Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Pye's Head Family Reunion
It's been nearly a month...and I'm behind on blogging, but there are some great photos (mostly courtesy of Scotian) from our Natal Day Weekend family reunion in Guysborough County that I wanted to share.
We had a weekend of rain, rain, rain, and I was so thankful for my little Le Chameau rubber boots - they kept me dry - the best $35 I ever spent on a whim in my life! But, despite the rain, there was lots of family, friends, festivities and food!
Scotian's maternal family settled in Pye's Head back in the 1700s as part of the Yorkshire Settlement. The land was granted to the Pye family and still remains in the hands of their decendants today. The first time I visited Pye's Head, there stood a white clapboard farmhouse, on the verge of collapse - a symbol of the family gathering place. It's gone now, having been demolished for safety reasons, but it made me sad the day I heard it was gone, old farmhouses are so full of hard work and elbow grease, I love to wander through them and imagine what life was like even 50 or 60 years ago in a place as isolated as this.
This is the old farmhouse as it looked in the 1960s - I took this photo of a photo. This is the home where my mother-in-law spent all of her summers growing up, swimming in the chilly waters, playing with her cousins, and generally running free. It feels a bit nostalgic just to look at this photo. Two years ago, my mother-in-law started hooking a rug of this same scene to help remember both the fondness of her childhood summers and the necessity that were wool rugs as she remembered them in this old farm house. She intended to have it finished for the reunion, but it is still a work in progress. She has hand dyed a small amount of the wool to use in the grass areas, but she tries very hard to find "rummage" wool at thrift stores - she has amazing thrift shopping skills, I have to say!
I'm very impressed with her skill in bringing this rug together - it is no easy feat, and she has only been rug hooking a few years, it's an impressive endeavour!
Pye's Head is located on a peninsula, and there are three beaches - front beach, back beach and field beach. I find it hard to keep track, but they all have their own features - front beach is calm and rocky, back beach is wild and rough, and the field beach is, as its name suggests, at the bottom of the field where it is sheltered and the generally preferred swimming spot, if you can brave the cold water!
One of Scotian's cousins, in a move that I am quite proud of, purchased the Liscomb one-room school house a few summers ago, and had it moved to "The Head" to be re-purposed (as all of the design mags are calling it now) into a summer cottage - complete with blackboards, tin ceiling, original wood floors and reclaimed woodwork salvaged from the farmhouse before it was demolished - the big, bright windows, the high ceilings, the rugged beauty - even Spunky found it somehow comforting, we couldn't pull him away from the school house!
Despite the rain, we had a lovely time, and the last day the sun did come out and the fog burned off long enough for Spunky to have an al fresco nap under the trees while the many, many little ones in the family took a dip at the field beach. Although the water was warmer than usual thanks to the rain runoff, it was still chillier than I would have liked - so I put on a wet suit and flippers and had a great time in the deep salty water! We're hoping to do it all again next year - and I'm hoping that it isn't me that brings the rain, as everytime I've been to "The Head", it's been rainy, foggy and cold. But, a little reunion, a little BBQ, mussels in the boat house, swimming at the field beach, you really can't go wrong!Labels: family
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