This is a story from last year, but some of you may not know it, or not know all the details. You have probably heard the name Primo at some point. In honour of spring, here is Primo’s story, from Mathew Ingram:

A neighbour borrowed one of the unused fields not far from the house, building a pen there for some sheep. One of the sheep was Bella (who, confusingly, has the same name as our neighbours' dog). She gave birth to three lambs, and we called the first-born Primo. Right off the bat, there seemed to be something not quite right about Primo.

A neighbour borrowed one of the unused fields not far from the house, building a pen there for some sheep. One of the sheep was Bella (who, confusingly, has the same name as our neighbours' dog). She gave birth to three lambs, and we called the first-born Primo. Right off the bat, there seemed to be something not quite right about Primo.

Apparently, it's rare for sheep to have three lambs, so one lamb often gets short-changed, and in this case, it was Primo: he was small and weak and looked sort of hunched-over. Soon his mom shunned him completely, and even started knocking him down, as if to see if he was strong enough to remain with the flock. Becky and our youngest daughter Zoë started bottle-feeding him. His owner built a little pen near the house for him, and he pretty much started living with us. Bella the dog was very protective of him, and they became best friends.

Around Mothers' Day, something strange happened. Primo had always been weak and wobbly, but one morning he couldn't get up at all. It was as if his legs had turned to rubber. We Googled things like "lamb whose legs don't work". We found that he might be lacking selenium, which can cause a white-muscle disease similar to muscular dystrophy. We gave him a selenium shot. Becky found an animal shelter with a lamb with similar symptoms. They cut holes in a shopping bag so they could carry him and his feet could touch the ground. We did that too.

It worked for a while, but he outgrew the bag. Becky and Zoë carried him around in a wheelbarrow, and propped him up with pool noodles. We even carried him up onto the deck at dinner time. Frances from KCC suggested putting him in the pond, as a kind of hydro-therapy. Soon after that he started to sit up, then he stood for a bit, next thing he tried to walk but fell down, then he started falling less and less, and soon he was running.

We let him have sleepovers with his flock to readjust and to see that they accepted him. Eventually he stayed for good, and now he's just a regular old sheep who smells like a wool sweater you left out in the rain.

Book Nerds Of KCC -Alan MacLeod

Do you like the idea of reading a book and then having somebody to talk about it with? Do you enjoy the pleasure of conversation as a path to community in KCC? Would you like to have some fun while talking about some great books? All right, this is the group for you.

The KCC Book Club meets via Zoom on the last Saturday of the month at 7pm. There are members who have been in book clubs before as well as those who have never had the experience. We start with open-ended questions like…What did you like about this book?…What surprised you about this book? Not a lot of work is involved, only the pleasure of reading the book. It’s meant to be fun, not a chore!

We have met twice so far, and enjoyed discussing, “All My Puny Sorrows,” by Miriam Toews and “How To Pronounce Knife” by Souvankham Thammavongsa. KCC members were engaging, nice and funny, what a bonus! Best of all, they cared about the books and offered different perspectives and ideas about them. This club is first and foremost about community building.

We try to use the Book Bag selections from the Peterborough Public Library, but do not restrict ourselves to this source. Patrice sends out the zoom invitations, so saddle up, bring a glass of your favourite beverage, and join us on the last Saturday of the month (PJs are okay!).

Beautiful and Cozy -Myra Hirschberg

I started making quilts 40+ years ago. First, as a way to connect with a group of creative friends who met every week to work on projects, drink wine, and share ideas for saving the world. I made creative artsy quilts for myself and some commissions. Then my friends started marrying (wedding presents!) and having babies (baby gifts!) Then I ran out of recipients and gradually abandoned quilt making. But over several moves, I continued packing and unpacking my (ridiculously extensive) collection of fabrics, threads, tools, and gadgets (there’s a saying “the one who dies with the most fabric, wins”) on the theory that some day, some time, I’d get inspired to start again. That was many years ago.

Then came COVID. The call went out to sewing folks to make and donate masks - lots of masks. In those endless early days of isolation, this was the ideal job to fill my time and - even better - use up some of my fabric. As the masks churned out, and the leftover scraps piled up, I decided a quilt using those scraps would make a perfect memento of this year. So, as the autumn came on and the days shortened, I pulled out those old tools and threads, dove into my pile of scraps, and this is the result.

Now I need a name for my quilt. So far, friends have suggested:
Pandemic Quilt
COVID Calamity Quilt
Isolation Comfort Quilt
Faces of Community Quilt
More ideas gratefully accepted!


This one is a “round robin” quilt made by a group of quilters who met on the internet. Each of us made a centre (in this case, I made the hot pepper wreath) and mailed it to the next person in the group, who added on to it and sent it further around the circle. So, for six months, we each received someone else’s quilt to work on each month, and at the end, we each got our own quilt back.

