good night moon & hello spring

Last night the full moon would be closer to the earth in its orbit than at any time since 1992. Apparently its orbit is not like a bit of industrial machinery, always doing the same thing over and over.

Everything, from the tilt of the earth's axis to the distance between continents and the speed of the earth's rotation, is always changing. Sometimes, as when tectonic plates shift, changes are dramatic, and we notice them. Most of the time they are infinitesimal, and we don't. Changes continue whether or not we pay them any mind. We are being changed, too, since we are a part of the whole cosmic reality, even if only in a very small way.

This morning Greg took these pictures of the close moon.

It was about to set across the western harbour as the sun began to come up through the forest to the east.
A few minutes later morning had broken, but the earth still felt the moon's quieter power.
Then the last night of winter was over. Today (at 5:21 PM here in Atlantic Time) the sun will cross over the celestial equator, and spring will arrive on McNutt's Island.

unrestored daguerreotype

When we first saw the house in the fall of 2006, there was a small cased daguerreotype sitting on the pump organ. I thought about that old picture quite a lot. When we bought the house it was filled with such things, large and small. But this one photograph drew me back to it over and over. I wondered why it was still here. Elizabeth Hyde had once written that when she bought the house in 1961 many of the things inside it were already here. She wrote that it was as if the previous owners had simply gotten up and left one day, leaving their things behind. Could this photograph have been one of those things? Could it have actually been here since the house was built? The thought seemed both incredible and plausible, and it's odd, when you think about it, that a thought could be both.

But then after we moved in, Elizabeth's daughter told us that Elizabeth had actually bought most of the things that were now in the house at auctions here and there, over the years. But Elizabeth's daughter was just a small child when Elizabeth first moved in. So there really wasn't any way to know if this old photograph -- or any of the other stuff -- had already been here. Though I do think that the families who lived here before, first the Perrys, then the Gouldens, and last the Demings, would have taken their things with them when they left the island. It would seem so un-Nova Scotian to just leave things behind like that. But I couldn't know, really, whether the photograph had been a part of the house for a long time, or not.

If the daguerreotype had been here, then it could have been from the Perry family. William and his father Jonathan built this house in the mid-nineteenth century, and well before that the Perrys lived in an earlier house, down below the lower apple orchard, a place that's a ruined rock foundation now. There were several Perry daughters. Could these have been two of them? And yet, the styles in the photograph are from a generation earlier. The young women I was thinking of wouldn't have worn their hair like this, not in the late nineteenth century. It seemed more likely that Elizabeth had bought the photographs in some dusty antique store somewhere. And now they were here, two young women, sisters, maybe twins, from who knew where, gazing out at me. But they could not speak, because nobody knew who they were.

During our first year here I was beginning to research the history of the house and learn about the Perry family and Nova Scotia life in general in the time when the house was built. I returned to the picture over and over. It had such a hold on me. Could it be a window into the very world I was learning about? It was a mystery I wouldn't be able to resolve. But I did write a poem.

Unrestored Daguerreotype

Two young women are identically dressed in mourning.

They seem not interested in having their picture taken

and sit looking as if they'd rather be someplace else.

Their hair is curled in complicated ringlets

likely out of style by then

in Boston and Halifax and other centres of fashion.

The someplace else could be home again --

this wild fir-tipped island,

this house where they grew up,

a Nova Scotia fisherman's daughters.

The picture sits here still, slowly dissolving into its elements.

Their caught faces float pale on the surface glass

while all dark detail of hair and dresses and eyes has slipped away

to reveal a stippled disintegrating painted black background

layered underneath.

Nebulae wink in the folds of their sleeves,

comets arc through their heads

and if you look closely into their eyes you can see all the way to

the vast swirling night sky that reels above this place forever.

Anne Barclay Priest

Mary Morse and Leroy d"Entremont emailed us last night to let us know that Anne Barclay Priest had died. Anne was a good friend to many people, including Elizabeth Hyde, who owned this house before us, and her daughter Joanna, and Mary and Leroy, who took care of her Blue Island sheep when she was back in New York, and later bought the flock from her. We were fortunate that she reached out to us newcomers as well, soon after we moved here, and so began a brief and lively friendship of email exchanges in the winter and a visit each summer. We learned right away what so many other people know better than we: that anything having to do with Anne was lively, to say the least.

