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The Longest Month of the Year
I dislike the month of February; it just seems to drag on. Winter typically begins in Canada in November. This includes snow, cold temperatures and short days. Now all I want is spring to arrive and unfortunately, that is at least a couple more months away. I know the first day of spring is March 20th, but that means nothing over here.
As you know, April in Britain consists of daffodils in flower and lambs skipping and frolicking in the fields. If we are lucky, spring lasts a couple of weeks in May in Southern Ontario. Then boom, the heat hits. Canada is a country of extremes weather-wise; as we can be in the minus 30’s (°C) in the winter, and be in the plus 30’s (°C) in the summer.
Summer for us lasts from June through August, with lots of heat and even more humidity. I can stand the heat and the humidity just drains me. Also since moving to the Acreage, we don’t have central air conditioning, this old house won’t accommodate it. Luckily for us the summer of 2009 was cool and damp, which to my mind was perfect.
As for my favourite time of year (September and October) the days and nights are cooler; there is crispness in the air. All the leaves are turning on the trees, fall fairs begin, and if we’re really lucky we get an Indian summer, where the weather is just glorious; bug season is over with; yes we have bug seasons over here as well, especially in the summer!!. It’s a time to make you glad you are alive.
HERE I am back again; let’s carry on from last week. So you know why we left Britain for Canada. Here is how we got to Canada. Dh and I went for a week’s vacation in October of 1988 and dh started going door to door looking for a job. Back then there were a lot more jobs available and he was fortunate enough to get a job with a company run by a Dutch guy. He agreed to keep the job open for dh. We came back home applied to emigrate and in May of 1989 we landed in Canada. We moved to a city called Brampton, in Southern Ontario. What an eye opener that was; moving from Appleby with its 2,000 people to a city of a 200,000 people, it’s closer to 500,000 people now. However we settled in there and stayed in that city for seven years. We then moved to the next town called Caledon and lived there for another seven years while the kids went to High School; when they left high school to go to university, we moved back into Brampton again. By the fall of 2008 we knew the kids weren’t coming home to live again, so we decided to do what we had wanted to do for a while and that was move back into the countryside and own some land. That dream came to fruition in May of 2009, when we moved into a 1911 Ontario Farmhouse on five acres of land. To buy this though we had to move nearly an hour north of Brampton, however we are sort of half way between where the two kids live, as one lives north of us and the other south of us. So now we are back to where we started from, we live in a farming area with that small town feel. The only problem is I am a city girl now, so it’s been an adventure living that country dream, and over the weeks you will hear all about it
Until next week…
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