Christmas Letter 2022

 

DON and MAGGIE MITCHELL

OWEN LANE, NORTH HILL

P O BOX 83, THE VALLEY

AI-2640 ANGUILLA, BWI

 

Cellphones: (264) 235 8654

(264) 235 7896

Email: idmitch@anguillanet.com

 mmmitch@anguillanet.com

 

11 December, 2022

Dear family and friends,

DON AND MAGGIE’S CHRISTMAS PHOTO LETTER, 2022

The year has been kind to us, and we hope it has been to you, too.  Maggie’s incipient GERD and emphysema are both being held in check with treatment.  Don’s failing heart and increasing blood pressure are succumbing to medication.  His heart went from 70 to 60 to 50 to 40 beats a minute and then stabilised at 38.  It seems we may have a few more years with you than we anticipated at this time last year.

This year was our 50th wedding anniversary (22 April).  How we made it to this milestone is a mystery to us.  We can only put it down to having no children.  That choice gave us the chance to indulge our preferences and to live our lives relatively free of stress.  Don was able to concentrate on one obsession after the other.  Maggie was able to concentrate on taking care of Don.

One of the highlights of the year was the visit of Don’s nephew, Mitch with attachments, in January.

Mitch at the beach.

Then, Don’s niece Michelle and her family and friends, Chantelle, Gage, Amy, and Charlie, in March.

 

Brian and Michelle at Shoal Bay beach.

Maggie’s brother Mac, sister Bridget, niece Kitty and husband Fred, and great nieces and nephews, Leo, Carmen, and Joey joined us in April, in time for the wedding anniversary.

 

Mac, Bridget, Kitty, and attachments come to visit from France and the UK.

Dinner on our veranda.  Another view of the Mccarthy invasion. 

 Bridget and Mopie the dog picking breakfast.

 

Don and Maggie on Sally’s veranda.  Don’s fruit salad for desert.

Sally and Mary Ann treated Kitty’s children to a US style Barbeque in the garden.  the adults dined more elegantly on the veranda.

Sister Alix and her Brian visited us in Anguilla off and on a couple of additional times.

Locating Alix’s land boundary.

We also hosted a squad of Temple University archaeology and anthropology students in our guest apartment.  They worked on Elysia’s annual archaeological dig at the Hughes’ Estate from May to June.  We are all looking forward to Elysia publishing her thesis when her doctorate is confirmed.

Being both now dedicated retirees, our main activity outside the home is having lunch two or three times a week at one of our favourite restaurants.  A hearty lunch and two drinks are followed by a siesta until about 4:00pm, when we wake up to check on emails and WhatsApps.

 

Maggie waiting for lunch to arrive at DaVida’s

The summer was long, hot, and very dry.  Between January and July, our area in North Hill received only 5 inches of rain.  Some of the fruit trees produced fruit, particularly the Papaya, Guava, and Sugar Apples.  The Barbados Cherries and the Figs were not so happy.  As you see below, the front lawn, given it consists of Agaves, gravel, and concrete did not complain.

 

Don and Maggie’s “front lawn” this summer.

 

The first bunch of red grape flowers this winter.

Friends Becky Haskins and Edson Charles got married, and Don struggled to remember how to say a few words in public.

 

Don speaking at Becky and Edson’s wedding

 

Don, Maggie, Viviane, Rolf, Sally, Mary Ann, and Deknur waiting for Becky to arrive for her wedding party.

Maggie with Megaera at table on our veranda.

Maggie’s 75^th birthday dinner was at Dick Foran’s favourite restaurant, Hibernia, in Island Harbour.  Maggie and I were hosted by our walking group and friends.  To our amazement, Dick arranged by long distance with Mary Pat to pay for all the drinks, which must have cost him a fortune.  As you see below, we lifted our glasses in a toast to him, far away in Toronto.  In the years before he gave up his lease here in Anguilla and moved back to Canada, he always took us out to dinner at Hibernia on Maggie’s birthday.  So, this was a lovely gesture on his part for old time’s sake.

 

Maggie’s 75^th birthday dinner at Hibernia Restaurant.

 

Maggie’s birthday cake, a gift from Hibernia.

During the year, Don continuing to populate his Blog with acerbic articles on every type of social issue that got him mad enough to put pen to paper.  They attracted a satisfying number of complaints.  If you are desperate for something to read, you can find them here:  https://donmitchellcbeqc.blogspot.com/

We hope the year 2023 will be good for all of us.  Let the new winter Covid surge be mild.  And, let the forecast recession not be too long and too hard.

