Yesterday evening, while walking around the yard, I was followed by a little beast!

I was even able to pick him up and pet him for a bit.  I dragged the end of a stick on the ground that he and his mother had a blast trying to catch, and I caught him (her?  still don’t know).  He was tense about it, but not freaking out, which is progress!

I found that the plums are now ripe.

These tiny little plums are almost all pit.  If I were to do something with them, I would be harvesting them now.

I might just leave them for the birds this year.

I can think of a number of things to do with them, but with so many other things of higher priority for this, our first summer here, I just don’t see it happening.

We had an unexpected visit from my mother, yesterday.  She called about coming over in the late afternoon.  I told her when I needed to leave to pick up my daughter from work, and she said she wanted to come to visit the farm and her house.

Not us, of course.

Now, had she not called when she did, we would have left earlier to go to the dump, first, but that got skipped entirely.

I got my dad’s walker out for her to use when she arrived, and we waited.

And waited.

My older daughter and I waited as long as we could before finally leaving to get her sister.  We’d almost reached the highway when we passed my mother, going the other way.  So we turned around and followed her home.

In the end, my older daughter stayed to tour the yard with my mother while I quickly got her sister.  Then, when it was time for her to take her medications, we went inside so she could have something to drink and eat with them.  We sat and talked for a while, and then she left.

Now, for those who haven’t been following this blog from the start, my mother asked us to move onto the farm to take care of it (and the bills) for her.  The house had been empty for about 2 years after my father went into a nursing home, then passed away some 6 months later, and she had moved off the farm about 2 or 3 years before then, to the senior’s centre she is in now.  It is a mutually beneficial arrangement between herself and us.

My mother, however, has a lot to do with why we moved away from the province in the first place.  And while it was a “good” visit, it was still incredibly draining.  There is always a constant string of passive aggressive digs and insults, and even her compliments are often backhanded insults.

It started as she was getting out of her car in the yard, as I stood with the walker ready for her, and her first comments were on the flowers by the fence; was I watering them?  We hit 36C that afternoon, so of course they were wilting, and I certainly wasn’t going to water them in the heat of the day, so I just made a comment about doing it in the evening.  As she was walking with my daughter around the yard, the reached one of the crab apple trees with ripe apples.  She filled the seat of the walker with them, saying how we need to use them.  To make dessert.  We don’t really make desserts, she was told.  Oh, that’s because we buy dessert.  No.  We don’t really buy dessert, either.  Then off she went on a rant about how people waste their money on things they could do themselves, how she came to Canada with nothing but her 10 fingers, and how Canadians don’t know how to save money.  That my daughter just told her that we DON’T buy these things went right over her head.  Then she found out we hadn’t processed the apples she’d given us before and was surprised about that.  Well, I had put them in vinegar water to clean them and intended to make an apple cider with them that evening, when it cooled down a bit, so they were ready and waiting, but that ended up not happening.  By the time she left, I wasn’t going to start on something that would take 3 hours of simmering.

And on it went.  She started weeding a tire planter next to the grapes that isn’t being used, then started pulling up the flowers also next to the grapes.  I commented on the flowers and she said, oh, they’re just weeds.  Well, I LIKE those flowers.  So do the hummingbirds.  Meanwhile, when my daughter told her about wanting to transplant the spruce trees she’d planted at the chain link fence, so they wouldn’t wreck the fence, she said not to not worry about it, just leave them.

Even when we went into the house, as my younger daughter came down to join us after changing out of her uniform, my mother immediately started commenting on how she could stand to lose a few pounds, before launching into how the doctor wanted my mom to loose some weight before her surgery next month.

Even the sharing of things is a problem.  I’ve told her time and again, not to bring leftovers for the outside cats, yet she still does it.  After she left, I found the plastic container she’d left outside, with fuzzy looking potatoes in it.  She keeps bringing us bread that she buys in the bargain bin, because it’s too much for her to eat by herself, but it’s old and stale and we usually end up having to throw it out (no, we don’t give bread to the cats or birds; it’s bad for them).  She brought us a jar of fresh pickles she’s just made using cucumbers my sister gave her.  The brine is cloudy.  Now, I’ve read that the cloudiness could just be from the tap water used, but I’ve had her cloudy pickles before, and … no.  I am not confident that they are good, no matter how delicious she insists they are.

She also brought some tea that she finds too strong, a bottle of white glue she bought for herself, forgetting she already had some, so she thought I could use it (I have lots, for different surfaces, in my crafting supplies), and the little blue stuffed bunny she won at bingo that she decided to give us, even though I’d already told her we don’t need more “stuff”, and please don’t give us any more “stuff.”

At least she didn’t bring the talking baby doll.

Then when I brought out the little pitcher of chokecherry vinegar I put up, just for her, and even mixed up a glass so she could taste it, I got excuse after excuse about how she “doesn’t drink any of that anymore” (in response to my giving instructions on how much to add to water, ginger ale or club soda).  When I was able to figure out she meant pop drinks, I commented that she does still drink ginger ale – she’s tried to make me drink it at her place, so I knew it was the one type she does drink – so she went on about how she’s supposed to be losing weight, as if the chokecherry vinegar would somehow cause her to gain weight, and so on.  She even tried to use the pitcher it was in as a reason not to take it.  I told her I got it from a dollar store.  I also told her she didn’t have to take it if she didn’t want to, but that I had made up the little pitcher of it, just for her, because I thought she would like it.  In the end, she did like the drink (though she fished out the ice), and as she was leaving, she even remembered it and asked for it.

*sigh*

Of course, there was more.  I still feel drained from the visit.

I’m just thankful it was one of her good days.

Out of the entire visit, the only positive thing that came out from her was to use the word “nice” in response to how things looked behind the storage house.  I later found out she kept trying, over and over, to find things to criticize, with my daughter playing defense.  Were we going to leave those piles of sticks all over? No, we plan to mulch them.  Oh, there’s a machine that you can put them in and it has cutters… Yes.  We plan to rent one at the end of the year to do that.

Oh, this apple tree used to produce so many big apples!  I used to water it, we need to water it…  Yes, my mother cleaned it up because it was dying and it looks so much better, now!

Oh, I planted all these trees here myself!  Yes, and they were planted too close together and were killing each other, but my mother has worked really hard to clean them up and save some of them.  Ah, I planted them to be a living fence!

Why is that pile of sticks there?  Hey, remember when you couldn’t even see through there?  That’s were all those sticks came from.  Doesn’t it look great now?

What is that stuff over there?  That’s the garbage we’ve been finding all over the yard, that we’ve put all in one place to be hauled away, later.

We do expect this from her.  It’s not a surprise, and while there was a time when it would have been hurtful, it isn’t, anymore.  We just roll with it.

But gosh, does it suck the energy right out.

Speaking of energy…

I don’t have the energy to cook up those apples that I had prepped, so I’ve decided to just juice them.  We had a juicer before we moved and it was among the things we purged, so I was happy to see the exact same juicer here.  I took it out of its box just an hour or so ago and discovered that, while whoever used it last did indeed clean the various inner parts, they did not clean the outside of the machine.

Ew.

I don’t know how many years it’s been since it was used.

Thankfully, it came off fairly easily.

I still plan to simmer the juice with spices later on, but it won’t require hours of cooking and heating up the house during a heat wave, this way!

I guess I should stop procrastinating and get to it… :-/

The Re-Farmer