Summer Days, Driftin’ Away…

August 22, 2024

How is it already the end of August??? As usual, the older I get, the more time seems to be cranking up in velocity, like some horrible reverse-GR effect. Well, I guess I should try to review what I did this summer for posterity, and to hopefully figure out how I can be more productive in the fall…

May was a pretty chaotic start, featuring lots of travel back and forth to Toronto (where my mom lives) and Innisfil (where my sister lives) to see family and reconnect with old friends. We went to Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons, a reconstructed French Jesuit settlement near Midland, for my mom’s birthday. It was an interesting experience: the site obviously was an early component of the settler-colonialism that would come to decimate the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, and tried in some ways to reckon with that, but also was an important archaeological site for French and Catholic culture in the so-called “New World”. The staff were really friendly and popped in to explain the various parts of the site as we wandered around, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the tall wooden wall that surrounded the site and what it said about the relationship the people the staff were acting as had to their Indigenous neighbours.

(left) My sister and nephew feeding one of the site's cows that would have been used mainly for milk back in the day, and (right) my mom in one of the bedrooms of the living quarters the Jesuit priests would have stayed in over the winter.