July 17 - Dryden, ON

Lyle and I walked in Dryden this morning. We started our leisurely stroll at the Dryden Museum – a beautiful old home, originally built in 1897 and now restored to former glory.  You can see some of this in the picture below.

We strolled down the hill to the business area and Lyle did an excellent job of describing each business front to me. I was especially enamored with the brightly painted wooden lawn chairs on the sidewalk outside two of the shops. I was also interested in the royal naming of the streets – King Street, Queen Street, Princess Avenue and Earl Court.

While the walk was pleasant, I still do not like the brickwork sidewalks that are present in so many of the downtown areas where we have walked. Straight pavement or cement sidewalks are so much easier for a cane. While I was lamenting this, we arrived back at the museum and we came across the wooden cutouts of the family from a century or so ago. How much more difficult it would have been then for a man or a woman who had no sight. Today, those of us who are blind or partially sighted have so many audible and computerized tools to ease our lives and help us overcome some of the barriers of living in a world geared to sight. As I type this, I know that many of the readers of this blog message will not “see” it, so much as hear it.

Nevertheless, I took a minute at the museum to pose behind the woman in the cutout with my white cane in front. Even if white canes had been around then, a cane would have been difficult to manage with a milk pail in the other hand.