Countryside around home

[Note:  I arrived late to my first memoir slam event and found the others reading their pieces on the first subject: "Countryside around home." The second subject was "Bodybuilding," but I couldn't think of anything to write about that, so I wrote a piece on the first subject instead.  They didn't complain, even when I digressed!]

I grew up in the New Brunswick university town of Sackville, near the Nova Scotia border.  We had a cottage out in Tidnish near Northumberland Strait.  Sometimes when we went there we'd bring ice cream, but by the time we ate it, it would be half-melted!  Today I still feel a fondness for half-melted ice cream.

When I was about four my father had a year-long sabbatical from his job as physics professor at Mount Allison University and we lived in Brighton, England.  This was around 1966, when it was a big mod center, but my parents didn't notice this, let alone me.  My mother remembered seeing the live TV talk show where Kenneth Tynan used the F-word, and I remember watching Australian singer Rolf Harris playing his wobble board.  I remember many smells from that time:  butcher shops, grocery stores, diesel bus fumes, London's coal smoke. (When I visited England years later I recognized the smells again.)

We also visited Expo '67, but I was only five and ended up walking too much.  I got into a foul mood, and don't even remember the immediate reason.  The main thing I remember was the train that took us onto the site.

My mother was born in Cape Breton, near Fort Louisbourg.  We often visited it in the summer.  The scenery was pretty dramatic.