a new home

hmmm, the joys of moving, packing up ones life and challenging the threshold of familiarity. An interesting fork in the road abounds at every new house-sitting opportunity, and this is no different than the others!

Slade and I will spend 7 weeks in the small Mennonite village of Hawkesville, just 25 minutes from the city. Close enough to convenience but worlds away from life as we know it. With this housesit, we have a new member of the family to care for … a blind Siamese kitty named Tsumi. She’s really adorable but incredibly skittish and scared. It’s so unnerving and heartbreaking to see her run frantically away from the sounds of our footsteps. In her flee, she runs into walls, furniture, screen doors. Normally, she knows this house inside out and has memorized the nuance of every crack, but in ‘flight mode’, she’s rather disorientated. Truly heart wrenching, because until she trusts us, there is nothing we can do, but water and feed her, brush her if she allows and be mindful of her every move (when visible that is!).
It is so neat to being engulfed in a community where it feels that I’ve stepped back 40 years in time. The sound of steel banded wheels on the cobbled pavement, harnessed by healthy Mennonite-owned horses, has me astounded every time … It sounds like a train passing by, every time.