Another Intentional Community

by Ralph McKim

This is a “shout out” to another intentional community to which Jean and I belong – the staff, volunteers and supporters that constitute the Kawartha Land Trust (KLT). The intent of this community is to protect the land we love in the Kawartha Region. KLT does this primarily by taking ownership of ecologically significant properties (usually by way of donation) and implementing stewardship plans based on inventories of the lands’ natural features and any specific bequests of the respective donor. In other instances, a property is protected by way of a Conservation Agreement with a private landowner. The property remains in private hands but is subject to protective terms and conditions that are agreed to by both the owner and KLT. The Land Trust then has legal responsibility to see that these terms and conditions are realized “in perpetuity” as ownership changes.

KLT is now implementing an additional strategy – working with willing landowners in a given watershed to help them develop and implement their own stewardship plans apart from any lasting agreement. KLT surveys the property’s flora and fauna, identifies significant ecological features and provides the landowner with a report, including recommendations for enhanced stewardship. In some instances, KLT is able to follow-up with technical assistance either directly or in collaboration with other agencies such as the Ontario Woodlot Association.

The following video, produced by two KLT volunteers -- Sandra Dimock and Bob Orrett -- illustrates how this latest strategy is currently being implemented with landowners in the Fleetwood Creek watershed: vimeo.com/501992811 password klt (lower case).

The Clothesline

-Marg Holland

I like this poem because of our clothesline discussion when we were envisioning what we wanted in co-housing.

A clothesline was a news forecast
to neighbours passing by.
There were no secrets you could keep
when clothes were hung to dry.

It also was a friendly link,
for neighbours always knew
if company had stopped on by
to spend a night or two.

For then you'd see the "fancy sheets"
and towels upon the line;
You'd see the "company table cloths"
with intricate design.

The line announced a baby's birth
from folks who lived inside,
as brand new infant clothes were hung
so carefully with pride!

The ages of the children could
so readily be known;
by watching how the sizes changed,
you'd know how much they'd grown!

It also told when illness struck,
as extra sheets were hung.
Then night-clothes, and a bathrobe too,
haphazardly were strung.

It said, "Gone on vacation now"
when lines hung limp and bare.
It told, "We're back!" when full lines sagged
with not an inch to spare!

New folks in town were scorned upon
if wash was dingy grey.
As neighbours raised their brows
and looked disgustedly away.

But clotheslines now are of the past,
for dryers make work much less.
Now what goes on inside a home
is anybody's guess!

I really miss that way of life.
It was a friendly sign.
When neighbours knew each other best...
by what hung on the line.

by Marilyn K. Walker

Equity Member Interview – Al Slavin

Al was born in Belleville in 1944 at the beginning of the baby boom. Al’s parents were both Westerners. His mother was born near Saskatoon on a farm which her father had homesteaded in 1904. This grandfather was originally from England and a toolmaker. He came to Canada at 20 and spent one year learning to farm by apprenticing. So Al knew one of the original Canadian pioneers! Al’s paternal grandmother died shortly after giving birth to his father; some friends, last name Slavin, offered to take the baby to help out and eventually adopted him.

His father had trained himself as a radio technician in a correspondence course, ending up in Belleville working in a radio repair shop. He eventually started his own business. Al was the 3rd of 8 children, 4 boys and 4 girls. They were never all at home together. Al remembers being the eldest in the house at age 12 and took this as a serious responsibility. He would wake up in the middle of the night and be concerned about fire – he’d get up and check everything and go back to bed. (I vote for Al as fire warden for KCC.)

They moved to the country -- for his first 6 years of school, Al went to a one-room schoolhouse – but moved to back to Belleville, where he finished high school. In this time, his Dad went back to school to become a teacher; and cash being short, Mom took in 3 French Canadian boarders who came to go to business school. This was a great experience; a nice cultural exchange. He spent one New Year’s with one family in Quebec and went to Midnight Mass, ate lots of tourtière and sugar pie and tended the backyard ice rink. Though taking French in high school, his oral skills were still weak. Later, Al, Linda and their kids went to France for a sabbatical year and he learned to use it pretty well then. (The kids were 4 and 6 and enrolled in a French school but they spoke no French on arriving. One day, 2 weeks into school, he asked his daughter what she learned that day, and she said she learned how to ask to go to the bathroom. Al was thinking, “How have you been surviving the last 2 weeks?!”)

