May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day.  May songbirds serenade you every step along the way.  May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that's always blue.  And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.

~ Traditional Irish Blessing



Melancthon Township, Ontario. Photo: lbwalker



On a Shoestring ~

When the publisher of a struggling American magazine* asked short-story writer, Dorothy Parker, why she had not come in to do a piece she had promised him, she retorted, "Someone else was using the pencil."

Roy Thompson, patriarch of the great Canadian dynasty, multi-billion dollar, Thompson Newspapers, was known for his "count-every-pencil" accounting.

Herb Mardindale, owner/founder of The Neat Little Bookshop, expressed concern that we could "make enough money."  Herb kept his accounting on a pile of stapled scrap paper, using stubs of pencils.  Herb knew, of course, that our goal was not to become a Canadian dynasty, or certainly not The New Yorker magazine.  Herb, we are coming up on our sixth or seventh year ~ depending on which Cayuga Street location you figure!  The Neat Little Bookshop doesn't collect tax on used books;  we don't earn enough to qualify.

Book people seem happy with modest surroundings ~ a round table where great conversations naturally and spontaneously erupt.   Pencils abound, ratty, chipped with long-ago fossilized erasers.  We will never be trail-blazers in The Neat Little Bookshop, but then no one is counting the pencils either.  

*The New Yorker

DIRTY BUSINESS The Reality of Ontario's Rush To Wind Power *

"When you look at how our legislators created an act that removed the democratic process from Ontario's rural municipalities and at the same time, used taxpayer and electricity ratepayer dollars to open the door to large, largely foreign corporations to exploit Ontario, it is simply astonishing." ~ Jane Wilson, July, 2011

Published by Wind Concerns Ontario, 2011.  http://www.windconcernsontario.org/

Although The Neat Little Bookshop is a used/like-new bookshop, there are certain new books that we are pleased to make available.  DIRTY BUSINESS is one of those books.  Having attended numerous meetings, spoken with local administrators, we support the idea of research and open-mindedness.  Please pick up a copy of this collection of articles and essays.

*Edited by Jane Wilson; contributing editor, Parker Gallant.



John A. Turnbull ~ July 1890 - January 1975*

"I have recollections of taking the old horse down to the bush after we came from school and snaking up a tree to cut up to burn that night.  One night we had nothing but a pile of pine logs on the woodpile and they were soggy and wet.  However, we cut a few blocks off them and split and carried them in.  We went to bed with all our clothes on that night."

*My maternal grandfather ~ lbwalker

"In the very early days of bees ~ this district ~ bees were very common, as the pioneers were rather inexperienced.  When they came to the new country the work that faced them first was so unusual to what they were used to at home and as there was no one to turn to for advice or instruction, it was do-it-yourself if it was to be done at all.  The alternative was starve, and so out of necessity a generation of men were produced that were daunted at nothing.
With the bush and starvation on one side and their wives and small families on the other, they buckled right in to the task ahead of them and relying on each others' help and advice, they learned many things that we of this generation have long forgotten if we ever knew them.
When we think of this country as a dense bush, no roads any place, no cleared land, that faced the settlers about 1840, and then remember it as it was about 1890, we wonder how men did so much in fifty short years."


~ John A. Turnbull (1890 - 1975) life-long resident of East Seneca, Haldimand County.


A Bee ~ East Seneca Church

 Photograph:  J. A. Turnbull, second from right.

Found in the Pages of The Early History of Haldimand County ~ by Russell Harper, published May 1950.

Advertisement in The Caledonia Advertiser

NORTH AMERICAN HOTEL
York, Grand River, C. W.*

The undersigned would beg to intimate to his friends, and the travelling public that he has moved into this well-known House, and furnished and fitted it up in style to accomodate (sic) them as well as they can be in any similar establishment on the River.  His TABLE is always supplied with all the substantials and delicacies of the season and his WINES AND LIQORS are of the choicest kinds.  No pains will be spared to make the sojourn of his guests both pleasant and agreeable.

Commodious stables are connected with the Hotel, and an attentive Hostler is always on hand.

The Stages running between Caledonia and Cayuga call at this Hotel daily.

York, Nov. 1856.  Land Hughson
* Canada West

Grant Stengal Peeling Apples

Ross Makey Making Rope

Peeling Apples & Making Rope at Heritage Day Selkirk ~ Early chores in rural Haldimand

Ross Makey is the author of Mills of Walpole and Rainham.