Meanwhile, have a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Don and Maggie

Don and Maggie's Christmas Letter

 

DON AND MAGGIE MITCHELL

OWEN LANE, NORTH HILL

P O BOX 83, THE VALLEY

AI-2640 ANGUILLA, BWI

 

Cellphones: (264) 235 8654

(264) 235 7896

Emails: idmitch@anguillanet.com

mmmitch@anguillanet.com

 

 

12 December 2021

Don and Maggie wish you a Happy Christmas and a Prosperous and Healthy New Year in 2022.  Our news for the past year has not been spectacular.  If the truth be told, it is quite banal.  But for what it is worth, here it is. 

Maggie and Don in April 2021 courtesy of Rado

The year has been mercifully free of any legal work for Don.  With his failing memory and general decline in mental and physical faculties (which he will tell you all about in agonising detail if you ask) he has been spared embarrassment.  The closest thing to legal work has been his faithfully attending all the government’s constitutional reform public meetings to show his support for the reform movement.  They were mainly held in churches throughout all seven electoral districts.

 

At a Town Hall Constitutional Reform meeting (The Anguillian)

The only excitement at these meetings was provided by a reverend pastor.  He appeared confused about the purpose of the butt plug sex toy which he insisted was required to be worn by injured homosexuals.  He appeared obsessed with the prurient details and harangued each constitutional meeting, particularly those held in churches, with the need to ensure the new Constitution contains a provision limiting marriage to one between a man and a woman.  The Constitutional and Electoral Reform Commission had no view on the topic.  My preference is not to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

Maggie too is now fully retired.  We mentioned last year that when her friend Gabby retired from WISE, she retired too (for years she volunteered at this school for students with problems with conventional education).  In addition to reading, she now occupies herself with being a board member of the Anguilla Mortgage Company and helping the Secretary with the Minutes.  She also continues her Aquarobics exercise program three times a week.

Don has spent the year busying himself with the garden.  He has mainly been planting fruit tree slips.  In this his 76th year, he understands he is planting them mainly for the benefit of the grandchildren. 😊

We were mercifully spared from any hurricane visits this year, though it was forecast to be a dangerous one for the Caribbean.  The problem is that, as a result, our rainfall has been dismal.  In our area of Anguilla, North Hill Village, the rain that we have measured on our roof to today’s date totals 17.9 inches for the year.  That is nothing short of catastrophic.  Average annual rainfall for the island is 40 inches.  We have had less than half of that amount.

 

The papayas we’ll eat ourselves

The herb garden is especially productive since he has become a manufacturer of compost on an industrial scale.  Both the Orchards and the herb garden benefit from drip irrigation systems.  Now, instead of going from tree to tree or pot to pot applying scarce water, he simply turns on the tap for the requisite amount of time, and waits for the timer to sound, at which point the tap is turned off.  He grows all the herbs and vegetables in 15-gallon pots, well fertilized with compost.

 

The herb garden

The compost factory in our back yard consists of five 32-gallon bins filled with dry leaves, cardboard, cow-patties, and clippings.  A bin takes approximately 3 weeks to convert from the natural ingredients to rich, earth-smelling compost.

 

The Compost Factory

The main garden project has been the digging and planting of three Pandemic Orchards around the property.  He started in March of this year, and, as each of the Mimosa, Loblolly, and Cedar trees had to be dug out with a pickaxe, hoe and shovel, they took months to clear.  The boulders that line the beds shown in the photographs were all manually excavated by him.

 

Pandemic Orchard No 1 under construction and completed

Orchards Nos 2 and 3 are only now being populated with fruit trees (small slips, really).

The only thing that keeps our plants alive is the daily two litres of water that we measure out to each of them through our drip irrigation systems.  Do bear in mind that the only water we have in our yard is what we collect on our roofs.  There is no public water supply to our area of North Hill.

Orchard No 3: Construction begins (chicken coop in the rear)

We did a Caribbean cruise in August.  The main objective was not enjoyment but avoiding the need to host his 75^th birthday party onshore.  We could not face the exhausting prospect of having 300 people around for the festivities (the minimum that Don’s entertainment standards would have required).  So, we escaped on a Celebrity liner from Sint Maarten to Barbados, to Curacao, to Aruba, and back to Sint Maarten, for seven days.  Our friend Kathy Haskins of Shoal Bay Villas Hotel (the most sought after, reasonably priced, luxury vacation destination in Anguilla) came with us and helped organise the more difficult aspects of booking the cruise, vaccination protocols, ground tours, etc.

