August 31, 2021

Today was the last day of August, the final day in the last full month of summer.

A summer to remember, a season that will go down in history. It was a historic summer for many reasons. A summer of unprecedented heat. It was a summer we began with optimism and excitement. This month ended with a time of uncertainty and fear. The month also ended with something we drastically needed.

Rain.

Glorious, rejuvenating, energizing rain. Our drought-ridden soil soaked in the precious moisture that fell in a twelve-hour deluge. I stood outside in the morning and absorbed the refreshing drops of precipitation.

I love the smell of fresh rain.

The summer began early. June ended with record temperatures. It was the most intense heatwave I have been in in my entire fifty years on the planet. I was very lucky to spend the days on the water. Many people faced intense heat with no relief. The lost and forgotten didn’t survive.

Then came the fires.

The town of Lytton,  mere weeks from recording the highest temperature ever in Canada at 49.6 degrees celsius, was wiped from the face of the earth. An intense blaze, likely ignited by a train casting sparks, burned through the small town and destroyed everything in its path. And a couple lost their lives to the fire. It was a sad beginning to July. A stark reminder of the power of mother nature and the fragility of life.

The weather was amazing and the days felt like a warm sauna basked us. The summer felt good in spite of the fires that erupted in the forests of our province. My boat was busy and people felt freedom from the restrictions that had been imposed on us for the last number of months.

Until Covid numbers again climbed in our region. 

People were so done with all the media coverage and all the hype around the coronavirus that many had stopped caring. When the health authorities tried to institute mask mandates in the Central Okanagan a lot of people pushed back, they didn’t want to go backward.

The Delta variant of covid didn’t care what people wanted. And then the hospitals began to fill up. This time with younger healthier unvaccinated people. 

A pandemic of the unvaccinated they called it. Yet so many people have resisted the jab, out of fear or out of concern that they don’t trust the health authorities. 

Some believe that the government and the health authorities have some hidden agenda, some underlying motive to control them to insert a poison into them. Maybe I am nieve but I believe that these people that were elected and hired to look out for the rest of us are merely doing the best they can with what they have. 

Too many people have refused the vaccine and now we are paying the price and being given new restrictions once more. Summer has come to an anti-climatic end with the threat of a vaccine passport hanging over our heads. .. by the end of September we will be only able to go to restaurants and movies, live music, and pubs with proof of vaccination. 

And then the government called an election. What a foolish waste of our money and time.We will end September with a new government in place, will it be Justin Trudeau and the Liberals or Erin O’Toole and the Conservatives? Or could more strange things occur and we end up with an NDP government for the first time in our history? 

Time will tell and after all the strange things that have happened in the last eighteen months, I don’t dare to make any predictions. 

Strange days indeed…