This afternoon a wild westerly wind is blowing and the sun bounces off a harbor churning with white-capped waves. It’s a wide awake day, cold and lively, after a night of high wind and ice and rain. The wind holds the house in an enthusiastic embrace, pleading with it to get up and dance an unruly lumbering winter stomp to the tune of its loud brass band, a Mardi Gras of percussive bass with overtones of wail and screech, in defiant, wake-the-neighborhood surround-sound. Let’s dance! The wind is yelling over the noise of itself.
Today we have a lot of sun and a lot of wind. It’s the perfect combination that gives our fancy batteries a big charge and gives us more electricity than we can use, unless we plan to spend the afternoon in a hot shower, hopping out now and then to use the vacuum cleaner and the power saw.
Our house had done without electricity for a hundred and fifty years before we installed the solar tracker and the wind turbine. It had seemed lovely to do without, but impractical. Now, hidden inside its walls, are the wires that allow us to light the rooms, use the internet, listen to music, and keep our food cold, not to mention fire up all those power tools.
But we can’t store this power. Our batteries, once filled, decline slowly but inevitably. They need constant recharging, from tonight’s wind and tomorrow’s sun, or any combination thereof. Even though we have more than we need, we can’t save it up for a rainy windless day, and since we’re not on a power grid we can’t sell it to anybody. Today our energy is abundant, and tomorrow it may be nothing but a trickle.
The ancient Israelites got into trouble out there in the wilderness when they tried to store the manna that came down from the sky as unmanageably as does our electricity. They thought they were wise to collect more than they needed, engaging in the sort of industrious and resourceful behavior the world admires. But the next morning the manna was moldy and rancid and they had to throw it all out. They learned, eventually, gratitude for a daily sustenance, a gift of life they could not control.
The last storm began on Thursday. It was strong enough that even Greg did not venture outside much for three days. And this evening a new storm will arrive. It is even now making its way up the East Coast from below New York and over the Gulf of Maine. Then it is due to cross the province and slam into Cape Breton and New Brunswick again. This is the pattern of our winter storms. 
Six sheep are in the back orchard today. We have to give up our theory that the sheep come around in the winter only when the tide is too high for them to eat the seaweed that has washed up along the shore. Because the tide is not at a particularly high point. So there's more likely a simpler explanation for their visits. Maybe they are coming by more frequently now just because the snow has melted off. 
Over the past two summers we have dug around the west and south side of the house, next to the kitchen, where we planned to put a small flower and herb garden. It's mostly in that area that we have dug up our artifacts. We don't know anything about ceramics, though, so these are just another reminder to us of the life that has gone on here before us. 
Our local weather station at Baccaro Point is calling for flurries today, with a high of -1 centigrade. The flurries are flying across the island on a westerly wind at fifty five kilometres per hour. For comparison, we don't travel across the harbour if winds are above twenty five kilometres, and winds above sixty three kilometres are classified as gale force. The wind is plenty strong today, and since it's coming from the west our west-facing house takes the brunt of it. It's on a day like this that we realize how many cracks and crevices our wrinkled old wooden house has. I wonder if it would seem so cold inside if we could not hear the actual wind howling into the house. But we do hear it. It's just what days like this mean for us: we live close to the weather, like everybody who has lived on this island before us. 
We have been watching for the bald eagles. Last year we began to see the first pair of them in mid February, though for a few days we couldn't quite believe our eyes. "Are there eagles on the island?" we demanded of anybody we could find to ask. "Maybe," they would say. "Could be." These were not satisfactory answers. I'd stare out the breezeway window for minutes on end, looking. And once, as I pored over the eagle picture in my Birds of North America, I thought I saw the real thing winging past, as if to teach me a lesson about where to look. So this year we have been ready, and waiting.
Thanks to Terry Deveau for the information in today's post. The Montresor map is in the public domain.
When we first came to visit this place, we missed the truly significant aspects. Instead we focused on the house itself. Could it be restored and could we afford to restore it? We thought about those kinds of questions -- the "practical" questions people learn to ask. But we did not think at all about all those aspects we barely noticed, which would gradually emerge as the important things. 
I cleaned up the breezeway so today was a good time to take a picture of it. This picture shows the entire building -- somebody's house or shed -- that was brought here from somewhere else on the island sometime in the early twentieth century and attached to the original house. For the Gouldens, who lived here from 1907 to 1951, and the DeMings, who lived here from 1951 to 1960, this part of the house was divided into two rooms: the wood shed and the cool room for keeping milk, cream and butter. There was a pass-through structure that connected the original house and the wood shed/dairy room. 
