Putting the Garden to Bed and Visitors Arrive

October may be the most glorious time of year. The leaves are turning golden and orange; there is a crispness in the air and the season has definitely changed. It’s always tough to see fresh vegetables and beautiful flowers transform into black, dead plants.

The Maples have been ‘raining’ golden leaves this week.

There are still lots of jobs to do in the garden. It’s time to pull the remaining carrots. Last minute lilies, iris,  tall grasses and mint had to be planted. Today I pulled out the dahlias which have rewarded me with multiple bulbs. Each will grow into 3 ft high flower bush next year.

These Dahlia were red and prolific bloomers.

I planted a good crop of garlic last year and some of the bulbs that I harvested in July will grow new garlic for next season. It took me 2 long afternoons to clear the old tomato plants away, turn the soil, pick out more rocks, pull weeds. I finally planted the garlic cloves under drizzling rain conditions, while listening to my ipod reading of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing. CBC’s show Between the Covers is podcast and there are readings of entire books available for download.

The soil looks so rich because it’s quite damp.

I’ve been in a bigger rush than usual to get the gardening priorities finished because we were expecting two important visitors. Our son and daughter have flown here from Toronto and LA for some family time and to help us with the finishing touches on the house.

Jesse arrived first and we’ve put him to work stacking MORE wood. The yard looks to me like we are going into the cordwood business.

Larry surveys Jesse’s woodpile stacking.

Emily is an anti-clutter expert and quite organized …way moreso than the rest of us put together. She has moved about 8 times in the last 3 years following the animation trail. She’s got great ideas and I sure don’t want to get in the way of sane living. She’s just got a few commissions to finish first which will give me a few days to redeem myself. It’s the same idea as cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes over.

She is precise and very focused.

Larry is still painting bedrooms, hanging tricky shower doors, sending back window screens for the 3rd time because the supplier custom-made the wrong sizes.

Yet another coat of paint in the dining room.

I’m cooking lots of home-made meals for the family, baking bread, pies and fussing over our gorgeous, creative kids. After all, it’s the first time they’ve slept in this house so it feels pretty important that they can be here with us.

The wood shapes and textures are inspiring.

I planted some more lilies and iris out at our pond too. The heavy rains this month are creating a steady supply of water to our home-made pond and she’s looking fantastic right now. I sat at the edge on an upturned pail for a while before I went in to make supper. (The final harvest stir-fried) I watched birds swoop by me. I found the colours, the smells and the reflection to be stunning. Once again, I could hardly believe what my eyes were seeing.

Cordelia, the willow tree is so far away, but still is reflected in the pond.

I wanted to go back in the house and bring Larry out here, when suddenly he appeared with a hot cup of specialty tea that our daughter had brought us from California. We both agreed that October is extra special not only because the colours are spectacular, but we also get to spend some quality time with our kids.

Larry points out the crossing to Jesse.

If you feel like taking in the sights, please drop by. You don’t even have to bring your own pail to sit on.

11 Day Countdown

It rained every day this week in Bear River. The rain stopped long enough in between to dry things up a bit, and to plump up the tasty cherries in the 3 very old trees at our place.  Most of them are far too high to reach, but the birds have been enjoying the bounty. I’ve been eating the lower ones. Yum!

Bear River's Cherry Carnival originated over 100 years ago because of all the cherry trees. The few remaining are very old.

The rain has also doubled the sizes of the vegetable plants. It doesn’t seem very long ago that I was turning the sod to plant things. Now, suddenly EVERYTHING is up and growing. So are the cucumber beetles who almost took out the zucchini, cucumber, squash and pumpkin seedlings over a 2 day period. I picked off over 30 and drowned them in a bucket of soapy water, but it was like trying to catch rain drops. I’d like to find out if there is a ‘friendly’ way to kill them without poisoning the plants and beneficial birds and insects. Until I do, I’m using some powdered rotenone until there are a few more leaves on the plants so they can better fend for themselves.

Pole beans, broccoli and bush beans.

The beans are getting chomped by slugs, but they are still winning!

Not exactly 'House and Garden'.

The rain has also brought the roofing to a dead halt.

The good thing about the delay in the roofing is that one of the roofers has time to work on floor sanding with Larry.

