Island landscape

Here are some of the lobster cages washed up on The Point and along the cobble beach south of The Point.  Greg is walking along wondering what he can make out of them. From seaweed to trashed cages, Carla Allen helps me recognize the particular wonders of Nova Scotia. 

Stardust

We are surrounded by darkness here. There is no ambient light. Nothing mediates our experience of the sky on a moonless, cloudless night. It is beautiful, yes, stunningly so. In summer I gaze upward in awe and swear I'll learn more constellations so I can understand a bit of this overhead wildness, get my bearings and find my way around. 

It's just the tiniest shift, though, from awe to terror. In winter the stars are cold glittering points, beaming messages billions of years late from a place that no longer exists. The night sky swirls and dips and lurches. Constellations swing from place to place, planets reel across the heavens, the moon rises and sets in random places along the edge of a dark looming endless bowl. The Milky Way slides across the sky from angle to angle, a loose belt in the engine of the universe. There is nothing you can count on up there, except for a cold glitter coming to you forever from before time began. 

The immensity of this unmediated sky disorients and terrifies me. The stars remind me of that essential dust which is my beginning and my end. Remember you are dust, the stars sing silently. On cold starry nights I'd rather be inside.     

But then it's also just the tiniest shift from terror to awe. Their cosmic song is a promise of some unimaginable goings-on beyond our ephemeral selves.  The starry night will receive our dust, our molecules, our glittering motes and beams, and we shall be at once nothing at all and at one with all, as it all swirls on. 

 

Lull between two woodpiles

Our wood pile is in a lull. At the beginning of winter we revelled in how much wood we had, a wall of wood, split and stacked, long, high and wide, of spruce and apple and birch. We were rich in wood. But by the other day it was almost gone. I don't know how this happened so quickly. It reminded me of when you think you have plenty of money and then all of a sudden you see you don't. How did that happen, exactly, you wonder.

It's not that we don't have wood. We have a huge pile Greg has made since December, a wall of wood, split and stacked, long, high and wide. But it is the wood for next winter's heat, not for now. It must dry and age until then, when it will be ready. It will be of great use next winter. But it is of no use at all right now.

We can scrounge our way through this lull. There are plenty of standing dead trees around. Come to think of it, we are rich in standing dead trees. Greg can cut one down and chop it up and we can burn it right away, since it's pre-aged. And down by the sheep corral there's a huge pile of well-seasoned slab wood -- the remnants of Skipper's lumber milling over a year ago.

It's another lesson in living hand-to-mouth, an aspect of late winter when the wealth of harvest is running out faster and faster. Still, the temperatures are rising. Soon we'll be in and out of the house all day, too busy with spring projects to pay attention to the fire in the woodstove, which is how winter finally ends.