I have usually been fairly consistent when it comes to observing Remembrance Day – I think it’s an important day to recognize. This year turned out to be more complicated than I had anticipated.
I really liked that the local theatre had a huge poppy wall light in the evenings, and everyone was wearing poppies. So I bought mine. And I could not figure out how to pin it to my coat. After several days (yes, days) of wrestling with it then leaving it on the kitchen counter: I finally googled, ‘how to affix my poppy’ and that was me off and running. Next challenge was what service to attend – after the 2016 incident with a squirrel during the 2 minutes of silence at the Milton cenotaph, I’m leery of letting Scout near anything, but I heard there would be a parade on the Sunday. Perfect, we’d go to that. Except, I couldn’t find it. I wandered around downtown for a while (I’m usually okay asking for directions, but approaching people to ask for the nearest parade felt weird), then gave up and came home. Imagine my surprise seven days later, to come across a parade of bagpipers going past crowds lined along the streets – unlike Canada, where we celebrate things on or before the day of an event, it seems here they celebrate on or after the day. Oh well, I’ll know for next year.