He went to the University of Toronto studying Engineering Science (a stream for engineers who will probably end up doing research) and he specialized in physics. He lived in Campus Co-op – student owned and run co-operative housing. It was community run; everyone had to do 4 hours of work/week. He met Linda at this time. They got married in 1967 (54 years!) when he got his BASc. He went on to do his MSc in Physics at U. of T. and then got a scholarship to do his PhD at Cambridge. They travelled all over Britain in their spare time and backpacked in France, “riding their thumbs”.

They came back and Al got a postdoc at McMaster in Hamilton. They adopted their daughter shortly after – it was a “2-week pregnancy” – 2 weeks after going through all the necessaries to adopt, they were told, “We have a baby available, how soon can you take her?”

After the postdoc, Al got a job at Trent University, which they liked because Linda’s family was in Havelock and his was in Belleville. Al taught at Trent 37 years. His area of research was solid surfaces, including looking at atoms. He also got several awards for teaching; the 3M award and the Canadian Association of Physics among them.

They lived in Peterborough for the first year in 1973-74 when they adopted their son. They were actively involved in the anti-nuclear weapons movement; he, Linda and Sheila worked with Project Ploughshares. After that first year, they and his eldest sister’s family decided to buy a house together on a farm; the farmhouse they now live in. It was a communal living arrangement – they had 2 kids and his sister and husband had 2. It was a good experience but, ultimately, they found that their lifestyles were too different, explained thusly: His sister’s family filled the sugar bowl when they found it empty and Al’s filled it when they emptied it. Both systems work well individually, but they don’t mesh.

After his sister and family left, they rented the back part of the house for 15 years. After that, they offered it to anyone who needed it temporarily. Sometimes these were semi-communal living arrangements. Did they farm the farm? One year they had a local farmer plant ½ acre of sweet corn. They sold it everywhere they could; at the end of the lane, at the market, Linda peddled it door to door in town. It was a lot of work for what they got out of it, but rewarding.

They’ve always had a large garden which has given them enough corn, tomatoes and vegetables to eat and freeze for the winter months. In the last 25 years they’ve allowed organic farmers to use some of their land free to both their advantage – Al doesn’t have to cut the weeds and can go pick from their crop as needed. This year a Syrian family with 5 kids also farmed ¼ acre.

Al and Linda have travelled widely. They backpacked in China for 6 weeks before Tiananmen Square. They travelled in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand, Mexico, Morocco and Spain. They feel blessed by the international travel they’ve done and that time spent abroad has given them an international perspective on Canada. Another sabbatical was spent in Berkeley, California when the kids were 10 and 12. Both of their children have some black heritage. In Berkeley, for the first time in their lives, the children felt they didn’t stand out in class. His daughter says that all her life she thought of herself as black, but there she felt she was culturally white and so asked, “What am I?” Currently, a black feminist blog group she belongs to has helped her and her parents understand that some of the experiences she has had were due to racism.

Al and Linda’s daughter and his sister live in Peterborough; their son and partner live in Lindsay. Al has 2 brothers and a nephew who live in Millbrook, and a brother not far north. They get together regularly.

Al does cross country skiing and badminton and plays harmonica. He puts lots of time into climate change activism; he and Linda are involved in For Our Grandchildren and the Peterborough Alliance for Climate Action. KCC takes a lot of his time – “it’s a good group to work with”. None of it feels like hard work – it’s all enjoyable. Spoken like a true activist.

Introducing… Lyn Miller

When I first asked Lyn for an interview, she said she wasn’t sure because there was “nothing much interesting and exciting” to talk about. Well, the following is for your perusal, gentle reader, and see what you think about it.