Besides the post entitled How to Keep Warm you can read a little bit more about Anne in posts here, here and here.

You can read about her memoir, Trafficking in Sheep: From Off-Broadway, New York, to Blue Island, Nova Scotia (The Countryman Press, 2008), here. The beautiful photograph of Anne on the book's cover was taken during a sheep gathering here on McNutt's Island.

Here's how Anne concludes her memoir:

I have asked myself questions about my life in Nova Scotia. What if I had purchased a piece of land in another part of the province? I never would have bought the island, never bought sheep, never heard of Brian Nettleton. It was an immense crossroads, one that never in my wildest dreams I could have foreseen. I don't regret one bit choosing the road I did. It has brought a richness and beauty to my life that I love and embrace, as well as many friends. And so what it the people in Greenville as well as West Green Harbour think I'm off my rocker? They could think worse. And probably have.

cranberry walkabout

On the south side of the island, hoping for cranberries, I picked up the ghostly track of an ATV. Maybe it was our own from this time last year. I doubt if anyone has come there since. I followed it, walking through a low scrum of bayberry and juniper and cotton grass and dried fern, around stands of spruce and up a gentle crest. Surrounded by the forest and the sea and hidden in a low place, the bog becomes visible only when you are upon it. Like so much on the island, if you don't know where to look you will only discover it by accident. And if, having found it, you fail to take sufficient note of where you are, you may not find it again.

Once I was in the bog I tiptoed about in my rubber boots, a curious giantess, and bent down and squatted so I could peer closely at this world. Everywhere I looked I saw the basal leaves of the pitcher plant, plump veined red teacups. Each one now held a thimble-full of some dark shining brew. The pitcher plant seems to have had a very good year in this bog. I might have come upon the last touches for an end-of-season tea-party about to be tossed by the local fairies for a few invited flies. While I admired the cunning place-settings, the guests, abuzz, were at home donning their iridescent wings and polishing their heads.

Even though it is a small enough place -- maybe four or five acres altogether -- and even though you can see all the way across it no matter where you are standing, still, it's easy to lose your way in the bog. Somehow you are never quite where you had thought you were. You look up from peering into its watery pathways and glinty pools and rumpled velvet moss to find yourself somewhere else entirely. How did I get over here when I was just over there, you wonder. I think there may be some shape-shifting that befalls the bog visitor, which can be disconcerting unless you begin to go with it.

It is easy to forget that, like a reasonable person, I have come here for a reason. I remember from last year's search that to see these cranberries I will need to adjust my expectations. I won't be looking for the colour we call cranberry. Instead, I'm after a glimpse of dull purplish bloom only a few shades darker than the pitcher plant's teacups. I remember Peter's rule for seeing whales in the summer. "Go up to the lighthouse four or five times in July," he said, "and look out to sea, and I guarantee you, if you do that four or five times, on one of those trips you'll see a whale."

Peter's rule applies to cranberries too (and maybe to other things as well). I spied one, then another, then another, until I had gathered a handful in my cupped palm. If I bent down to look four or five times, on one of those times I'd begin to find them lying quietly about here and there, attached to a delicate green thread, a dark jewel set on a bracelet of tiny green leaves, bog treasure.

remembering a hummingbird

This place where we live is a small patch that for a couple of centuries now people have been making into their own. Its house, stone walls, crumbled cellars, apple trees, wells and old fields are evidence of the long-ago work of domesticating a bit of acreage on an island filled with bogs and rocks and forest and surrounded by the sea. It's a project we embrace, most days.

But around and beneath and above and even within this place lies another, vaster place, which is wildness. The two places live side by side and intermingled. Sometimes that other country, that wild place, is distant and impossible to discover, and sometimes it is very near. Sometimes it encroaches. Sometimes it brushes by, lighter than a feather.

