Although we have some time to go until the celestial Autumn arrives, the weather at the end of August and now into the beginning of September has been chillier, cloudier, and wetter. In other words, things sure are feeling a bit more like my favourite season!
I recently had a memory of being in the Charles M. Shields library in South Porcupine and coming home with a copy of Beezus and Ramona (1955). I might have been six or seven? I remember enjoying it quite a lot and it helped to “be seen” in many ways when you have a younger sibling as the oldest.
While the book is still in print and new copies are easy to obtain, what I really wanted was something a little closer in time to the edition I would have read nearly 40 years ago. My hazy memory was telling me it may have been a printing from somewhere between the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.1
Combined with the fall feels, it felt like the right adventure to take in the waning days of my surgical leave: I would walk through Old Ottawa South and stop in at Black Squirrel Books. While there, I had a nice maple soy latte and browsed the shelves, hoping to find what I was looking for.2
In the end, I came out of the cozy book store empty-handed. While I did manage to find a copy of Beezus and Ramona, it was a more recent printing, from either side of the movie that was released a few fifteen years ago and would simply not give me the nostalgia trip I was hoping for.
Still, it was a lovely walk in an air that has become increasingly crisp (if still humid) through a neighbourhood that has many interesting angles. Leaving Black Squirrel wasn’t the end of that day’s adventure, perhaps encouraged by another part of my past, I continued through Old Ottawa South toward Billings Bridge to pick up a few things for dinner.
Camera
Lens
Film
Developer
Time & Temp.
Scanner
Location
Date(s)
Filing
Nikkormat EL
Nikkor-H Auto 50mm f/2
Ilford Delta 400 (+2/1600)
HC-110 Dilution B (1+31)
9m at 25°C
Plustek 8200i / SilverFast 9 / Apple Photos
Ottawa, Ontario
September 2, 2026
Series 7, Roll 160
- The branch opened in 1969 and I don’t remember the cover looking like the original 1955 printing. While that would be nice, a quick search on Abe Books (Amazon, boooooo hissss) shows a few copies with collectors’ pricing orders of magnitude greater than I am willing to pay. Collectors really do ruin everything they touch and this was to be a nostalgic lark. ↩︎
- It wasn’t just Beezus and Ramona (1955), I was also looking for Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (1939), and Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi!: A Novel (1975). ↩︎