If anyone wants to get together for a virtual sewing/crafts/schmoozing circle, please do let me know 😉.

Equity Member interview -- meet Aukje Byker

Aukje was born in a chicken coop. Well, technically. She was born in Friesland, the Netherlands on her grandparent’s farm. There was a shortage of housing after the war, so her parents lived in this building, which was registered as a chicken coop.

Her father wanted to farm and her grandparents' farm wasn’t big enough for all of them. They emigrated to Canada. Her brother was 4 years old and she was 3 months. They knew someone in Drayton, Ontario and the Dutch Reformed Church there helped them settle. Her father worked on farms and saved enough money to buy a farm in Drayton.

After 5 years, her parents realized how hard it was to make a living farming. A friend, who worked at Stelco, told them there were lots of good jobs there, and the family moved to Hamilton, where Aukje grew up. These days, Hamilton is an up-and-coming, gentrifying city and Aukje says, “Just when it started to get interesting, I left.”

Aukje dropped out of high school after grade 10. Her family were poor, working class people and had no expectation of university. She assumed she would get married someday, so didn’t see the value in going to university. She decided to become a hairdresser and only needed grade 10 for her 2 ½ year apprenticeship. After working another ½ year, she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. She found another job delivering laundry, driving a small van.

When she turned 16, she met a guy at church. She married him when she was 19. Her parents were glad she found a Dutch boy who went to church – they saw her as kind of wild and were happy she was settling down. The marriage lasted 3 years. Once they separated, her father told her he never trusted her husband. “Why didn’t you tell me then?”, she asked. He said, “Really, would you have listened to me?” No, she admitted.

She got another delivery job and eventually worked a quarry weigh scale. When no one was there, she read books. She said Betty Friedan was an eye opener. She realized her life would not be taken care of by a man. She got her grade 11/12 at night school.

Aukje went to McMaster University as a mature student at age 24, studying sociology and social work. She did some travelling so it wasn’t a straight run through her degree. She joined Crossroads, which sent students to 3rd World countries for the education and experience. She ended up in India for 3 ½ months. Finding a placement didn’t go well – she was getting sick a lot. She did one placement helping women learn to sew (so they could start their own businesses), but that didn’t last long. She spent a week living with an Indian family. Her placement time ended and she travelled for a month on her own. She finds Indian culture fascinating because it is hard to understand; she feels she really only learned bits and pieces of it.

Just before going to India, she met a guy at a party and fell in love. They wrote letters while she was away. When she came back, she moved in with him on the farm he rented. They never married – she didn’t want to after having been married once – and had 3 children; two boys and a girl.

She did finish her degree. Aukje met a woman who worked at Mohawk College, who suggested she apply as a sessional. She was hired and continued as a sessional for a job readiness training course for people in the community who were not very well educated, but looking for work. Eventually, she was hired full-time.

When she retired from Mohawk College, she had done a lot of different things there over the years. She worked in a literacy program, took an ESL course and started teaching ESL. She loved the students, but didn’t love the work and it was not her strength – spelling and higher-level grammar were difficult – and she only taught the lower levels.

Facing a possible layoff, Aukje went back to school to get her Masters in Counselling. Two years before finishing, she and her husband split up, so she was a single mom with 3 kids. “It was tough, but doable,” she says. She taught for 20 more years at Mohawk -- job readiness training, and in the Social Service Worker program.

In those years, she and her partner, with his sister and her family, bought a 57-acre farm just outside Hamilton. It had a big farmhouse and they added onto it. Another friend built a place in the barn for himself. This was Aukje’s first experience of co-living. It was great for the kids, who had a lot of freedom, and it gave the parents some too. Christmas was always wonderful. They hadn’t really worked out all the details, and she instituted a “family meeting” once a month for discussions. When things were going well, it was fine, but if things weren’t…it was problematic. That’s why, when she joined KCC, she insisted it was really important to decide how to work/live with each other.

Aukje’s eldest son now has 2 boys – 6 and 9 years old, and they live just behind her in Peterborough. Before moving to be close to her grandchildren, she had visited the city a lot and liked it.

She is pretty handy. In one of the programs she taught – Women in Trades and Technology – the students took shop classes. She took those classes with her students so she would know what they were learning. She used those skills in all the houses she has lived in. If she doesn’t know how to do something, she looks it up on YouTube.

Aukje loves to read, play board games, hear live music and dance. She is a vegetarian. She once belonged to a women’s Wiccan group, but has been a Unitarian for about 30 years. She now goes to the Unitarian Fellowship in Peterborough.

Aukje is a very Dutch name. She knows it’s hard and it doesn’t bother her too much if it’s mispronounced (she’s so used to it!), but (hint, hint) she would like people to learn to pronounce her name (Ow-kye) if they are going to spend a lot of time together.

