returned to England.

A beautiful dream and a lovely couple!

We hope they landed on their feet back in England.


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

There was a small colony of feral cats that inhabited the backyards between Glebe and Clemow Avenues when we lived in Ottawa.

A kindly widow, who lived alone on Clemow, arranged to neuter any cats she could catch. She would also leave out food and had made a little shelter on her back porch that they could use when it rained.

Although we had never caught them in our garage---an ancient wooden building that we used just for storage---we suspected the cats stayed in it from time to time. There were some holes at the bottom of the back wall that they could have used to enter and leave.

There were some particularly handsome cats. There was a fluffy female with lovely gray and white markings whom Pat called ‘Pink’. Pat once told the woman on Clemow that she really liked ‘Pink’ and the woman replied that her proper name was ‘Betty’, but Pat could call her ‘Pink’ if she wanted.

And there was a large, distinguished-looking, but timid gray male, whom Pat called ‘Jake’.

When they were hungry, Pink and Jake would come to our back deck. Pink was the designated ‘beggar’. She would plead for a handout in the most outrageous way, meowing, rolling over, licking her lips and rubbing against the door.

But they were wild cats. As soon as we started to open the French doors with some food, the cats would jump down on the ground until we had left the deck. Then Pink would jump up and would have her fill while Jake watched from the deck railing, swallowing quietly and hoping there would be something left for him. (We always made sure Jake got something to eat.)

We enjoyed the cats. It was like having two cats but without the litter box.

From time to time, one of the cats from the colony would disappear and there were reports that people were catching them and selling them to laboratories.

But Pink and Jake came regularly to our deck, summer and winter.

One winter, we had a succession of snow storms. There was so much snow that the people behind us hired a man to clean the snow off their garage so that the old structure wouldn’t collapse.

The weather finally cleared but there were no visits from Pink or Jake. The woman on Clemow phoned and asked if we had seen them. She wondered, as we did, whether they were now in a laboratory somewhere.

A few days later, I was looking at the drifts of snow in our backyard, drifts so high they covered almost the whole of the side window in the garage, except for a little patch at the upper left corner of the window.

And then I saw some movement inside the window.

A cat’s head!

Our kids got snow shovels, and plowing through the drifts found that the person who had cleared the snow off our neighbour’s roof had thrown some of it between the two garages.

The snow had blocked the cats in our garage.

The kids cleared the snow and one after another the cats streaked out of the garage.

Pink and Jake had lost weight but were otherwise OK.

We and the woman on Clemow wanted to tell our neighbours this miraculous survival story but not everyone liked the cats. They didn’t like the way the cats used their flower beds as litter boxes. They didn’t think we should be feeding them.

Looking back, I can’t recall a single problem with mice at our Glebe house, thanks I am sure to the cats.

Now, we did have a problem with rats coming up our toilets from the sewer, but that’s a story for another time.

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See you next Sunday for Posting #25 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.