pei

summer postcards, remember the invisible buffalo?

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

joey.buffalo

What I love best about kids is the way they don’t need Any Specific Thing to make them happy, how just the idea of going to see where the buffalo live is reason for skipping, how they listen to the story of the original herd being a gift from Alberta to the island for its centennial some 50-ish years ago and when you’re finished telling that sliver of history they ask if you know that their shoe keeps falling off because it’s too big and they point at where the buffalo Would Be if they were grazing instead of resting in the forest out of sight and when you say that’s the way it goes they’re okay with that because there is still the business of imagining how enormous they must be and the enormous sounds they must make and of course their enormous poop pancakes are Right There, proving They Exist.

♣

♣

the light getting in

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

There’s a beach where I sing Cohen’s Anthem to the seals, the chorus anyway, about cracks letting in light, the perfection of imperfection. I’m pretty sure that’s what the seals are singing too.

But this post isn’t about seals.

It’s about trees, which is part of the reason I’ve been inconsistently present for the better part of a year,

I’ve been wandering among what’s left of the them ever since Hurricane Fiona struck the east coast, when the island is said to have lost 40% of its trees on that single day in September, 2022.

Much has changed about the landscape since, not to mention the shoreline, not to mention the bridges, wharves, barns and houses demolished. The everywhere piles of timber have become a testament to the art of log stacking.

I’ve been wandering in what’s left of wandering space in the forest around my house, initially dazed, less so each time. We’ve done mammoth cleanups and have begun to cut a few new trails but we’re taking our time. I realize I don’t need a whole forest to wander through in order to feel awe.

There is new sunlight, saplings too, and mossy glades have sprung up among the still standing spruce and eastern larch (tamarack), the maple and birch, groves of beech, mountain ash, serviceberry, alder and aspen.

The other day I counted eight or nine new oak trees I’d never seen before. A few days after that I saw twenty on the same walk. This morning I stopped counting. This is the way of trees, I realize, the slow reveal of them. A forest at a glance is… green space. Up close it’s an unending universe.

Just the other day, at the edge of the tree line, I found two new apple trees, each a great distance from the other. One I call the galette tree for its tiny perfect fruit, tart enough for galettes, one of the few things I enjoy baking, precisely because the crust wants to be imperfectly shaped.

The old linden beside the house was perfectly shaped, but also imperfect because it had grown so large it almost touched the hydro lines and a month or so ago when another hurricane threatened, and because the direction of the forecasted winds (different than Fiona’s) would force the tree’s branches right onto the power lines, we took no chances, and had it cut down. I expected to be sad, pained even, but it wasn’t in the least painful, not a bit sad. There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.

Now every morning I salute these stumps and the space once filled with the old linden’s canopy, thank it for its willingness to continue standing despite (we realized) rotting from the middle and something eating its leaves, for making it easy to do what was necessary, and for the light its absence allows.

The other day in my ramblings along the tree line, I noticed among the ‘greenery’ a tiny grove… of linden saplings.

What else to say…

Here’s to the cracks and the light.

Ring all the bells.

light gets in

summer postcards — see glass

~ carin ~ 7 Comments

glass.birds

Various forms of found glass keep crossing my path, old blue jars dug up in the garden, an unusual piece of pirate glass on the shore, a whole little village made of bottles, and at the farmers’ market (on the sprawling lawn of a farmhouse where the owners make our newest addiction: their excellent pizza), I stop by a table where a woman and her grandson sit behind various crafts fashioned from seaglass. Did she find it all herself, is it tumbled, is it all from PEI, even the tiniest pieces because you hardly ever find tiny pieces here... I ask, trying not to sound like I’m filled with suspicion that maybe she isn’t a true glass forager but then she answers, so sincerely, (yes, no, yes, and yes) and the conversation easily turns entre nous in that way it often does when you find yourself connecting with mutual appreciation, a kind of recognition almost, and her grandson, eight or nine, waves from the chair beside her and tells me how he hunts glass with his gran for hours and how he puts what he finds into little glass jars of sand, which he sells for $5, and so I buy one for family in France, who were visiting last year but I’m thinking surely the sand has washed out from between their toes by now and needs to be replenished. And I buy a framed picture as well, tiny seaglass birds on a wire because Cohen’s words are part of the soundtrack of my summers.

it’s been too long and i miss this space

~ carin ~ 7 Comments

Hard to fathom it was back in September last year when I was last on this site, no intentions to take a break of seven months, no idea then that Hurricane Fiona was days away.

The aftermath of which was certainly a big part of my absence. And not just in the way of getting over the shock, or even the clean-up, which will be years in the doing, but because big events cause big shifts in ways you sometimes don’t even know are possible. Big shifts in the crevices of our lives. The way we think about things mostly.

Not the least of which is how I’ve come to think about the forest. When we first arrived here to this house near the sea and at the edge of the Wald (a german word that I love), I remember looking at some leaning trees in the distance and bemoaning the fact that they were too far away to cut or straighten, that they cluttered the otherwise beautiful Wald, gave it a messy look because of course trees should be upright, never dead, and full of twittering bluebirds. The best forests are like that. Aren’t they?

