Various Veins
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The suspense is over. Chancho's Mexican Restaurant opened the doors on Monday in the Sandytown Mall.
Manager Abe Hamm lives in Aylmer, but he's not a stranger in Straffordville. He's a family man, five children, one was at work, maybe more, when I dropped in to get acquainted.
Abe has been involved in baseball teams at the community centre, and hopes the facility is not lost for such activities.
The restaurant has been fully redecorated in bright colours in Mexican mode. A jaunty sombrero on a table in the entryway sets the tone.
Abe is offering a full Mexican menu, refried beans, the whole works. There's coffee and drinks. Come and see for yourself.
A few days ago I met a ladybug in my entry way, and another in the den. Were they looking out the windows? Wouldn't answer the question, but I took it as a sign spring must be on the way. About time!
So there have been no more ladybugs in evidence. Could be a host in the attic, but as long as they behave I won't squash them. In the last century ladybugs were more or less simply beautiful beetles. Kids held them on a finger and chanted, "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children alone."
Then somebody imported a similar species from Asia to eat the aphids that sucked the juice from soy beans. The newcomers resembled the indigenous ones, same colours, a little more streamlined, but man, do they bite!
That's why I might be less tolerant of the two early ladybugs.
That spring's making her way north is shown by the earlier arrival of dawn and later dusk. I noticed the evening change first when I didn't have to find out when I woke in my rocking chair at six whether I'd slept all night or not.
Even more encouraging it is to see the power of sun to thaw the ice from my walkway and from the streets.
I didn't welcome the reminder to change my clocks on Saturday night to DST. Except for the inconvenience of keeping schedules I'd keep to EST. Dad Bowes refused to change his pocket watch years ago when we were tobacco farmers. He wouldn't send us to the fields to prime tobacco at 7 a.m. EDT. It was too dark to assess the ripeness of leaves in the gloom between the rows. Dew soaked us to the skin. If we wore rain gear, sweat soaked us to the skin.
When bonier tobacco plants with leaves like the ears of African elephants displaced the earlier smaller tobacco, at 7 a.m. EDT you couldn't prime a leaf from the stock without breaking its sap-filled spine. In the heat of a kiln those fractures turned a sickly green that lowered the value of the crop. Even at EST it was a problem until the sun wilted the leaves. Have you ever tried to tuck wilted leaves the size of an African elephant's ear into a bundle under your arm? No, I didn't think so. Machines changed all that before most of you were born.
Nothing to do with spring, but when priming machines and bulk kilns ended the hands-on way of harvest, we could gather the fallen leaves from a kiln floor with a six-tined fork and toss them into the metal frames. That filled us old dudes with horror! It just killed any sense of pride in the production of golden leaves for the market.
This sort of nostalgia will annoy the anti-smoking crowd. Heck, they want to take scenes of smoking pipes, Gandalf style, cigars ala Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, George Burns, and cigarettes from movies lest young people be led to take up the habit.
Keeping tobacco out of new movies makes sense. Mutilating earlier films is vandalism.
See you at Chancho's?