Lyn was born in 1951 in Kingston; she has an older sister and younger brother. Her brother says, “he was mothered by 3 mothers”. Lyn’s mom did a variety of jobs but was mostly a homemaker; she was a great cook and she handled all the household finances. Her grandfather was a United Church minister; like her grandfather, Dad was a “kind, caring, counselling, intellectual” sort of person. He counselled prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary and eventually became the director of the National Parole Service of Canada and is considered one of the architects of prison change. It was a loving and supportive home.

When Lyn was 2, the family moved to Ottawa where she grew up biking, swimming, singing in choirs, going to church and babysitting. When she started high school, she didn’t get involved in anything, but over time discovered school was a lot more fun when you did – and this inspired her to become a teacher. Eventually she went to the University of Ottawa, studying Physical Education, and on to teacher’s college at Queen’s University.

During university Lyn needed money. Her sister talked her into joining the Naval Reserve. She liked it and ended up staying in the reserves for 20 years, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander. After getting her teaching degree she didn’t work as a teacher for 5-6 years because she was frustrated with the glut of teaching grads who couldn’t get jobs and the cutthroat atmosphere at Queen’s because of it. Lyn decided she “wasn’t going to play anybody’s game” and to lay low until the market changed. She did a lot of short-term work those years, much of it in the reserve; she worked in Kingston, on both Canadian coasts and in England. Lyn eventually left the reserve realizing that even though she loved the people, the work and the learning, it just didn’t fit with who she was as a person – basically a pacifist.

She also went back to school –- to Kemptville Agricultural College where she became a qualified dairy herd worker! Whaaaat? All her life she’d wanted to be a farmer, but she learned it wasn’t really in the cards for someone who didn’t grow up on a farm where you could learn from a young age and your family had already financially committed to it. She would also have had to switch from her favourite subjects of French, English, geography and history to sciences. She did work on a few farms and loved it. So, is KCC going to have a herd of cows then? “Chickens maybe.”

Lyn came to Peterborough in 1980 as a child-care teacher for kids with emotional/behavioural difficulties who lived in therapeutic treatment homes. While there, one of the academic teachers saw a job posting at the Peterborough School Board for a teacher of children with the same sort of problems. They told her she was good at this and should apply and they gave her good references. She got the job and worked in the program for 13 years. Later she taught Grade 3. Then the principal talked her into becoming the kindergarten teacher, saying the best kindergarten teachers have a love of music and books, and Lyn had both. She sang with all her students. She taught kindergarten for 8 years and loved every minute of it. She ended her teaching career with more work in special education. School was more than the classroom. Lyn ran the recycling and composting programs and helped with assemblies, sports and the breakfast club.

Lyn met Judy in 1987 when she applied to sublet the top floor of Lyn’s rented house. Judy arrived in January and by June they were a couple. They had started looking for a house to buy together before this happened – they just knew they were really good friends – and while looking at houses they realized it was love … that was 33 years ago. The house they ended up buying was a renovated church in Westwood. They lived there for 15 years, but eventually sold it as they became more and more involved in things in Peterborough. Although they were active in the Westwood community, they were forever getting in the car – for work, theatre, lectures, concerts, movies, volunteer work. They’ve had 2 houses since, but they have a lot of happy memories in Westwood and Lyn still gets a lump in her throat when she drives by. They are going to be buried at the church there – “we’ll be able to see our house from our burial plot”.

When she retired in 2008, Lyn became more involved in environmental and social justice work. She is active in what is now the One Roof Diner which has been providing a weekly meal to marginalized people for 13 years. Lyn is also part of the Peterborough Food Action Network, LGBTQ organizations, First Nations Reconciliation, Amnesty and the Peterborough Peace Council. She volunteered overseas in 1993-4 for Jamaican Self Help (with Sheila), in 2010 in El Salvador and in 2018 in Sichuan, China, through the United Church.

Cats have been a part of Lyn and Judy’s life for a long time (Griffin and Zephyr are “the kids” right now). She and Judy are “reverse grandparents” – a family adopted them as grandparents to 3 (now) teenagers. The love to travel and have been to South America, Scotland, everywhere in Canada except Nunavut and NWT; the east coast is their favourite place. They do lots of camping and Lyn bikes, swims, gardens, knits and has tried things like pottery and stained glass.

And so, gentle reader, were you bored? I wasn’t!