A spell of bitter cold began the day after Groundhog Day and continued until last night. Every branch, every twig, every stone, every upturned pail and rotting log was ice-coated, and dazzling. Then overnight the air warmed. On this Sunday morning snow and ice are melting into slush.
The best known feature of McNutt's Island is the Cape Roseway Light. This lighthouse was built in 1788. It was the third lighthouse built in all of Canada, after Louisbourg in 1733 and Sambro in 1758. The original light was built of locally cut stone and at some early point the exterior was clad with wooden clapboard. The first light keeper was Alexander Cocken, whose 1790 petition to the Legislative Assembly for payment of his salary can be read here. 
The morning snow has turned into ice, and teeters between icy rain and rainy ice while the temperature keeps falling. The spruce are weighted down with wet snow. They sway in ominous slow motion, from top to bottom, to the slow-dance music of a cold northeasterly wind. They look as if they could topple over from the effort of remaining vertical, continuing to dance beneath their steadily increasing burden. 
The day was bright and still, though cold. I was surprised to see that the road to the light house was covered with snow and ice. The snow had melted away around our house and down to the western shore. But the road goes through the forest, and so things are different there.
It was hard to walk in the snow since there was a crust of ice over the top. I had to watch where I was walking and concentrate. The island was very still. Sometimes I could hear the sound of the lobster boats out in the channel or off the cape. I was the loudest thing out by far, with my din of crunching snow. Had there been any wildlife near the road it would have been well warned. Every once in a while I stopped to listen to the snow-covered silence that descended when I was not walking. Then I could hear a crow or a gull, or a small bird deeper in the forest. Deer tracks crossed the road, following their own way from one part of the forest to another. The road means nothing to them.
I looked at the signs posted along the road: No Littering, Lighthouse 4 Km, sign without words. There are secret signs, too, that indicate entrances to interior paths: an orange surveyor’s ribbon tied to bush, an old red taillight. Several streams have their source to the south of the island’s watershed on the east side of the road. They run beneath the road down toward the western side of the island. From the road I gazed at mossy stream banks and a moss covered forest floor, bright light filtering through the spruces.
At the side of the road in the middle of the island stands a curious tree. It is surrounded by water from multiple springs, so that it stands on a small island within an island. The tree’s root system must be covered by water most of the time. This tree is a conifer, but its shape is reminiscent of a hardwood tree and it is bare of either needle or leaf. From below you can look through the branches into the sky’s vast blue background. Gray-white cones adorn the branches like tiny dried roses or little jewels. There’s a mysterious quality to this tree, growing in moss and isolated by gently running waters.
Along the road are forests of miniature spruce seedlings. The ice has melted around the little trees, leaving each one on its own warm island surrounded by a frozen sea. Each little spruce tree is a tiny radiant life force.
Getting to the light house was glorious: all sun and no snow there, the sea so pale and calm, the sky mirroring it, high and wide, with wispy long streaks of cloud. I sat on a boulder and watched serene-looking lobster boats, all different colours, some mere dots on the horizon, others nearby.
After the warm sun at the lighthouse, I didn’t want to walk back through the cold icy forest along a road shadowed now with the gloomy light of a winter afternoon. The return journey seemed much longer than the going out, even though I only retraced my steps. My occasional slips on the ice were a reminder to pay attention and not gawk so much or slide into useless meandering of thoughts as I often do.
I read somewhere that the
Wild raspberries ripen all over the island in August. You can find them anywhere, glowing like amethysts along the side of the road or off in an old field. There are some patches that are particularly dense and bear especially sweet fruit. But I can't tell you where those patches are, because where we pick our raspberries is a secret. Other claims are staked openly. The mosquitoes are fierce protectors of their turf, and so are various little flies and worms and bees. It's easy to reach beneath a cluster of leaves for a perfect berry only to see, just in time, that a bumblebee has gotten there first. But in the end there are enough for us all.
We ate plenty of raspberries as we pulled them off the brambles, and we used lots of them right away. But mostly we froze them. I spread them out on a cookie sheet as soon as we got home, and stuck them in the freezer. When they were frozen I measured a cup of raspberries into a snack-size baggie. After a few weeks of this we had a small baggie mountain of frozen raspberries to gloat over, about two and half gallons. Not that we gloated.
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