Senior Outreach by Kathie

It’s Saturday morning but I am not at The Pickering Markets, working. It closed permanently. The pandemic took three months in 2020 away from business here, closed. Now a new shutdown affects its ability to stay open, and it closes on December 26, 2020. On a metal kitchen stool my laptop rest, so that I can hear and see a show play while I work. Wash dishes, pause. Sweep, play again. I see UK artist Yinka Shonibare go about making his art. Pause, put recycled items in the bin outside, play on. Brilliant Ideas on knowledge.ca is running in my attempt to find art in my life and in my day. The Brixton Market in London appears and I stop to pay attention. The people, The artist Yinka is shopping at this market. Sourcing for a future art raw material: African fabrics. These materials are his unique signature. I am pulled back to being in the market I knew. I would say Yinka is using a dreaming eye, if he is like me. I did that when I wrote poetry, seeing something in my mind's eye. A ...

  Acadian sisters on December 31, 2020, Tracadie, New Brunswick If you have been fortunate in life to have a best friend from an Acadian community in the Maritimes, Canada, then you may have been the beneficiary of their traditional meals cooked for you on many occasions. My best friend comes from Tracadie and moved back to Moncton about three years ago, after living in Ontario. We have worked together and stayed friends since that fall she arrived in Toronto in 1987.  To learn about people is to know something of their generations-long traditions in cooking. But understand, there are things that go with cooking that define these traditions. On a telephone call to her this week, I asked how her New Year's Eve went. Living in New Brunswick is a better place to live during this pandemic than many other places like my own province and city. There are so few cases of covid-19 in New Brunswick, compared to Ontario, that it seems another world away. This year I feel worlds apart, an...

I have worked with people having an intellectual disability, and been to a Social Role Valorization workshop in 2019 that speaks about the undervalued role people with intellectual disability sometimes experience. Something unfolded while I waited on a hot sunny September afternoon outside Service Ontario in Brampton’s Gateway location to change my health card and licence.  This experience spoke to me about both: a person with this kind of disability and an exceptional Canadian, an employee with Service Ontario. As I stood in the outside queue (a Covid 19 procedure in reopening Service Ontario and any retail place in Ontario now), a young adult man arrived alone about a half hour into my wait. It was around 3:30 pm and the queue closed at 4 pm to process people by their 5 pm closing. The man was distressed by his body language and voice volume. He did not understand the social expectations for waiting your turn in total, but enough that he was able to navigate his way to the front ...

  OPINION READERS' LETTERS Touchstone of our legacies Wed., Oct. 3, 2012 timer 1 min. read Re: History gets a swift reprieve, Sept. 27 This is an Erin Brockovich-type story for Oshawa’s residents. If a bird in the hand is a chimney swift, then delays until the bird flies from its nest are no rescue. This house built by George McLaughlin is a human touchstone of Canadian legacies intertwined. Why care and who is George? Farm life, auto foundations in Canada and our war efforts to save world peace all get told through George and his stone house. A founder of Oshawa up until WWII and brother to Sam McLaughlin, together they built auto transportation. George became known this year as a significant Canadian to the war effort. We experience history in our senses. George designed and built a world-class Arts and Crafts architectural beauty in the 1920's in a stone farmhouse. His design is the inspiration for Minto homes to be built here. Minto will destroy their source. Profit and los...

  Proceeding into the evening twinkle of candle lights on the path down into the Pickering museum Village, our group of fifteen descended into the woods. Forgotten cedar and earthy scents from a light rain immediately fill within you. You are within nature. Tonight I am taking the ‘Spirit Walk.’  Sorry folks. You snooze, you lose and you will have to wait until next September when the volunteer drama group of the museum, Backwoods Players, presents it’s sold out Farmers’s Rebellion of 1837 story again. Our guide in an 1800's costume enters in the darkness to introduce the story and what we can expect. Down the path we go and, we are interrupted by an absentee ‘aristocrat’ landlord of Pickering Township in the 1800’s. No city, no roads, few bridges for the men and women living in the area. The muddy streets into York that receives favour from the Tory leaders of the day. He doesn’t need his land, all extra grants given him for his privilege of serving in the King’s army.  ...

  It wasn’t a ‘Rebellion’ this day When a grade 7 and 8 school bus group rolled into Pickering Museum Village from Toronto for their 1837 Farmer’s Rebellion day experience, little did I know I was the one going to be taught.  That spring day I worked alongside a semi-retired teacher volunteer, in activities the museum has arranged to show young teens about ‘the olden days.’ Students were here to learn about a period in Upper Canada history when change was in the air in its government. The students would experience the outdoor museum village and fresh air, backwoods trees, a river and heritage-period buildings… like a blacksmith shop and feel what life was like then.  Times may be different, but some things never change, only the setting!  Here are some of the olden day presentations we led the students through: Simulating a town hall meeting in a church turned meeting place, students petition their government representatives to listen to their injustices. Their sessi...

On a sunny June day, the grade 3 students of A.G. Bell traveled down the wooden path As a museum educator I get to do the job I love. I came to realize that on each trip, there is something for me to learn also. I observe how much the students enjoy using their five senses and see our day as one of discovery and exploration. I hoped for reflection as that is what a museum means, a place to reflect. Off we went down the path, and I asked the class I was leading to stop and look at the root growth at the base of the cedar trees, and observe the plants they might consider if they themselves had travelled back in time and were the children in a settler family. For the day, they would be all brothers and sisters with chuckles of amusement.  We pat the horse-tail fern that is bending behind a wood trail fence toward our feet. It is one of the oldest plants and was used as a pot-scrubber by the pioneers. It feels hard and rubbery yet soft and grows near water, making it handy and availabl...