 

Maggie enjoying a guided tour in Aruba in April!

The ship’s crew treated us royally.  The Celebrity Summit was fully crewed, though only about 30% of the berths were filled.  The price was less than half of the normal, and we were upgraded from a cabin with a window to one with a balcony with sliding glass doors, all with the compliments of the captain.  Booze, internet, and tips were included, so we felt we were royally treated (in our case the booze bill is usually the equivalent of the cost of the cabin, I beg your pardon, “the stateroom”).

Don’s birthday dinner on board ship

We hope you have all had your double shots or jabs, and the boosters as well, as we have.  We can still get infected, but the likelihood of us getting seriously ill or dying from the bug becomes microscopic.  It appears that we are supposed to expect more and more variants over the coming five years at least.  Welcome to the New Normal.

Don and Maggie

Christmas Letter 2020

 

Don and Maggie wish you a Happy Christmas and a Prosperous and Healthy New Year in 2021.

We have done practically nothing at all for the year.  Our long-planned, grand, Easter, Maggie’s Family Gathering went down the tubes for a reason you will have no difficulty guessing.

Maggie’s annual summer trip to Europe went down the same tube. She retired from volunteering at WISE at the end of the summer term. At 72 and going deaf, she decided that 12 years was enough. She will miss the students and the teachers but will keep in touch. She does aquarobics 2-3 times a week, for an hour each time, and comes home exhausted and content to collapse for an hour or so while Don feeds the dogs.  She was re-elected to the Board of the Anguilla Mortgage Company at its (virtual) AGM in March and goes off to meetings at regular intervals.

Don’s main excitement was his cataract operation in nearby Marigot which meant he had to spend two weeks in quarantine in the Guest Shack.  He is now without spectacles.  As he has been heard solemnly announcing, this is the first time he has been able to drive a car without spectacles since he was seven years old.

Dick Foran was not in Anguilla to take Maggie for her traditional November Birthday meal at Hibernia Restaurant, so Don had to dig into his reserves and act as a stand-in.  A delicious meal as usual: 

1. Don and Maggie at Hibernia Restaurant

 

2. Don spectacle-less at Ola’s Restaurant

One adventure we enjoyed was taking advantage of Kathy Haskins’ special rate for a “staycation” for locals at her Shoal Bay Villas Hotel, and spent a lovely week playing at being tourists.

We have enlarged the family with three more mutts from AARF (Anguilla Animal Rescue Foundation).  The two biggest take it in turns to spend the night inside on internal security guard.  The other four are on duty patrolling the outside.  We take the usual precautions urged on all retirees everywhere of trying to be home before nightfall, and ensuring the doors are all locked before we go up to bed.  If we are driving home after dark, we use the automatic door lock, and shut the windows.  With the coming layoffs in the public and private sectors, we expect civil disturbances, including home invasions of the elderly, to increase.  There is no evidence of this occurring at present, only our naturel paranoia.  Remember the old warning, “Just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not really out to get me.”

 

3. Maggie playing tourist at an empty Shoal Bay East beach

Our only overseas visitors were Gad and Ruth Heuman, friends from the Association of Caribbean Historians, who stayed at Carimar Beach Club.  Don enjoyed lecturing the Professor Emeritus of Caribbean History all about the history of Anguilla – Don’s version of it, anyway.

The yard occupied most of Don’s waking hours.  He has dug up almost every cubic centimeter of dirt and wheelbarrowed it outside the fence.  Only the pots in the vegetable garden will contain dirt.  The surface of the yard is now completely covered in concrete and gravel.  He is making good on his promise to himself that he will not spend his old age weeding Anguilla rock stones and pretending to keep a garden.

 

4. Don with 3 of the 5 children proudly showing off the graveled, dirt-less front lawn

 

The rest of the family (Morocoys) at dinner

Kitchen scraps and garden clippings, as you see above, go to the tortoises (the peafowl were lost in Hurricane Irma in 2017).  In Anguilla we have both the yellow leg and the red leg varieties.

 

6. Cheap labour employed to gravel the yard

The pandemic has been kind to Anguilla from a health point of view.  The few cases we have had were all caught either by testing at arrival, or at the second compulsory test taken towards the end of the guest’s obligatory 14-day quarantine.  Most of the staff employed in the tourist industry were laid off but received a monthly allowance from the Social Security Fund by an amendment to the Act made to permit this irregular use of the Fund.  The money won’t last much longer.

Keep safe, and hope to see you in the New Year.