This summer we hung up a hummingbird feeder for the first time. We delighted all summer in watching the frequent visits of two female hummingbirds to the feeder -- so frequent that, if you just stood for a few minutes at the front door, you would see them there, all day, every day, without fail. Because they became so familiar I thought I was getting to know them pretty well.

But then, as summer was coming to an end, I met that young hummingbird up in the vegetable garden. At first, when I saw him sitting so still for several minutes at a time, I didn't have enough to go on. It didn't fit with what I had seen near the feeder. So I thought he might be sick or dying. Why was he allowing me to get so close? I began to spin a sort of hummingbird tragedy in my mind: the little bird, somehow left behind or blown off course as his relatives all flew away across the Gulf of Maine, now lonely and afraid and stranded in the vegetable garden. It's a pretty good story, and it could be true.

Or not. It could be that he was merely on his way, alone or more or less along with others, and had stopped to rest for a few hours before moving on. The day I saw him was both sunny and windy, not a good day for flying east against a strong westerly wind, but not a bad day for being close to the ground in a relatively protected sunny garden. It's possible that he was feeling perfectly confident and able to take care of himself, within the limits of being a very small bird with a great distance yet to travel. I did not need to invent pathos where none was required, there being a big enough supply of tragedy in the world already.

Until my tutorial in the vegetable garden, I had not known that hummingbirds sit for long periods of time, stalk their prey, blink, swallow, and unroll their amazing tongues, a skill I associated only with frogs and snakes. He was, though young, an excellent teacher.

But I still don't understand what I saw that day: where he came from and where he was going and why he had come to the garden. I expect there are interpretations that I even don't know enough to consider. I only know that for an hour he became a small portal into the vast wildness that surrounds us.

welcome to bean world

The beans are flourishing, and I am beginning to think maybe I planted too many of them. There are two trellises of pole beans and two beds of bush beans. The bush bean seed packet contained a few random pole beans put there by some trickster seed packet packer somewhere, so there are also pole beans sprawling around among their more upright and conscientious relatives and making awkward late night take-over moves, ambitious climbers with no place to go.The horizontal cross bar on one of the trellises -- an eight foot long 2"x 2" milled from island spruce -- sagged and sagged until at last it snapped in half under the weighty morass of twisted vines, spreading leaves and dangling beans. I don't care, though.
Every other morning I work my way around this trellis, parting a dense jungle of leaves and dodging bees to peer as deeply into bean world as I dare. The challenge is making sense of such manic, burgeoning complexity. I can only see parts of beans amid fractured shards of shadow and sunlight. They are rarely dangling properly as they are supposed to, more often wedged up behind the trellis netting or lolling across a twisted bunch of leaves. Some of them do hide in plain sight, growing larger and larger until even the most distracted seeker could find them, gigantic foot-long beans, cartoon beans, beans guaranteed to get your attention no matter what.
I begin my every-other morning bean harvest with a slow, patient, systematic search for normal-size beans. Be mindful, I tell myself. Be Zen-like. Appreciate the beans. Let the beans be your teacher. But pretty soon my disciplined approach breaks down into something primitive, Lord of the Flies-ish. Even though it's early, the garden is hot, and there are mosquitoes about, and my hands have a mind of their own. Half way around the trellis they assert themselves, not at all mindfully. Whatever they locate by accident, they take. Whatever they miss, they miss and don't even know it. My hands are in a hurry, and greedy. They are focused on the bottom line. So many beans! they think. Let's get this over with. My hands get impatient and they don't look back.

Later we eat a few of these many, many beans, which Greg has sautéed in olive oil with garlic and tomatoes. Briefly, I manage to allow a tiny sliver of amazement. What we are eating here -- what is giving us sustenance and keeping us from hunger -- these green beans, our daily bread -- came directly into our kitchen and thence onto our supper plates from the combination of seeds and dirt and sun and water and season: a miraculous harvest, even if there's a part of me that takes it for granted every single time.

monarch in lace

Maybe this monarch is preparing for an upcoming flight to central Mexico. Even though it has never been to central Mexico, it knows how to get there. I try to imagine what that journey is like from a butterfly's point of view. But I can't grasp it. It's beyond me in so many ways.

humming garden

There's not much reason to spend time in the garden these days but I do it anyway. Oh, I'm harvesting peas and bush beans and lettuce, collards and turnip greens and swiss chard and mustard greens. But mostly I'm just looking at things grow: squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, pole beans. It gives me an excuse to wander around surrounded by the sound of a hundred bees humming away.
They've been hard at work in the garden all summer long. Just because the season is turning slowly toward fall is no reason to change their ways as far as they are concerned. There's still lots for them to do.

