Earlier this fall, a note on my birthday card apologized she had been unable to find yet another calendar. Today as I flipped the last page, aha! A 2009 calendar. If this is an omen of how the new year will take care of my needs and some of my wants, the year should be a good one.

We will be pleased to see the ending of this dirty, bedraggled old snow. It has become encrusted with a black grime. Shocking to realize it does not come from a coal mine or a factory near my corner house. It comes from the exhausts of passing motor vehicles. An indicator to remind me to be grateful for the giant old trees that surround house and garden. Trees that keep the house cool and the air clean in summer. I say, “Plant more trees.”

When I was a Dundas town councilor, in one of our heated arguments, Councillor John Prentice interrupted me to say I was ill-informed. I was saying something about the lack of public trees in town. He said there were more trees in town and along the escarpment than in the last 100 years. “People cut trees on the escarpment for firewood. It was almost bare.”

For the month of December, the 2009 Dundas Heritage Calendar shows a sparse hillside behind the Dundas train station, with the landmark peak in the background in a 1950s photo. The month of June shows a parade with a truck pulling a large float down King Street and a bevy of beautiful young girls in formal gowns gracing a make-believe garden.

A shop sign says Honest Sam “will not be undersold” and above the Wentworth Gas store the music hall balcony was prime viewing of that Wentworth County Centennial Parade in 1954.

Stan Nowak was, again, pressed into service for the captions in this very popular fundraiser for the Dundas Museum. If you have photos of Dundas events, the calendar is a collection of black and white photographs. If you have a memory for incidental history, you could e-mail northbrooks@sympatico.ca .

My favourite book this Christmas may well be my favourite book next Christmas as well, F. R. It is the biography of Anais Nin, a 620-page tome, including the notes. Deirdre Blair is a relentless researcher, a meticulous writer not lacking in humour. I am grateful to have had such a companion these past several weeks because I have spent the time in a suspended sneeze, sleeping and feeling grumpy.

In our era of four-letter words, nudity, blood and gore acceptable even in news casts, the Nin biography is merely clinical. She was a beautiful, intelligent, willful creature who lived in other interesting times.

If I never manage to the end, it will make an excellent volume for pressing flowers.