Leaving London

We said gooddbye to London Ontario, our home for the last four years, on July 24 this summer as we set off for Greenwood, Nova Scotia. It was a hard thing to say goodbye for both of us, but especially for my wife Kay. A gardener invests labour and hope and love in a place. I always enjoyed touring the garden with Kay, learning what had grown that day, getting her commentaries on various plants and learning, as best I could, to tell the difference between shasta daisies and bergamot.

This video was taken on our last day there, and shows part of what Kay gave up o follow me on my mad adventure.



This is Kay with the Tinge pine. It's a white pine that was given to us by the late Tom Robson, who I was blessed to meet when I served the congregation of St. George's, Middlesex Centre. Tom and Inge were like parents to both of us, and their little home in the middle of the cornfields was an oasis to me. Of course, we called the tree the Tom and Inge pine, or the "Tinge" pine. They never got to visit our house, but they had a picture of the tree, when it was much smaller, on display in their home. Tom and his wife Inge both passed away in 2007, and we were very sad to leave their tree behind us.



More views of Kay's garden:





The two of us as a ghostly reflection in our patio window:



With my son John just before we left:



And crammed into our Kia Rio, "Der Ratte". John, me, Kay, and a back seat full of Kay's plants from the garden. It was sort of like that old SF movie Silent Running, about the guy in the greenhouse spaceship who tries to save Earth's last plants. We left London on May 24, after phenomenal help getting the house clean by our friends Bill and Hilda Bonner. Four days later, we pulled into Nova Scotia (to be continued).