It is not the "Sickly Season"

It is not the “sickly season” now. There were sickly seasons, deathly sickly seasons, in Newboro, or as it was once called, "The Isthmus”.

Robert W. Passfield tells me in his Military Paternalism, Labour, and the Rideau Canal Project  (2013),  that in 1828 almost all of the men working on the Rideau Canal were sick with Malaria. In Kingston Mills the mortality rate reached 13%.

At the Isthmus, in 1831, the "swamp ague" and "remittent typhus" poisoned people as they worked to scrape and quarry a canal, to push back the forest, drain the swamps, and tend to their families. Fifty-one artisans of the 7^th Company of the Royal Engineers,(RE) their Captain Cole R.E., and two members of the Commissariat Department were at the Isthmus that sickly summer. With them were twenty-seven women, and forty-six children, of the 7th Company, and two camp followers. Within two weeks, 50.9 % of the men, 40% of the women, and 43% of the children were ill with "swamp ague”. Eight of the artificers were diagnosed as having “remittent typhus”.

Dr. William Kelly ordered all but a handful left to guard the stores, to evacuate to a site just completed by Bell Richardson & Co: The Narrows. 

I think especially of these people when I go to the Narrows, or when I watch birds at my feeder in the comfort of my home on “The Isthmus.” 

~*~*

Snowy day at The Isthmus:

Just for fun

"You mirror me, and  I’ll mirror you, and we will mirror together,

You mirror me and I’ll mirror you, in cold and wintry weather."

Red-bellied woodpecker

Nuthatch

They travel together

At the Narrows Nov. 20 2014

I can show you morning

When I was nine years old my father introduced me to Nina and Fredrick. I sang my heart out along with those musicians and often would slow down doing the dishes, just so I could sing and sing and sing. One of the songs I particularly liked was “Seven Daffodils”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmHQodSD610 . The line "I can show you morning," has stayed with me all my life and on mornings like this when I lift my eyes from the computer to see a ruby sky, I grab my jacket, pull it on over my night dress and robe, stay shod in slippers, holler to Alanagh and Molly and head to the lake.

It is hard to turn away from the living sky, however something made me do it this morning, and in doing, I saw the full moon behind translucent clouds,  fading in the advancing light.

I am unsure if ever I will be able to convey the peace and comfort I feel watching a rising sun that causes the sky to blush and the lake to respond in kind. Nor will I ever be able to send to  you the sound of a loon on the sweep, the squawk of a heron rising from the reeds, and the gulls calling overhead as they glide high.  I can, however share with you, how immeasurably grateful for these moments in my life and wish you many of the same.