spring scenery

It's a fresh day. Many times I have tried to capture the beauty of Old Man's Beard. At least this gives you some idea of it.
A home for somebody, in an old apple tree. This tree does not give many apples, but it provides other benefits.
The apple trees provide a good place for insects to live, too. And they, in turn, are a food source for birds, who make striking patterns on the bark.
A fresh spring sky today. Lots of wind and sun, and story-book clouds.

island life continues, and we resume our place within it

We have been home for a week or so. At first it seemed as if we never left, though I'm almost certain we did, a few days before Christmas. Here sits the house, there the stone walls, the apple trees, the stacked wood, all pretty much where we left them.

But there have been changes. The mice came out to play. Three of them were killed in the traps we had cunningly, murderously set along the kitchen baseboards. So, traps sprang shut. On the window sills, flies expired of old age or despair, their tiny legs sticking up in the air. One small shrew fell down the stairs and died on the bottom step. The shrews do that now and then, and always in the same way, dropping from some unknown place and landing on the last stair, a fatal lack of attentiveness or memory that they make over and over, from generation to generation. We came home to this assortment of small corpses, evidence that time had passed.

Each autumn as the weather turns cold again, the deer mice come back into the innards of the house. They arrive through their secret passages, the ones that we will never close up, no matter how alert or ingenious or dedicated we are. And from there, their safe places, at night, while we are asleep upstairs, they enter the kitchen. Where we have set out mouse traps, baited with cheese. They take the bait, or some of them do. And then in the morning we find them dead.

While we were away the house was cold, but still, for the island's most permanent inhabitants, a nice enough place to spend the winter. Now that we have returned, the sad but inevitable dance -- dance of cheese or death --resumes, exactly where it left off.

We do not hate the mice. They are beautiful and charming animals. If only they didn't want to live inside the house, but of course they do want to live here in this warmly crumby place. And there's no co-existing, no compromise that would suit both parties. So, with regret, we kill them off, one by one. And with determination or hopefulness or filial piety, their children and their grandchildren keep coming back to this fabled paradise, the place they hold dear in their collective memory, our kitchen.

It was about this time a couple of years ago, in the dregs of winter, when there's hardly anything left out there to eat, that we began an understanding with the ravens. It was they who thought of it first, swooping closer to the house than we'd ever seen them do before, stalking and preening around in the side yard. Before, they had mostly perched in the spruce trees south of the house, or in the lower orchard apple trees, or flapped in threes and sevens into the dead forest along the shore where the owl lives. They are birds of great size and dignity, and we were surprised to see them coming so close.

On the nights when we ate meat --lamb or venison or mutton, all from the island --we were then in the habit of putting the bones and scraps outside on a bench until the next day, when I would carry them down to the wharf and drop them into the water, for the gulls. One morning Greg saw a raven fly up off the bench. He had torn open the plastic bag and taken the scraps. Then we began to lay the left-overs on the cement platform of the solar tracker: an offering to the ravens. And soon we added the morning's mouse corpse to the collection. The ravens took it all, lifting into flight with their claws firmly holding these gifts.

Now we are home again. Outside, snows have come and gone, fallen and lain and melted. Rain. Ice. Wind. Winter in its relentless power. Of all that I can only guess, like someone with amnesia trying to puzzle this gap back together again in my mind. I get the general picture but I have missed all the detail.

A raven has noticed that we are home, and walks, gravely, like an old man, along the picket fence near the house. It is he who is the keeper of seasons past. He remembers how long ago, before Christmas, we set out meat scraps for him, and the delectable fresh corpses of mice. He hopes to remind us of our old charitable impulses, to reawaken our consciences and stir our memories, to patch December to March, and move on.

marooned

I looked up the definition of maroon this morning. The first definition doesn't apply to us, since it requires our having been captured by buccaneers and set ashore as punishment. But here's the second definition: to isolate as if on a desolate island. Yep, that's us. We haven't been able to leave the island for a week now, and it looks as if we won't be able to leave for another week, or even longer. And what an adventure it is!