Christmas Letter 2018

 

This year we took it easy, as I hope you did too.  No cruises, no touring, no lawyering, no teaching; just reading, writing and gardening.  The occasional “Letter to the Editor” and other activities favoured by those who have time on their hands J  The 18 bits of written evidence are here, but only if you have time to spare:  https://donmitchellcbeqc.blogspot.com

 

1. Don and Maggie at Roy’s Bayside Grill for lunch on a Sunday in 2018

In January, Don gave up his faithful Nokia as his main phone and relegated it to be the “garden phone.”  The Samsung that Chinnix gave him for Christmas fell out of his pocket several times and pieces kept breaking off.  He learned to keep it on his desk next to his computer, and to bring it out only when there was an amusing sight to be photographed.  He now keeps the Nokia for important stuff like making phone calls.  Chinnix spent a lot of time teaching him how to use the darned thing.

 

2. Chinnix explaining to Don how to use the Samsung

We continued to recover from Hurricane Irma.  The early half of the year was very dry, but starting in August it rained nearly every day.  The island’s vegetation has made a remarkable comeback, and the yard is once again blooming.

The concrete benches on the pool patio (that Hurricane Irma tossed over the wall onto the ground below in September of last year) have now been replaced.  The privacy wall of Mimosas has regrown with the summer and autumn rains, and we are once again invisible from the main road.

 

3. The forest around our property is growing back

In January, we adopted Kathy’s dog Skye, a Belgian Malinois who hunts ground lizards endlessly, digging up various valuable herbs and shrubs in the process.  She is the best barker we have among four alleged watchdogs who occupy our yard.

 

4. Skye on her bed on the pool patio

As if Skye was not damage enough, in April we welcomed to the yard a sort of mini-hurricane in the form of a new puppy named Megeara, one of the furies, the goddess of jealousy, born of the blood of Uranus when Cronos castrated him!  She is otherwise a sort of Rottweiler.

 

5. Mageara. You have to admit she is a beautiful grand-daughter

Maggie continues to volunteer at WISE (Workshop Initiative Secondary Education) every Monday and Thursday, and says she believes she is being useful to the Principal, Gabby.  Along with her aquarobic exercises on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she is trying to keep active and fit.

The walking group of Ginny, Kathy, Viviane, Sally and Don continue to walk and to exercise three times a week, which keeps Don in some sort of acceptable shape.  Ginny showed him how to take a selfie with his new Samsung on one of the walks to Sile Bay:

 

6. Ginny teaches Don how to take a selfie with his new camera while on a walk to Sile Bay

In June we hosted four of Professor Paul Farnsworth’s student archaeologists in the guest shack for a second year.  They were no problem at all, and I hope they learned something useful digging about in Wallblake Estate’s main house environs.  Irma took off the roof and ripped down the old cut stone walls of the outside kitchen building.

Stanley Reid helped Don to make the Anguilla High School law textbooks compliant with the revised Syllabus.  Stanley has taken over the teaching course, and Don’s hope is that with a vibrant, young lecturer, the Anguilla students will do even better than they did under his tutelage.  Jasmin Redhead helped with the new edition of the textbooks for Grenada, and the hope is that her students with these study aids will do even better than they did in earlier years.

In September Don’s brother Gordon visited from Trinidad and his sister Alix and Brian visited from Canada.  If we recall correctly, this was the first time in over a decade that all four Mitchells were together in one island at the same time.

In November Don completed the Herculean task of pickaxing the entire back yard, wheelbarrowing a mountain of dirt outside, and spreading four truckloads of gravel in place of the dirt.  The idea is that the wild Mimosas will have nowhere to root the myriad of seeds that splatter down into the yard at the slightest breeze.  A monthly dose of Gramoxone spray will doubtless help to keep the weeds in check.

In December, Don finally finished his 2000 page magnum opus, “Mitchell’s West Indian Bibliography” and sent it off.  It is being published by Emmanuel Publishers, who did his law textbooks.  Hopefully, it will be on Amazon early in the New Year.  After all, it has only been 30 years in the making.  It will be the first edition on paper, but the twelfth edition digitally (if he can find someone to re-published digitally!).

And so the year closes.  Maggie’s brother Denis, wife Julie and son Alexander arrive in a few days to spend time with us for Christmas.  A few days later, Don’s sister Alix and husband Brian with their Burlington, Ontario neighbours Dan and Cheryl descend on Don’s brother Stephen’s home in Old Ta just a couple of hundred yards away.  There will hopefully be lots of partying to usher the Old Year out!

 

7. A close-up of the newly gravelled back yard

With best wishes for 2019 and beyond,