Certain people have been driving me nutso lately by referring to wind that comes straight into the moominbeach (like in the first pic) as a “north wind”. Nope. Our beach faces northWEST and when the waves are coming straight in, they are coming from the northwest. We get the biggest waves when the wind is coming from the northwest.

Now. The wind does *occasionally* actually come from the north. When it does, the waves come in at a slant and they are never very big, not anywhere near like the ones shown here, with only a few teensy tinesy little crests. Also, a north wind is much colder than a northwest wind.

Anyway, I have been harping on the person who keeps calling this a NORTH wind. No no no no, it is not. Today, I was (finally) looking through The Binder. The Binder contains all kinds of Canadian vital records for my grandparents (birth, marriage, death). It also contains court documents for an important land ownership case that my grandfather (and two friends) won against an interloper. More on that some other day. I do not possess a “legal” mind and on my first quick scan, about all I will say for now is that plaintiff Gretchen was about as good as the Orange Baboon and an estranged in-law of mine at picking lawyers. Like, you don’t have a case but we’ll take yer money anyway.

Long before modern navigational aids for shipping, there were lighthouses all over the place in this area and lighthouse keeper was a pretty good job, if I get it right. There was a letter in The Binder from a woman sending her niece bits and pieces from her own sojourn as a lighthouse keeper’s wife. When I was a child, some of those old lighthouses still existed in various states of disrepair. I haven’t processed all of this (and maybe won’t ever) but my soul is kind of ringing with the fact that people walked this beach and swam here well before me.

From a lighthouse keeper’s wife’s notes in the late 1800s:

I kept our books and if we would forget one day, we would just put in “northwest wind, all lights visible.” We could not miss on that. Wind was most always northwest.

Indeed.

The second pic (from the Sherman Archives) is of meeeeee (in the middle) and a couple other kids swimming in a northwest wind with even wilder waves than today. I was six.

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