Greg called Laura at Fort Point Fisheries to ask about Gunning Cove the other day. "Oh, yes, it's iced up," she told him. "It doesn't look too thick out there, but no boats are going out." We knew no boats had gone out for the past week or so. It has been too windy and the waves too high even for lobstermen. This isn't really their time of year anyway. Even though the official lobster season runs from the beginning of December to the end of May, most lobster boats take a break during the season when the weather is at its fiercest. It's too dangerous out there now. They'll start going out again in late April, and fish until the season comes to a close at the end of May. With ice covering the waters of Gunning Cove, and no bigger boats going in and out to break it up, Greg would not risk trying to take our little Chopper over there.

Fortunately, Greg is a serious student of weather forecasting. So he can tell me exactly what Environment Canada is predicting for the next week. It goes something like this: cold, cold, cold, wind, wind, wind, wind. Here's a little lesson I never knew until I lived here: warmth and wind go together. So does rain, but we don't care about rain. It's wind that makes the difference, and, in the winter, ice. We are not talking about light breezes when we say wind. Greg won't take little Chopper out into the harbour when the wind is blowing at 25 kilometres per hour, and these days the wind is well above that level. Right now the wind is strong and the cold is biting. And Greg says it's about to get a whole lot colder.

So, maybe he can go in next Wednesday. By then there will have been a string of warmer and windier days, maybe enough to melt the ice in Gunning Cove. On that day the wind is supposed to die down and it's supposed to get colder again, but if the ice has melted by then, there should be enough time for him to go into town and run all our errands and get home again. Or not.

The inconveniences are not that great. We have run out of butter and cheese and milk and -- horrors -- okay, this one is serious -- we are about to run out of coffee. We are running out of vegetable oil but, as people who have our priorities straight, we do have a big stock of olive oil. Greg is sad that he's almost out of garlic. But the freezer contains enough food -- green beans, moose meat, lamb, mutton, chard, chanterelles, raspberries, dried apples, et cetera -- for us to dine well into eternity or until the freezer dies, whichever comes first. And we have plenty of Greg's home-made beer and hard cider in the cellar.

We can't return or borrow books at the library but -- hooray! -- the library now offers digital downloads. So far I've been able to download and read John Casey's glorious new novel, Compass Rose (Random House Canada, 2010), Rebecca Skloot's amazing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown Publishers 2010), and Lewis Desoto's Emily Carr, a title in a lovely if somewhat perplexing series called Extraordinary Canadians and published by The Penguin Group. The library's online services were down for three days this week but they are up and running again and I shall go a-browsing. Marooned, but with digital library borrowing: pretty good.

With all this enforced indoor time we have both been carrying on with our various writing projects. We keep the wood stove blazing. Greg devotes a great deal of time and ingenuity to the pursuit of asymmetrical warfare against mice. And I cleaned the stove. So, you see, it's fine, really (though not for the mice). An adventure! Except for the coffee.

making a change

Maybe, dear reader, you've noticed a change. The photograph on the banner is different. When I started this blog in the fall of 2008 I used an evocative image of the lighthouse on a slightly foggy day. It was beautiful, and said as much about life on the island as one picture can say. But when Greg was working with Pottersfield Press on his book, that lighthouse picture (which he had taken) came up the clear winner for the cover. It belonged there.

Meanwhile, over in blog land, it's been time for a change. This online journal has been underway for almost two and a half years, so it's ancient in blog years, which are, I bet, similar to dog years. Anything this incredibly old can use a fresh look. I looked through my cache of pictures and chose the picture that's now on the banner, which was taken in June 2010. Since it includes stone walls, forest, apple tree, mysterious hanging wooden pulley, ferns, fog, an edge of my clothesline and one adorable beast, what more could I ask for?

I hope you like this new look.

happiness all around you

Here's an interesting statistical study that confirms what we see around us here in Nova Scotia. It turns out that in Canada satisfaction with life is more related to community than to how much money you've got. As Americans we are, as they say, gobsmacked.

92 per cent of Canadians satisfied with their lives

The Canadian Press

Date: Tuesday Nov. 23, 2010 4:00 PM ET

OTTAWA — A new study of life satisfaction in Canada finds that among the provinces, Prince Edward Island takes the happiness crown.

