Mother’s Day dinner and Rose MacPherson’s masks

May 13, 2020

Preparing Pulau Rice and Bengali Kheer for 400 is not everybody’s idea of a fun way to celebrate Mother’s Day,

Sisters Amrit and Gian Kaillon, as well as the mother and daughter team of Arlette and Elyse Rodgers, along with other members of their families as well as a host of volunteers, prepared a Mother’s Day brunch for a broad swath of the local community, to go along with a Zoom gathering.

The meal was sold at $12 for two people, under cost, and for those who could not afford that in these difficult times, people purchased extra meals so no one who wanted a meal would go without.

The meals sold out in one day a couple of weeks earlier, and were prepared in the Rural Frontenac Community Services kitchen and delivered to those who could not pick them up by Frontenac Transportation Services.

The whole production went smoothly and by 12:30pm on Mother’s Day they were all gone, and eaten shortly thereafter.

For Amrit Kaillon, who started the Caremongering Sharbot Lake Facebook site 7 weeks ago, founded the local COVID-19 community support group and came up with the idea for the Easter and Mother’s Day dinners, preparing this particular meal was the culmination of all that effort.

“I am hoping that things will start opening up sooner than later,” she said.

Along with the meals, each bag contained two cloth masks, made by Rose MacPherson. The 400 masks that Rose made for the brunch is only part of the mask production she has taken on over the pandemic lockdown, with much help from her mask-making partner and husband, Pete.

“I am not a sewer,” she said, when contacted this week over the phone. “Pete bought me a machine a few years ago and I use it now and then, but not that much. When COVID hit, my sister in-law who lives in Texas told me that her sister -n-law, who is a midwife, said masks were going to be important. So we googled a patter and started making them. People have brought materials and we have learned how to make them.”

Rose estimates that she has made about 1,700 masks thus far, working 12 to 16 hours a day for a time. People have contacted her, looking for masks, and she makes them, bags them and leaves them on her front porch. Now the Rotary Club of Kingston wants 2,000 masks, so they can have a supply on hand for the next pandemic.

“The Rotary Club are in no hurry for them, which is good because we are out of materials, and have ordered some from Amazon but we will have to wait until it arrives before we start on them,” she said.

Rose masks have been delivered to Sydenham, where her daughter Jennifer lives, and to Kingston as well. Once the materials arrive, Pete and her will likely be busy all summer because it takes an 8-hour day to make 50 masks, so it will take 40 days of work to fill the Rotary Club order.

But for Sharbot Lake’s Queen of the mask-makers, it is all worth it if the masks are able to keep people that much safer and more secure.

Although Rose and Pete are sheltering with each other, they have been able to visit their cottage, which is off of Road 509, a few times over the past month.

“It is the same there as at our home, but we get to look at the lake,” she said.