Introducing… Tom Calwell

Tom and Myra have spent the last few weeks in his sister’s sugarbush. It’s the first year he’s helped out and I asked if he enjoys it. He likes being out in the woods; when starting the snow was a foot deep, but by the last week it was slippery mud and leaves. It’s a bit tiring for a back, arms and legs not used to carrying 5-10 gallons of sap. But what sweet, sweet pain: in the end he gets all the maple syrup he could want.

Tom grew up in Glencoe; a small farming community. His parents opened a hardware store and he grew up working there; from grade 8 on it was mostly repairing things – windows, bikes, lawnmowers, cutting glass and screens. Around grade 3 (8 years old!) he started cooking the family dinners as his parents worked until 6pm. He has 3 brothers and 1 sister and he is the second oldest.

From 1977-1982, Tom went to the University of Waterloo studying Systems Design Engineering. What’s that? It’s a way of looking at problems. Everything you design is the system and everything around that is the environment and you have to make the system work with all the inputs and outputs from/to the environment that affect it. The theory can be applied to any type of problem. He did co-op jobs in Ottawa tracking satellites, in Downsview reading weather satellites, in Scarborough developing a new mixer for paint pigments.

His first job out of school was in Kapuskasing doing cold weather testing of cars, tanks, chainsaws, snowmobiles. It was a different kind of job where he worked 12-16 hours days, 7 days a week from December to March/April when it was cold, and then get the summers off. He would leave and travel around Canada visiting folk festivals across the country. He had a truck he could sleep in the back of. He saw a lot of Canada. He lived in Kapuskasing for 6 years.

His next job was in Toronto at the airport designing, testing and certifying fuel control systems for jet aircraft engines. He lived in Brampton because it was 10 minutes from work. He did this job from 1989-2002, when he retired – 6 months before his 45th birthday! That had been his plan all along; he wanted to retire by 45. He didn’t spend a lot of money on vacations and extravagances. He never flew; he drove. He was making more money than he needed to live on. He’d bought a house in Brampton and paid it off in 7 years. The things he liked to do did not have big expenses.

He didn’t really like living in Brampton; there weren’t a lot of social things going on there, so he would go into Toronto for that. One of the things he found was traditional dancing – English country dancing and contra dancing. English country dancing has a long line of couples; you and your partner move along and dance with every other couple in line. When it moved to New England the music was much faster (jigs & reels, Quebecois music, southern old-time music) with the same formation.

He would travel to dance weeks around Canada and the U.S. and met Myra in a West Virginia dance week in 1993. She was living in Brooklyn and they met on the dance floor. She figured nothing would come of it, but they arranged to meet at a number of different dance events and got together quite a bit. Myra moved to Canada in 1995. She was working in HR and negotiating a severance package for the employees who volunteered to leave. And then she took it!

She lived with him in Brampton and they both agreed that when they retired, they would leave and find somewhere where there was more of a community. Tom doesn’t like big cities and Myra has always lived in the heart of a big city, but what she likes about that is the little neighbourhood community things. They picked Peterborough because it’s one of the few places in Ontario where the downtown is still alive with some sort of social community. It also has a dance group that combines English and contra dancing and every month there is a dance – except in the summer when everyone is outside.

They have another house in Asheville, NC. Most years they go in November, which is more like Sept/Oct here, and again in Feb/Mar. Asheville is a centre of the Appalachian arts revival – it has a huge amount of arts, crafts, live music and dance and lots of nice hiking in the mountains. Both he and Myra call traditional dance and they would go down and call dances in the area, so they knew people before they bought the house.

Tom is the only one of his siblings without kids. In all he has 19 nephews and nieces and step nephews/nieces. They are mostly nephews, as in all the family there are 3 girls amongst a whole load of boys. They all live in Ontario. The next generation is starting now and he has 9 great nieces and nephews. In normal times, they all get together a couple of times a year. There are 4 weddings backed up now. Tom does stained glass, so for each wedding he does a window that depicts the couple’s interests (if possible). He says he has 4 windows backed up too. He’s gonna be busy after this is all over!

Tom and Myra are doers and makers. He says, “I’ve been retired since I turned 45, I’ve got the time.” Aside from stained glass, he turns wooden bowls and other woodworking, does home renovations, makes corn brooms and has a pottery wheel and kiln. They make their own cheese when they can get good milk (in Asheville), and bake bread every second day. They garden quite a bit at their own home, in a community garden and at a friend’s farm. He fishes in the summer – goes out in a kayak around sunrise for 2 hours -- catching mainly bass and freezing or smoking them. He doesn’t catch more than they can eat in a year. Both like to cook and have visited Thailand, Vietnam and Italy to take cooking classes. They like to share their knowledge and teach many of these things in Peterborough.