1866

photograph: "Heads Up" - sunflowers near Christ Church, Upper Canada Village © 2006 wizenedeye.com

I can't get enough of Upper Canada Village. The creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway flooded several small towns and thousands of buildings that stood near the river's low-lying shores, and this Canadian Heritage Park was created as an attempt to preserve and commemorate a part of what was lost.

The Village is a re-creation of a typical rural community of southern Ontario in the year 1866. Some of Upper Canada Village's buildings were moved from areas soon to be flooded; others came from nearby towns and are representative of structures from the period; a few buildings are newly constructed using lumber milled at the water-powered sawmill in the Village. To go there is to step back in time (minus the worries of that age, of course).

I love to visit the seamstress or the miller or the cooper; love watching the piglets run free. I smile and nod approval to the gardener in one of the healthy-looking, weed-free vegetable gardens, note the goldenrod-dyed hand-spun wool yarn at the weaver’s, and admire the beautiful quilt being pieced in one of the log farmhouses. I sniff in the smell of freshly sawn boards at the water-driven mill. The St. Lawrence River flows nearby, the sun is ripening this summer’s abundance of apples and pears, and for an afternoon I forget about global warming, oil dependence and wars.

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