The study released Tuesday by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards found that on a scale of one to five, the average level of happiness among Canadians aged 20 and over was 4.26 in 2007-08.

At the provincial level, life satisfaction was highest in P.E.I. at 4.33 and lowest in Ontario at 4.23.

In 2009, 92.1 per cent of the population aged 12 and over were either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, up slightly from 91.4 per cent in 2008.

The study also looked at factors influencing the happiness or life satisfaction of Canadians, and found that it's not all about money.

In fact, household income was found to carry less economic significance for happiness than other variables like mental health.

A sense of belonging to the local community was a key determinant of individual life satisfaction, while high stress levels were linked to lower life satisfaction.

Being out of work also had a negative impact on people's happiness.

The study found relative to household income, moving from unemployment to employment has the same impact on happiness as a 151 per cent increase in income for the average person.

The study was based on data gathered from Statistics Canada's Community Health Survey.

To read about The Centre for the Study of Living Standards and this report, go here. Note to Americans: it's not one of those fake politicized think tanks. Believe it or not, they don't really seem to have those here.

boundaries, ghosts, witches

It was a beautiful day. In the afternoon I walked south along the shore of the cove. I wanted to visit the boundary rock again.It marks the boundary of the original Lot 1. I wonder whether there are other boundary rocks on the island.
The boundary rock is in the foreground. North of it is the shore line that was a part of Lot 1. The first grantee, Moses Pitcher, sold this lot to Shelburne merchant George Ross in 1787. Ross owned it for about thirty years. A few days before he died, in 1816, he sold it to Dorcas Thomson, who was the wife of his business partner. There was a landing here called, not surprisingly, Ross's Landing.
I was gawking over the rock when I glimpsed the tiniest movement in the nearby woods. The sheep stand very still like statues and hope you don't see them.
They become ghost sheep.
Then when they think you are not looking they melt away and come out in another place entirely, looking remarkably like the stones along the shore. The magical properties of sheep are not widely recognized.
Since I began by walking along the shore, I took the more civilized path homeward, along the lower road. Still, you never know who you'll meet. I heard some deer warning each other to fly away. A raven sailed through the forest with an urgent message but it wasn't for me.
Witch's Butter. Mmmm. Looks delicious.

carrots & kelp, et cetera

Carla Allen has a report on her blog about the flooding in southwestern Nova Scotia, which has been severe.

On the island all is soggy but otherwise okay. The island is a swampy boggy wetland anyway. So now it's just more so. The weather was mild and calm this morning. Just right for a little amble.

Looking north I could see Sandy Point Lighthouse in the distance, as well as some houses near it on the mainland. The sun was just shining on them. I love the look of the sky in this picture.
Looking south I saw a lobster boat tied up at Mark and Patsy's camp.
Later, off she went. Probably going on a carrot run. You can never have too many.
The tide was very high.
A lovely little mushroom of some sort, loving this weather .
Rose hips against a skeleton forest.
The skeleton forest in all its glory.
About a dozen sheep were out on the point eating kelp. They love it when a storm pulls kelp from the ocean floor and pours it out along the cobble beach.

rainy days

The past day or two has been filled with rain and house-rattling wind.

Now the wind has died away and it's just rain.

We keep the wood stove going and turn to our rainy day activities.

season of good cheer

There's a quality of good cheer about deer hunting season on the island. The "hunters" are the same people as our neighbours, only for a couple of weeks they dress differently. As far as I can tell they have customary hunting rights over the whole island, which means that whoever I see riding by on an ATV belongs with one of our neighbours. It's usually one of their fishing mates and some younger relatives who are gradually learning the ways of hunting under more experienced eyes. So, since it's pretty much the same people year after year, they take a great deal of interest in how the deer population is doing. I would say they know more about the habits of the island's deer than anyone else. They are, really, students of the deer.