When we first moved to the island we couldn't imagine how anything got pollinated, since there were no honey bees.

We've learned that's one thing we can cross off our worry list.

The wild bees take care of everything. They don't make honey so humans don't think they are just the end-all and be-all. But humans can be short-sighted that way.
There's a Grimms Brothers tale called The Queen Bee. The youngest of three brothers, who was dwarfish and insignificant, followed his two older brothers out into the world.
He may have been insignificant but he was kind. Maybe his own dwarfishness gave him empathy for other small creatures.
In three episodes of the story, he defended first ants, then ducks and finally bees against the cruelties of his brothers.
Then came the tests to break the spell on an enchanted castle and win the hand of the princess.
They were quite impossible tests.
But the grateful ants, ducks and bees came to the aid of the youngest brother and so he was able to accomplish them all, even though his older, stronger, and no doubt more handsome brothers failed.

I often think of this story.

being at home in the world

I go out in my rowboat only when the water is calm, so there's no need to row to actually get somewhere, or to keep myself from being taken away from where I want to go. And besides, wherever I am in that boat is pretty much where I want to be. Any destination is fine, and sort of made up at the last minute, and bound to change again a few minutes after that. So I zig and zag and stop and start, not doing much and not going anywhere in particular.

Instead, I ship my oars and lean over the edge of the boat to watch the bottom of the harbour. I drift on the current while images stream past below me: rocks flecked with light and limpets or hidden beneath tangled golden piles of waving rockweed, schools of tiny silvery fish, white sand, underwater fields of bright green seagrass, whelks, clamshells, a lone laggardly jellyfish, and huge scary fingers of kelp like a monstrous bronze hand reaching out to grab the boat from below and drag it down to a watery grave. I'm away from each sight as soon as I arrive.

I have been looking for starfish this summer, but I have not seen a single one. Last summer they were plentiful, at least below the government wharf and out on the seal ledges. Maybe they'll return again next summer. The ways of starfish are mysterious.

But while searching for starfish I found sand dollars instead. I hardly recognized them at first since they looked so unlike the only sand dollars I've ever seen: dead ones, whitened skeletons piled in souvenir shop bins, with that silly, insulting Legend of the Sand Dollar attached to them so they'll sell better.

Here, though, I began to see, in particular places beneath the water, as if cast upon a soft bed of pale sand, what appeared to be perfectly round and flat black objects.
As I looked more closely I could see that these dark round objects bore the sand dollar's five petal pattern, but in reverse, like a wax resist technique using fine sand instead of wax to reveal the pattern. The sand dollar is an ocean filter, sucking in organic matter beneath it and releasing water through the tiny holes that form its petal pattern on top. What I could see was, I think, the residue of its filtering process.

Even at low tide they lie a couple of meters below the surface, beyond my reach. That's just as well. As it is I can only look but not touch, as if I am visiting a collection of rare masterpieces. I doubt they are rare. But who knows anymore what's rare or endangered? Things seem to slip away without our noticing, and then they are gone. For now these sand dollars remain where they belong, on the ocean floor, their dignity intact, doing whatever small obscure thing it is they do on behalf of the world.

picking peas

I pick a cup or so of sugar snap peas every morning now, and every morning the pea vines have gotten taller. Now they arch beyond the trellis, which is five feet high. To reach the highest pods tomorrow, I'll need to get on a rickety chair -- a derelict wooden one that's lost its back and is spending its last days waiting to be of some use in the garden. When I snap a pod dangling above my head, the fine early morning mist that still hangs about the vine and leaves showers down on my face, an island version of a beauty treatment in more ways than one.

