A good heavy rainstorm yesterday (although the wind was not so nice!) and the garden has really perked up as had the grass. We could use another rain like that soon.
I am really finding the online Church Service very much to my liking. Yesterday we sang two old favourites of mine and having the musical accompaniment with the tablet is really great. Perhaps I was always meant to be an online person but the technology had to catch up to my inner nature!
Today is a cleaning day so inside for a change. It still looks like rain here so that works well anyways.
I think the walnut tree grew in the rain as well At the start of the spring after the leaves had come out the tree stretched across half of the first pane of the window in my workroom. It has now stretched across that entire pane and is into the next pane. I wonder if I will be able to see the sky next year!
We are into the dog days of Summer. This is a beautiful start with the heavy rain to help hasten the crops along to fruition. Not being a gardener in nature, all of this gardening has been an interesting interlude in my life. It is now nine years since I started doing the heavy work in the yard. But I have lightened it quite a bit the last couple of years. There are some things that I just do not do. They are too heavy for me and in another five years it will be all grass except for the beds along the edges, the raspberry bushes and the elderberry bushes. I can not do all of that for sure and so cut back every year.
Inside we are still downsizing but COVID-19 has interrupted that process as we can not get rid of some of the things at the moment. Once that starts up again the number of things to dust and clean will diminish steadily. That is perhaps the secret to growing old. When the end of our days come we should have no more than what we came into the world with perhaps although that isn't possible but we can certainly minimize what we have for our inheritors to take care of or eliminate as necessary.
I have a box full of letters that my mother sent to me over twenty five years. I have scanned them but still have not destroyed the originals. Somehow it seems like something that should be able to survive. She always used good notepaper so there isn't any yellowing of the paper. I have placed all the letters into an acid free box and separated each letter with a piece of acid free paper. Perhaps in the future with all of her grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc there will be one that becomes interested in her as a person and would enjoy having those letters in their hands. It seems wrong to deprive my mother of having such a descendant and wrong to deprive the descendant of feeling the handwriting on the paper of those original letters. I am not really a "keeper" of things but genealogy pursuit has taught me to have more respect for what our ancestors have passed to us whether in ancient records over which they had no control or in the stories that passed down or in the items that I now hold as custodian of their personal effects given to me at various times throughout my life.
I have the engagement ring of my great grandmother Grace (Gray) Pincombe which my mother wore as something old at her wedding, I wore as something old at my wedding, my daughter did the same and one of her cousins. I was given the ring at my Confirmation in the Anglican Church. The little opal that was in the ring was a tiny bit loose so after I was married I decided to have the ring repaired and I purchased a new opal and the small opal that had been in the ring was cemented to the new opal and the claws slightly built up to accommodate the new stone. So the same but refurbished. When my mother was given the ring the stone was replaced at that time as well but I think (and the jeweler examining the stone said the same) that part of that stone had cracked and broken away (opals are very sensitive) and that was why it was loose. Eventually that ring will belong to my grandsons to do with as they please but I will tell them the story of the ring so that it might mean a lot to them as well. Grace Gray was born in 1839 and she died in 1886. She had five children as far as I can determine with my grandfather being the only child to survive to adulthood. His sister died at 13, his brother was an infant and two died at birth.
One of the items not yet mentioned about Grace (Gray) Pincombe was that she was first cousin to Sir John Carling. Her mother Mary Routledge was a sister to the mother of Sir John, Margaret (Routledge) Carling. It is amazing perhaps that in my single tiny Canadian line of three people that they were all related to Sir John Carling (Grace, her son John Routledge Pincombe and of course my mother (and myself)). All the rest of my ancestors were born in England and all the ancestors of my Canadian ancestral line were also born in England (except for my mother, her father and his mother).