I'm glad to see them every fall because it's my chance to ask questions and learn something about the mysterious ways of deer. I try not to ask too much. I don't want to seem like I'm prying. So I limit myself to a question or two per year. This year I learned that the bucks usually stay deep in the woods while the does and fawns wander about more. That's why we see does and fawns around the house and sometimes on the road, but hardly ever do we see bucks. Just because we don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

The bucks become less cautious, though, as rutting season strikes them. I learned from the hunters this week that it's the onset of cold weather that triggers the bucks' desire to mate and lures them out of their hiding places. Deer season began officially last Friday, but it only started to get cold a couple of days ago. They said something about the phases of the moon too, but I didn't understand that part. I'll wait until next year to find out more about that.

I like the sound of their ATVs going up and down the road, heading toward their blinds deep in the woods or to another camp, then back again. Each year in late October they clear out their old ATV paths into the interior. Their paths do us good, since we can walk along them at other times of the year and explore an otherwise impenetrable landscape of forest and bog.

For some reason I don't see hunting season as a tragedy for the deer. Most of the deer who gather around the piles of imported carrots and apples to help themselves are does and fawns and under-sized bucks who can't be shot. Maybe the carrots and apples they are eating now will add to the reserves they need to get through the winter. And if the hunters decide the herd seems too small and the bucks too few, they will just agree among themselves not to shoot any. Since they have been hunting here for years, they take the long view. Sometimes I think they are more interested in watching the deer than anything else. But they are truly happy when somebody bags one.

They enjoy being out here for a few days anyway. The young fellas are learning the ways of the woods. The old fellas are getting away from the mainland and enjoying a break between the end of fishing and the start of the lobster season in a few weeks, when they'll be hunting beneath the deep, cold North Atlantic waters.

autumn landscape

There were twenty contented sheep in the lower orchard on Monday.The bog, meanwhile, is showing off its prettiest colours.

looking for a place in Halifax for January to March

Dear Reader,

Greg and I are hoping we can find some sort of house-sitting situation in Halifax for January to March, or some part of that time. Maybe you might know of a place.

I would use that time at the Public Archives to work on a history of the lighthouse. Being in Halifax for an extended time is really necessary for this project, which I am passionate about. Greg would probably spend the time writing and revising his manuscript for a next book about our island life. So you see we would be very quiet and well-behaved house-sitters. We can also walk dogs and care for cats and water plants and forward mail, and we are, for the most part, fairly responsible people. Although we are island hermits we are able to clean ourselves up sufficiently to pass muster in the big city.

I would love to find something near enough to the Archives (at University and Robie) to be able to walk there. But really we would be delighted with any situation in town, since I'm sure there's a bus.

If you can think of any leads I hope you'll let me know, at anne.yarbrough@gmail.com.

cheers,

Anne

a day of gratitude

Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, even though it seems like people actually celebrate by getting together for a big meal on the Sunday before it -- yesterday. Maybe that's only true of the little slice of Canada we know anything about, which would be Carleton Village and Gunning Cove.

Among many, many other things, today we are thankful that our boat, Chopper I, wasn't more seriously damaged when she grounded in the cove on the rocks in high winds on Saturday.
Skipper says we can be grateful that she is a Rosborough hull, renowned for its strength. In which case we are grateful to Skipper for finding Chopper I for us in the first place. We are also grateful that our neighbours Skipper and Jim both came racing over in their skiffs to Greg's rescue, and that our neighbour Robin helped later that night-- in darkness and continued strong winds -- when the tide was high enough for Chopper to get towed over to Skipper's dock.

Then grateful to Skipper for looking her over yesterday and working out the slight propeller damage. And for dropping off sea trout he pulled out of the gill net. Those high winds did bring some good things into the cove after all.

preserved

Greg has been very industrious in the department of canning.

He has made apple butter, three kinds of apple sauce, pear chutney, apple chutney, grape jam, strawberry preserves, apple jelly, and pickled peppers. I love to stand in the breezeway and admire it all. I'm especially entranced by four quart jars of brandied whole pears.

We picked the pears two weeks ago and they are gradually becoming ripe enough to use. After they are off the tree, they take a while to ripen and you just have to guess how they are doing since they keep it under their hats. Then they are perfect for a day or two, but secretly, then they descend into mealy blandness followed quickly by mushy rottenness. Also they are individualists and do not do any of this evolving as a group. So if you have, say, two or three hundred pears you will have two or three hundred different schedules for becoming mush.

