Where I sit and chat with the morning sun, the air is filled with the scent of apples, windfall and other, to be picked and gathered once this sun chatter is done — some for eating, some for juicing, some for a marvellous apple loving boar down the road, a boar named Georgie.
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I’m reminded of the chap who once stopped me on the beach, he was visiting the island, staying at a nearby cottage with his young family and wanting to know WHAT to do and WHERE to go and THINGS to see and all this as we were surrounded by one of the most glorious stretches of coastline, uncrowded, perfect weather, seals breathing deeply on that rock there, blue heron on another, a single tern idly floating in water calm as glass, the occasional kayaker and only a few swimmers in this magical expanse of saltwater where only minutes earlier I’d been floating myself, though not entirely tern-like, eyes to the horizon, thinking how extraordinary to have all this s p a c e to myself… and so I ask the chap, who is the whole time he’s talking, looking at his phone… I ask how long he’s here for and he says a week and I give him some places because he seems so intent on What and Where and Things, but then I add my best advice which is, honestly, for now, just sit down, I say, and in the morning see how you feel and if you Must Go Somewhere, drive in a random direction, don’t plan anything and be surprised by everything or, even better, don’t drive, stay where you are another day, and maybe another… He nodded as if yes, yes, but he could hardly stop fidgeting, scrolling, googling for better ideas while all around him the heron and the tern and the horizon scratched their heads.
**
Later in the week, I went back to the beach and there was the guy again… seems time and maybe the absence of finding what he thought he was looking for, had had its effect, turned him into a guy who wears loose clothing, trousers rolled halfway up the shin, hands in pockets and walking sloooowly along the shoreline, stopping frequently to stare at the horizon, walking in a way that looks like he’s in love with walking and you can imagine him walking like that around the world, no sign of a phone and the tween kids are swimming a ways down the beach, his partner walks too, at her own pace, separate but together, like they’ve all found each other by giving each other space, not separation. Walking like someone who noticeably breathes differently than the guy I saw six days earlier. In fact I hardly recognized him.
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We’re getting close to finishing our harvest of haskaps, the first of the berries to ripen in our berry fields. Today, overcast, and thunder rumbles in the distance and eventually rain falls, through which we continue to pick until we’re done, always leaving a few berries for the birds.
This morning, feathers and pieces of bone and wing around some of the bushes tell a story that probably involves the foxes who were born under the barn in early spring, a couple of them still sleep there and hunt in our meadows and forest. We have become very fond of them, each having a name and as time goes on, we’re able to notice a difference in their behaviours, one from the other. But I’m fond of the crows too, who also have names and behaviours, and it was the crows who were angry yesterday, grack grack gracking madly for ages. I knew something was up and I suspected it had to do with the foxes. When they were just kits, I worried about their safety, worried every time mum went hunting, would she come back with enough for them to eat. I once watched her arrive with a baby raccoon in her mouth, which the kits devoured. A dead baby to feed babies, yet I was glad they had nourishment. My callousness surprised and appalled me. But then, I didn’t know the raccoon family, hadn’t watched them grow up, and I saw the offering only as food for young, not violence.
Looking at today’s feathers, I’m confronted again with the fact of killing as a daily necessity, how very normal it is, and after taking a moment to recognize the lives of both the foxes and the crows and the place they hold in this world I’m privileged to share, I think how so little of this is taught to us as children, how so much is sanitized, Disneyfied, and I find myself grateful to have been raised on Grimms rather than Disney. Some residual memory of those pull-no-punches stories surely helps put into perspective the impossible heartbreak of this very real world—
— in all its wisdom and beauty, and sadness.
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I sow radishes because of how they are with butter on slices of bread I make with almond flour and because of that night a half dozen decades ago when in a rainy cabin there was nothing to eat but radishes, butter, a rye loaf my mother made, and I ate and ate and ate and because it instantly became, and remains all these decades later, one of my most precious culinary experiences.
Every year my mother went to the beach to pick the hips of wild roses. Only a short drive from our house, the beach was somewhere we spent a lot of time as a family, swimming, picnic suppers, walking in the rain, collecting stones for a new rockery. The rosehip outings, though, were just the two of us, and always later in the year, in the fall when the hips were ‘ripe’. Not that I helped with the picking, I just liked any excuse to be at the beach. I picked shells and danced barefoot on cool sand while she, some distance away, stood, back slightly bent, leaning over thorny bushes that formed a long line parallel to the shore, filling her apron, or maybe a bag or a pillowcase, holding it open to receive each fat red hip. She would dry them for tea, mixing them with handpicked calendula, chamomile and linden, to make her own special blend kept in tins to enjoy all winter.
I remember how the hips turned the water pink. Magic.
It wouldn’t have occurred to her to buy tea, even if such blends were available then. ‘Making her own’ was a way of being… a farm girl from the Austrian alps, where there were no shops nearby and where everything was homegrown and homemade and medicine came from the garden, the fields, or the forest. Teas were medicine. Even after moving to a medium sized city in Canada with shops at every corner, her way remained homegrown and homemade, our medicine cabinet was the garden.
Someone mentioned roses the other day.
It doesn’t take much.
Another kind of magic.