I wasn't thinking when I decided to put the trellis along the outer edge of a bed. The peas are easy to harvest from that side, but if I want to reach the ones that hang enticingly at the centre of the trellis on the inside, and I do, I have to teeter on the wooden frame of the raised bed, stretch over two or three feet, steady myself with one hand along the trellis frame, and then try to pick each of those peas -- which are clearly the very best of the lot -- with only one hand. A weird new yoga pose. Although you really do need two hands to pick snap peas. So it's far better if you can do it while standing well-balanced on the earth on your two feet. I'd be standing on chard if I tried that. It's what you could call a design flaw.

This western side of the island has such high winds that the trellises blew over during the garden's first summer. We lost the last of the peas that year. After that Greg sank the posts into concrete to keep them upright through the whole season. So where they are is where they will be: what you could call a permanent design flaw.

I'm bringing all sorts of things into the house these days besides the peas: huge baskets of collards and turnip greens, chard, kale, curly lime-coloured mustard, great piles of lettuce. I can vaguely remember all the work that went into this year's garden -- the raised beds, the winter seaweed, the spring digging, the compost. But the pea trellis is not the only design flaw. Some of the raised beds are too wide. It's a big stretch to reach into the middle to cut greens or pull weeds. My early miscalculations put me in awkward positions every day.

But there are essential elements that have nothing to do with either how hard I've worked or how many mistakes I've made: the balance of sun and rain, the pace at which summer has unfolded here on the island, the warmth of the season. Except for the watering, I have little power over any of that. So when I'm picking the peas or cutting the collards my basic position is amazed.

shadows and sun

The leaves of the oak tree cast dancing shadows against the house.It's performance art, an ensemble convergence of wind, sun, tree and old clapboard.
A brief afternoon event, unscheduled and unannounced.
You just had to happen to be passing by if you wanted to catch it.

honeysuckle from the old hotel

The first summer we were here I saw a honeysuckle vine dangling above the ruins of the old hotel in the field next to our place. Maybe the Perrys planted it there once upon a time, when they had the hotel. (Folks say it was more of a bunkhouse, really.) Or maybe it was planted by the Rennehans, who lived there after that.

The next summer I went back and took some cuttings. I rooted them over the winter, and planted them in the new wildflower garden. They didn't do very well, but one of the cuttings at least didn't die.

The next winter I re-read Evelyn Richardson's classic We Keep A Light, about her life in the 1930s on the island of Bon Portage, which is not far from here. She wrote that she carefully placed a honeysuckle in a patch of soil at the top of a big boulder, out of the way of harm, and later spied a lamb who had climbed up onto the boulder nibbling away at it. Ah ha! I thought.

So I stuck alder branches along the outside of the fence. Last summer they kept the lambs from reaching inside the fence and eating the asters. I hoped they would be equally effective for honeysuckle.

This year the honeysuckle is doing beautifully. I'm glad that it's a honeysuckle that's native to Atlantic Canada.

I can't really identify which of the many varieties of wild honeysuckle this is, but as you can see, it's quite fancy.

In the meantime, the honeysuckle is flourishing over at the old hotel, in places where no lamb could ever safely go. High up in a spruce tree, for instance. Deep down in the ancient cellar.

I have tried to take photographs of the old hotel before but they never came out very well. I have discovered that it's a challenge to photograph a jumbled pile of rotting boards, which is pretty much what remains. You need a focus.

A contrast.
Some tiny story, maybe of how a vine can plant itself in nothing and blossom where you least expect it, or will keep coming up year after year even when everything around it has collapsed and even when there's nobody left to admire it.
Though we are admiring it now.

the elementary life

When the children were little they had a small boxed set of Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar books. The set was called something like The Elements. Each of the four tiny books was devoted to the discovery of an Aristotelian element -- earth, fire, water, air -- through the explorations and experiences of the elephants and their friends. In Babar's world the elements were as fanciful and enchanting as the king's own green suit. But out amongst the grown-ups the elements were abstract concepts: not really there. We had more important things to think about. I sometimes remember the sense of intricate wonder contained in those little books as I am slowly introduced to the elementary life.