But this year, for the first time, we have finally begun to outsmart the pears. So now besides the brandied pears and the pear chutney there are pear tarts in the freezer and fresh pears to eat and soon pear cider, which is called perry, which is so clever since this house was built by Perrys.

a most bountiful bounty

Eleanor and Ira, who have a camp on the eastern side of the island near the lighthouse, came by for a visit this week. Ira brought me some scarlet runner beans from his garden at home on Cape Sable Island. They are for planting in my garden next summer. What an inspiration! These beans make me want to pay more attention to all the seeds I plant next year. I think as I'm narrowing down what I want to plant I'll be able to get everything I need from Nova Scotia seed companies. That would be another step toward local eating.

I haven't finished putting this year's garden to bed yet. There are still tomatoes ripening out there, potatoes to be dug, red kale, dill, a late harvest of mesclun (and -- oh, no! more beans) and even a bit of summer squash.

Our freezer is packed with squash soup and various other delicious meals already made, and swiss chard and collards and kale and of course serious amounts of beans, as well as island foods that came from beyond the garden:

applesauce, dehydrated apples, apple tarts, apple bread, fresh apple cider, wild raspberries, chanterelles, mackerel and mutton.

And, from off the island, these fabulous wild blueberries Skipper brought back all the way from Advocate Harbour. It's almost ridiculous how well we eat. We do spend a lot of time growing, foraging, harvesting and processing. But that's all part of the interest and fun.

low tide in the cove

Yesterday afternoon was good for rowing in the cove. For a little while, anyway. Low tide reveals the intertidal rockweed that frames the shore in gold and bronze and jade. This view takes in some of the land next to ours. It's now woods and an old field where the hotel once stood. The trees near the water are filled with warblers and chickadees, though we can't see them from out here in the cove.
Our flag pole is a former wooden mast from Skipper's boat. At the end of the summer Greg reluctantly takes down our flag, which constant wind has reduced to half its original size. Here's a good view of the crib dock at low tide. Way off in the distance on the left you can see the tiny blotch of white that is Sandy Point Lighthouse, guarding the entrance to Shelburne's inner harbour. It looks like it's sitting on The Horseshoe. But it's really far beyond it.

the mercy of the wind

Our high-tech wind turbine and the solar tracker work together, and that's good. Because some days we have wind and no sun, and other days we have sun and no wind. On really glorious days we have both. That's when we turn on all sorts of energy-sucking rigs: the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the crock pot, the little hot water heater. We have a new dehydrator, for drying apples. But we can only use it on sunny and windy days, when our energy production is high. And we have a second freezer now, for freezing all that fresh apple cider -- about fifty gallons. It's an old freezer and even though it works well it adds to our energy load.

If we have a string of cloudy and windless days, the batteries that store all the energy lose their charge. Down, down, down they slide, while we turn off lights and computers. We do have a back-up for times when the batteries get too low: a ten thousand watt propane generator sits on a concrete pad behind the battery shed. The generator goes on automatically when the system calls for it. We don't let it run for very long though, since it uses up propane. We hear its motor kick on, even in the middle of the night, and one of us goes out to the shed and re-sets everything. By then the generator has kicked up the charge in the batteries at least enough to keep them going for a while.

A string of six propane tanks, strung together by copper gas lines, sits in the former outhouse, a shed next to the shed that houses the batteries and all the fancy blinking lights for the whole business. There's no measuring device for the propane tanks, an odd gap in all this technology. The only way you can tell how much propane is left in those tanks is to look for a line of condensation along the outside of the tanks. It should tell you where the level of your propane is. But you need to be looking for that condensation on a wet day. Because on a dry day you can't see it.

Yesterday we ran out of propane. But that was okay because Greg had an extra tank, which he attached to the end of the string of tanks, thus giving us a little lee-way until he could go into town to get the tanks re-filled. But then the stove ran out of propane too. The stove has been very much in use for blanching beans and chard etc, and canning grape jam and apple sauce etc. So then Greg took the one full tank back off the string of tanks in the shed and replaced the empty tank at the stove. So now, no propane back up for the generator until Saturday, when he can go into town. But he can certainly carry on with the apple tarts and apple jelly and apple chutney.