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I think of her whenever I see wild roses anywhere but it’s only those that grow on beaches that come with a memory made in a millisecond a thousand years ago when a child looked up from her barefoot dance and in the distance saw a woman she knew so well but would never truly know, holding open an apron, or was it a bag or possibly a pillowcase…
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…. when checking on my scarves, which are daily feeling like metaphors blowing in the wind, I find a nest I assume is a hummingbird’s so I ask an island expert on such things and she tells me that, no, not a hummingbird but a vireo made this beauty, which delights me because I’ve heard what I dared to fancy were vireos chorusing in this particular neck of the woods and now I wonder if this little place will be returned to like a swallow’s box because the very truth of it having withstood the heavy snow, pelting ice, and winds of winter is astonishing and if the vireo owners are maybe thinking of subletting, I’d like to suggest that ‘durable’ would not be an overstatement in any ad.
The picture distorts size. Imagine the cupped hand of a small child. Also, know that it’s hanging in mid-air, fixed to thin branches by spit, grasses, and hope.
A hummingbird, I’m told, makes a nest the size of thimble.
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I admit I’ve been easily distracted for the last wee while.
Which often takes me away from my desk and into the forest, tromping through snow with high boots and more recently over thick crusty snow and ice (because it’s March) with cleats.
I stand facing the sun as I watch ducks and sometimes geese on the small river we call a creek and soon the red squirrel and chickadees find me and hint hint hint hint hint that it’s time to walk deeper into the forest where their feeders hang in chickadee glade and where I’m suddenly surrounded by the sound of wings floofffing and whooshing as I add sunflower seeds to a handmade wooden feeder so old and squirrel-gnawed I’ve forgotten where it came from.
Never fails to make me smile, this floofff and whoosh, the sound of it, yes, but even more than that, the reminder of what also is.
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A well placed forest chair invites me to stop and sit a while this morning instead of walking further along and down to the creek as I usually do and even though the sky is overcast and still chilly enough at this hour for parka and scarf, I never say no to this kind of thing, especially here, an area that used to be dark and heavily treed, now open to light, created by hurricane Fiona a year and a half ago and where I now hang a couple of feeders which the juncos, chickadees, and squirrels share, and where today I watch a chickadee work at something in the moss, a breakfast of bugs?… but no, the motion is more gathering, nesting material I decide and assume bits of dried grass until it goes on for ages and I realize there’s no actual grass in the area so I can’t imagine what she’s gathering because it’s not the moss itself and when she finally flies off I wander over to see what else is there and I recognize an old deposit of fox scat, (because when you walk in a forest every morning you notice these things) and I know this particular scat has been there for months, I’ve seen it morph, the scat part having deteriorated, leaving a pile of mainly fur… fluffy and clean enough for a chickadee’s nest apparently… which delights me as only scat can, and which is why I never refuse a woodland invitation.
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A story written for a little girl in France, who speaks both English and French.
The preamble: https://matildamagtree.com/2024/02/29/spring-is-in-the-air/
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L’HISTOIRE DE PEPE LE PEW
Asseyez-toi and listen to the story of un homme that smelled in a way that not tout le monde loved.
It was hiver and Pepe le Pew was frois. He needed une maison to stay chaud. He tried un arbre but it was tres windy and his chapeau kept flying off.
He tried the inside of a trrrrrreeeeessssssss ENORME rubber boot (a polka dot one!) he found in a ditch, but it smelled worse than Pepe le Pew. And it had boue and l’eau inside, which was not nice pour dormir.
He tried the nid of a chickadeedeedee (too petite), and the nest of an aigle (too high up to climb every day).
He asked the ecureuil rouge if he would like a roommate and the ecureuil rouge said: are you kidding me??? (which means non)
And then une nuit froide, when the neige was starting to fall, Pepe noticed un chat going under one end of the barn. And he followed the cat (we aren’t sure if the cat is a he or a she so we will refer to them as they) and the cat fell asleep on a little nid of newspapers and dry bits of feuilles and they looked very chaud et confortable.
So Pepe le Pew, very politely, and very quietly, made himself une petite nid at the other end of the grange and there he stayed tout l’hiver and came out during the jour to enjoy the soleil and to find little things to eat and then went back under his end of the barn to snuggle up for the nuit.
And the chat didn’t mind one bit.
And so they spent the hiver together, tranquillement.
But that’s not the fini of the histoire because even though by printemps Pepe le Pew had moved out of his nid d’hiver he had left behind a fragrance in the grange that when the door was opened for the premiere time (by moi), made moi rire et rire et rire (parce que I don’t mind the fragrance) and say, ah, c’est evident you were ici, Pepe le Pew!! and I’m heureux that we could give you a maison d’hiver. Bonne chance, bonne chance!
Come back again l’annee prochaine!
La fin.
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Opened the barn door for the first time in two months because until yesterday’s thaw it’s been blocked with ever increasing levels of snow and drifts too big to clear away and was immediately met with a loud and clear fragrance, bringing two thoughts to mind:
one, I’m glad we’ve been able to provide safe shelter for the producer of said fragrance—I’ve seen its tracks in the snow all winter and often wondered how it (and others) survive,
and b) it’s a good thing I like an earthy pong (for that is what I’ll call it).
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Matilda Magtree 