The log lady

One of my stops on the long road to Falling Downs was in the quaint Ontario town of Mildmay.

The day I moved into my place there my buddy Kipling, who was helping me move, looked up at the water tower and remarked that it "looks like Mildew from here."

Indeed.

The locals were an insular lot. The original settlers in the area were German catholics. That was a tribe that disproved Max Weber's ruminations about the Protestant work ethic fifty years before Weber thought about it.

So in the six or seven years that I called Mildew home I often said hello to the old-school Germans who still spoke German amongst themselves.

Never did I get a hello back.

Across the street from me lived an elderly German woman. Heard from the neighbors that she was hard of hearing. Every time my path crossed hers I wished her a good day in a raised voice. There was never a response. I assumed she was just another conceited German settler.

One night after I'd lived in the town for quite a few years I was in the yard building a fire in the fire-pit. My children were with me and we were setting up for a marshmallow and weiner roast. At the time this was still permissable in small-town Ontario.

We're sitting around the fire and out of the dark comes the mute old German woman from across the street, with an armfull of logs. In perfect English she says "I saw your fire and I thought you could use these. I switched to natural gas and don't need them anymore."

Holy shit!

She wasn't mute, she wasn't deaf, she wasn't a snob...

Just goes to show how wrong you can be about your neighbors.