Turns out they are not. If you look closely at any healthy forest (not a park setting but a natural woodland) you’ll see dishevelment. You have to look closely though. A quick glance only gives the Disney impression, moss and ferns and rich earth, dappled sunlight, etc., all of which is there too. But look at the dead wood, the fallen trees, the decay that becomes new habitat, the saplings that find slivers of sky and sunshine that reach out and take those saplings by the hand and say this way!

Even so.

Fiona created more than dishevelment.

I spent hours every day walking through our ravaged Wald. Wept at the number of trees down, hundreds of them, like piles of enormous pick-up sticks, only most of these will never be moved except by time and the elements. It occurred to me that I was walking in the Wald more often than I did before Fiona, when the trails were clear. I was always drawn to the shore then, the forest was right there, it could wait. But now the forest called to me several times a day as if it had something to teach, it actually felt that way, and as I took in the devastation daily, sat amongst the debris breathing deeply in sadness but something else too, I noticed a huge white pine I’d never seen before, still standing, and named her Mother for the comfort of her presence, how she seemed to suggest that, despite appearances, all was in fact well, that life goes on. I soon realized that the yin yang of everything is here too, renewal in disaster. I was in anguish for the forest but the forest didn’t feel troubled. And pretty soon neither did I.

The forest, it turns out, is an excellent teacher.

I began to notice all kinds of things that felt new, things I’d walked past before. The tiniest twigs, which I now took the time to identify and celebrate as young birch, maple, oak, or beech. I watched red squirrels move into piles of brush as we cleared new paths and thought how the space had never been so alive with birds (had it?), chickadees greeting me every morning, landing on my outstretched hands, the way sunlight came through new gaps in the canopy. I’ve always embraced nature in a huge way, even as a kid. Outside is my favourite place to be, trees were always my friends, and the cycle of regeneration was something I’ve always known about but didn’t think about it in a deep way, something I just took for granted. Fiona made it impossible to take much for granted.

So this is part of what I’ve been doing all these months.

Falling in love in a new way.

And loving the surprise of its domino effect.

cathedral

one year

~ carin ~ 8 Comments

 

A year ago today we woke up in an RV after spending the night with our cats parked in front of a motel on the border of Quebec and New Brunswick.

We’d paid for a room but only to get the parking space. Covid protocols were wild and up until a few days earlier we hadn’t been sure we’d get the green light to travel at all, still didn’t know what would happen at the New Brunswick and PEI borders.

Anyway, we woke up in this rinky dink gravel parking lot where all night beside us was a small red car, motor running, and a group of (based on their clothing) young Amish or Mennonite folk with a parrot in a cage and a dog with a rope tied to its collar, both of which critters they kept taking in and out of their room for what seemed to be ‘walks’ or feeds from plates of scrap food. They were a highly excited group of kids, laughing, running about (maybe sixteen, eighteen years old, tops), not offensively loud just… overly happy for the time of day. It started to rain at one point and yet they still larked about, in and out of their room, the car still idling, until about 3 a.m. when we heard what sounded like car doors opening and closing and then (after much loading of wotnots)… they drove away. Bliss.

At the time it felt like sleep was important but now looking back, I’m grateful they were there. Grateful also for the night before, also spent in a parking lot (another room paid for but not used) and waking to watch a man in an electric company uniform doing tai chi beside an electric company van. I remember looking out the window of the RV as I ate my breakfast, thinking how little we know about people, how if I’d seen this guy doing his electric company work I would never have guessed that this is how he starts his day.

It’s no cliche, the journey is everything and we didn’t rush, not especially. Three days of driving and two nights in the RV, many picnic stops along the way. Lovely to have our own kitchen, bathroom and bedroom with us, felt like being a snail, travelling light yet impossible to forget anything. One of us drove the RV with the cats (who were fabulous) and I drove a pick-up filled with garden plants. My travelling companion in the passenger seat was an avocado tree given to me by my niece.

The plants have all survived, including the Ontario trilliums… that I only just discovered the other day, not yet blooming, but they survived the winter, and it was a thrill to stumble upon them; I’d forgotten I’d brought them and I’m just so glad they approve of their feet being in red soil.

A year ago today, after one last long day of driving, we pulled up in front of a house we’d never seen in person and it immediately felt like home.

There’s a good chance those young people were also heading to PEI; I’ve since learned there are sizeable Amish and Mennonite communities here. They were smart, we realized later, to cross borders at 3 a.m. — no line ups — and I often wonder about their drive, that small car crammed with feathers and fur and excitement, and sometimes wonder where they are now, how this year has been for them, if they, too, were in the process of moving from another province when our paths crossed, and I hope they, too, are happy to have their feet planted on this magnificent red soil.

And the parrot of course.

I hope the parrot is enjoying all the many pleasures of salted air.

trillium