Now that the daily provision of heat is not an issue, we have turned to the production and storing up of food. Most of next winter's wood pile is split and stacked, Greg's work of March and April. Since early May I've spent most of my time working in the garden or the greenhouse, getting ready for the brief growing season that is almost upon us. I think mostly in terms of growing what we can freeze for the winter. Meanwhile, Greg has become adept at pre-dawn visits to the gill net and at gutting the fish he finds there. He's at work on a small chicken coop in hopes that we can begin to have a few chickens after all. He is brewing more beer. All of this is absorbing and complex, time-consuming and labour-intensive. It's not so simple. But with each season, I think, we inch closer to the mysteries of the elements.

Time plays its part as well. I missed lots of what was really going on when I lived a speeded-up, multi-tasking, over-developed life. Because lots of what is really going on either changes in an instant, like a heron flying over, or takes eons, like the waves against the rock. My normal mode wasn't tuned into the extremes. Then there is the subtle unfolding and fullness and waning of each season, which I am only slowly beginning to recognize. I didn't realize that I was missing so much, though -- how could I know what I wasn't aware of? I just thought that life was somehow narrower than I wanted it to be, and I didn't want it to end like that, narrowing and narrowing.

I've been worried about our snake population, but as the weather has warmed up I've started seeing more of them. One or two are in the vegetable garden when I go up in the mornings. And yesterday a tiny twitch of a bright green fern bank revealed the hidden presence of a toad slowly making his way away from me. The snakes and toads are themselves fanciful, out of a children's story, and might even wear suits on occasion, though I have not yet observed it, and possibly the occasion does not often arise. Snakes and toads are mysteries too, enchanting, earthily elemental, present yet elusive. Happy the person who is fortunate enough -- and slow enough --to notice them.

rainy days

Two days of chilly rain remind me that the seasons do not turn upon our needs. Spring is happening out there, but on its own terms, which sometimes coincide with ours but sometimes not. In the midst of rain and wind the earth stretches and warms for its summer dance. The light grows longer, buttercups arise. The ferns unfold, and repair a broken patch of dead forest with their greenery.

Luckily we still have dry wood for the stove, library books to read, and jeans to mend.

I am not good at sewing, but I can patch a rip in a pair of jeans. It isn't false economy to keep Greg's old work jeans in repair. He's hard on his jeans, snagging them on this and that. And being six feet and five inches tall, and that mostly legs, he is such an odd size that Frenchy's does not have jeans for him. To replace the ones he wears every day would mean buying something new and not cheap. I'm being practical here, not romantic or sentimental.

My patching is inept and slow. I think of all the women of the past who have kept their household's clothing in good repair over years of wear and tear. I imagine they never sat down without a needle and thread in hand. I think of the fishermen mending their nets, of old farm wagons and machinery kept in service for decades. How, I wonder, did the act of mending become so out of date, the art become so lost?

The patched jeans have a certain something that new jeans lack, though I wouldn't go so far as to say exactly what that certain something might be. They are evidence that things both momentous and mundane are always falling apart and breaking. At some times -- in spring, for example -- the world goes about repairing itself, gracefully and on its own terms. With my uneven stitches I join the dance, however awkwardly.

view from the cove

The water is blue silk today, and so this morning I rowed out to the middle of the cove. Then I sat in the boat and looked all around and watched the morning unfold.

A dignified seal took the air and swam about nearby, calmly ignoring me. I could hear his relations singing across the harbour, from their favourite ledges, which are actually named Seal Ledges on some maps. I think the False Passage seals have been here since time began. It's possible they own the water here, although I don't imagine they have any deeds to prove it.

The water was so clear that, as I rowed, I could see the cove's silty bottom beyond the rocky shoreline, long strands of seaweed undulating in waving shafts of sunlight. Several lobster pots have been set here, and I carefully rowed around their bright coloured lines and gently floating buoys.

A few gulls gathered on the point for a brief meeting, conferred, then went about their day. The rams wandered along the shore, foraging. Today the ram elders have allowed the fourth ram, the young one with the long tail, to join them.

