Now that's a sandwich!

It's tomato time at Falling Downs. Like everything else, the tomatoes are coming in a little late this year, but talk about a bumper crop! There's nothing like a fresh-off-the-vine garden grown tomato. They're a completely different dining experience than the store-bought tomato. Cut 'em up in thick slices and put them on a slab of fresh sourdough bread with nothing but butter and a sprinkle of salt, and you've got a dining experience to die for.

Spent the afternoon at Cedar Hill Park. It was a glorious late summer day, and our beach neighbours were a really big family from one of those Hutterite cults... Amish or Mennonite, they all look the same to me. My old pal Lippert, may he rest in peace, used to refer to them as "stinkers," which I suppose could be seen as a derogatory term. Not that he was averse to trading with them for mutual benefit.

Jimmy used to have a side gig running a not-quite-legal egg operation. Quite a number of local restaurants used to source their eggs from his farm. When the laying hens ran out of gas, he'd trade them to the Amish for whatever was on offer, be it apple pies or cedar fence-posts. Those wore out hens would be in pickle jars by the end of the day, and we'd be homeward bound chowing down on fresh-baked pies.

Our neighbours came to the beach fully equipped for waterfront fun. That included an aluminum boat with a good sized Merc outboard and a couple of kayaks. My reaction to seeing Amish teens paddling by in their long skirts and head coverings is pretty much the same as when I saw those Hindi women in colourful saris paddling a canoe in one of our provincial parks - anyone who can do that obviously belongs here.

I'd been tossing sticks into the water for old Boomer, but they were too small to get her attention. I finally found a piece of cedar tree trunk about eight feet long. That got her into the water. Unfortunately, she grabbed it at the one end, and the seven and a half feet of cedar hanging out the other side of her snout acted as a rudder of sorts, heading her hard to port instead of coming back to shore. She was basically swimming to Wiarton with her prize!

She would have drowned long before she made landfall, had one of the Amish kids not kayaked out, grabbed the other end of her tree trunk, and guided her to shore.


That's my Canada; a little short on fatuous virtue signalling, but long on decent folks helping one another out, no matter what their background.