There is no sun expected here until Sunday, and today is Wednesday. According to the weather reports it'll be mostly rain between now and then. If the charge on the batteries goes too low we'll just watch everything go off. Then there will be no running water or flushing toilet or freezer keeping everything from the garden frozen or computers bringing us the world at our fingertips or lights. For the next few days we are living at the mercy of the wind.

These are hardly dire conditions, though. After all, we do have a back-up back-up system: an outhouse, and oil lamps, and an old well we can drop a bucket into, and little rainy-day projects that don't require electricity, like re-gluing broken plates and organizing closets. We do have books.

gifts from the sea (continued)

Dylan and Skipper came by to show us what they had found washed up on the shore. They brought me an unusually dark purple sea urchin for my collection.
They found a bounty of buckets, buoys and lines. You never know when you'll need more.
They found Charlie Brown.
An excellent coffee mug from a very high class place down the shore beyond Lockeport.
A perfectly useful matched pair of lobster claws, size extra large.
With his handy new claws, Dylan is demonstrating the proper use of a chest freezer which is also a recycled item, new to us, but which was not found on the beach. That would be another story, really. Maybe Greg will tell it in his next book.

grape harvest

Elizabeth Hyde planted our grape vine, long ago: a concord, I think. After Elizabeth died the house and the land more or less went to sleep, but those vines continued to grow along the ground up where she had her big vegetable garden. Skipper, who always kept an eye on things, built a wooden fence around them to keep the sheep and deer from plundering them. So when we first arrived, the vines lay tangled and forlorn inside and over the remains of a weather-beaten wooden fence.

After our first year we took down that old fence and included the vines inside the new vegetable garden. Ambitiously, Greg built an arbour for the grapes. We pruned them and trained them, sort of. But there was only so much we could do besides tearing out the single huge trunk and starting over. Which I wasn't that interested in. The arbour was pretty enough in the garden's second summer, with its vines growing this way and that and its translucent leafy canopy. Last year we got maybe a cup of grapes, and Greg made one little jar of grape jam. I figured we had built the arbour for the benefit of our bird friends, and I left it at that.

This year I paid no attention to the grape arbour. As summer went on some vines got too long and started hitting me in the face as I walked into the garden, so I whacked them off. But that was as far as any pruning went. Gradually, though, I started noticing that there were clusters of grapes forming here and there. Oh well, I thought, the birds will be happy this year. I did not get my hopes up. I barely looked at the arbour. After all, I had collards to consider, and chard, and beans. Important things.

Quietly, behind my back, the grapes grew.

This past week was apple harvesting time around here. The big-time action was all in the apple trees, but in the middle of the week Greg mentioned that he thought the grapes were ready to harvest, too.
So I picked the grapes, about four and a half gallons once I took them off their stems.

Though we should have been putting two and two together all along, the bounty of the grape arbour caught us off guard. I had thought that the birds would swoop in at the last and stage a gigantic avian grape-fest, and that whatever we got would be an afterthought, their leftovers. But now instead we had oh-so-much of a good thing, requiring immediate attention. The rushing torrent of apple momentum would have to wait.

Jam was what we aspired to, not merely jelly. Not something smooth and simple and jelly-like, but something dense, more complex. But it turns out that jam -- as opposed to jelly -- is complicated to make. There are many time-consuming steps. These are the ones I did: taking the grapes off the stems, then separating the pulp from the skin of each and every grape. So that you end up with a pot of pulp, called must, and a separate bowl of skins. As far as I know there is no machine for doing this, or at least not at our house.

After that I turned everything over to Greg. I can't even tell you how many steps came next, since I stayed out of the kitchen. There were many, many steps, involving rarely-used and mysterious equipment and supplies. All evening, until midnight, the kitchen was filled with the purple aroma of grapes and the reading out loud of snippets from various recipes pulled off the Internet, which sounded like nothing so much as the muttering of charms and spells.

This morning I came downstairs to discover magic jars of grape jam, more than I can count, a rich dark colour amidst the brightness of the apple harvest.

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.

last summer sky

Here are a few pictures Greg took of yesterday's evening sky.