White wisps of cloud drifted high above the water across a sky whose intense blueness was off the colour charts and so cannot be named. If you tried to name it you would do it an injustice, so inadequate would your effort be. A heron flew gracefully through that nameless blueness, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to sail through such a sky.

Strawberry wisdom

For years, before we came to this blessed place, I ate something that looked like a strawberry but actually had no taste at all. After a while it became something I wouldn't even bother to buy, even though, of course, it was available in the grocery store all year around. But once in a while it showed up on your dessert plate in a restaurant, a pretty garnish.

The first summer we arrived in Nova Scotia we began seeing hand-written signs outside Spencer's, the local garden centre, announcing that Lore's strawberries had arrived. What's the big deal with Lore's strawberries, I said to myself. But we bought a pint and took them home.

I remember my first bite of that first strawberry. It evoked in me a curious combination of emotions: speechless joy, but also anger that I had been so badly fooled for so many years, and sadness for all I'd missed. A strawberry is not something to be casually plunked onto the side of a plate, for colour. A strawberry is -- oh, let's just say it -- a sign of heaven. And a hard dry thing having only the appearance of a strawberry is a travesty and a mockery and does not deserve the name.

The Nova Scotia strawberry season lasts only a few weeks, depending on the weather. It is to be patiently and eagerly awaited, and entered into with awe. You must empty out everything that keeps you from joy: your anxiety, your cynicism, your lack of forgiveness, your sense of entitlement. Make room, instead, for the fullness of gratitude. Taste and see. When you eat a strawberry, do not speak. The moment is too precious for that.

And then, because you cannot keep it (except for freezing, but that's not the same), the season ends, and only its memories remain.

Last fall Joanne McFadden, the pastor at Trinity United Church in Shelburne, offered me strawberry plants from her parsonage garden when the time was right. Then, the other day, the time was right. I dug the new raised bed Greg built for this exact purpose last fall, and added plenty of magical island compost.

Joanne gave the strawberry plants to Greg. They sailed across the sea to their new island home.

In only a few years, there will be strawberries on McNutt's Island. In the meantime, I'll watch for that handwritten sign at Spencer's, a simple word to the wise: Lore's strawberries are here.

Lore's Strawberry Farm is located at 5505 Upper Clyde Road, in Middle Clyde. The phone number there is 902-875-2102. You can pick your own strawberries at Lore's, or just get them at Spencer's.

Gawking about

Gawking about, I found various small signs in the woods and along the road today. Signs of what? you might ask. Oh, I don't know, really. Maybe you can figure it out. The little Canada violet, with its delicate tracing of purple, for discerning bees.
The small blue butterfly that dances from sunny place to sunny place, always keeping just beyond the corner of your eye. When the blue butterfly alights and is still and you would think -- aha! it's still, now! I can really, really see it! That's exactly the instant when it closes up its wings and becomes invisible. So this butterfly is just too quick to be caught on film or pixels. But it dances nevertheless.

I thought I knew what this tree was, but now I'm not sure. It is everywhere on the island, and it shimmers now like amethysts and rubies flung across the forest.

A fern rising from the ground. The sheep love to eat them, but do not worry. Multiply this fern by about one billion and you will have the number of ferns rising from the island right now, silently unfolding, all together.

There are vast moss forests, too.

This wild bee is a sort of cinnamon colour, and has a long proboscis. He seemed to be enjoying the grass that grows along the road. He's about twelve centimeters long not counting the schnozz. I have read that there are thousands of varieties of wild bees. This is not the one I saw near the lilac buds the other day. It was lovely to see another bee.

Bee shadow.

April daffodils

Here along the North Atlantic, April is a season of cold, rain, fog and wind.

It's an environment that pares things down and makes it easy to focus on one thing. A sparrow, for instance. The deer, their coats changing colour from winter grey to summer cinnamon, foraging for tiny fern shoots in the field behind the vegetable garden fence. A few daffodils against a rock wall.

In the last week or so their hardy qualities have shone. They have been rained on and snowed on and hailed on, endured freezes and been blown about.

In some other, busier place, I would not particularly notice daffodils. Or if I did I might take them for granted.

But here they have my undivided attention. I look and look, and they always make me glad.