And lest you thought that there is no mess to clean up, take a look at the backyard! In two weeks time we’ll host my dear sister and brother-in-law who live in England. Because of the distance, we don’t see each other very often and I want their visit to be memorable, but in a good way! It’s hard not to see the mess through the eyes of a visitor, but this actually is a wonderful opportunity for me to practice acceptance. Still, it is nerve-wracking to think that the owner of the house we are still living in is returning in 2 weeks,  and we need to move all our stuff and unpack some of it at the other end, and our visitors will be arriving and a few details still need doing like:

• finishing caulking the bathrooms and complete the final water hookup
• replace the motor on the water pump that cuts out several times a day but restarts when you hit it
• finish installing the kitchen cupboards
• stain them
• finish chinking the bedroom floors
• tile the front foyer
• varnish the floors
• install kitchen counter
• buy a kitchen sink and install it
• paint
• hook up the hot water heater
• etc, etc, etc.

Plugging in the sander for the last time.

I didn’t think Larry would have time to sand this floor, but with the help of a great neighbour, the last sanding ended on Wednesday!

Larry never ever wants to look at another sander. The fellow at the rental asked him if he was interested in making extra money sanding. "I get lots of requests."

Now the upstairs sanded floors are getting crack-filled with strips of wood and then with a combination of sawdust mixed with a resin.

These floor boards are beautiful. They were first laid 144 years ago using trees that were over a 100 years old. History under foot!

By today, Friday, all the floors had been sanded and the kitchen was starting to be installed.

It's great watching it all take shape.

I have learned from all of this that when estimating how long anything will take to do, double the time – but only if you are efficient. Otherwise triple it. I will never look at anyone’s renovations with the same eyes ever again. It is a TON of work and requires amazing, constant decision making and attention to detail.

After supper on Friday, after a very long, hard week, Larry said “let’s go down to the house and see what that periwinkle looks like on the dining room wall.”

Look how high those ceilings are!

So, at 8 p.m. he started rolling it on.

It's always exciting and shocking to see the colour roll on.

The painted woodwork will eventually be white. The yellow-green that is most of the kitchen and dining room reminded us of the first leaves of the willow tree. The periwinkle is like the evening sky, but it’s also the colour of a shed we had in our former backyard where our kids and their friends used to hang out. Here is a story about that.

The woodwork will be white and the rest of the room a yellow-green.

I’ve been packing and weeding and vacuuming and mowing and driving into Digby for supplies. I really hope that in 11 days from now we have hot and cold running water in the kitchen and bathroom, the stove and refrigerator work and the water pump cooperates. Oh, and could we please have all our stuff there and the new guest bed that I ordered from Sears delivered.

Other than that, a good meal, nice company and a bottle of wine is all we really need.

Birthday on the Rocks

Our mantra about moving to Bear River reads something like this:  

We love living here and we feel thankful each and every day to have had landed here…except for one important aspect.

Our adult kids live thousands of miles away and inspite of Skype and email and the telephone, we miss spending ordinary (but really extraordinary)  time with them. You know what I mean. It is lovely to just sit in the same room together and talk about politics, the cat, working life, twitter vs facebook, American vs. Canadian belief systems, Battlestar Galactica, Naomi Klein, childhood memories, house renovations, artists, musicians and more.

Explanations are so much easier face-to-face

But it’s also nice to walk through a room and see Emily sketching the cat or Jesse strumming his guitar–both of them expressing their creativity. What a pleasure for a parent to see.

They have surprised us with a trip to Bear River and we’ve been having a great catching-up time with them. It is so nice to swap stories and it’s wonderful to cook for them AND to be able to sit down together and share a meal with them! Their lives are so fast paced and busy that they mostly eat take-out food, restaurant food so it’s a great opportunity for me to spoil them with home cooking.

Homemade bread and lasagna.

This visit coincides with my 58th birthday, with our daughter’s birthday and with Mother’s Day too! It’s quite amazing for me to share my birthday with them both. Last year’s birthday was pretty special too as we were gallery hopping with our daughter and son-in-law in Los Angeles on my birthday and I saw some amazing work by Matisse as well as German Expressionist painters too. We even got to see a bubbling tar pit in action.

This birthday we drove a short distance from Digby to Point Prim, a beautiful spot that we never tire of visiting and that we wanted so much to share with the kids.

Tidal pools form in the basins left behind by cooling lava.

Except for a couple of sites in Nova Scotia, like Peggy’s Cove, there are many, many beautiful, geological and geographical sites to see in this province that are not really promoted or known about except to the locals. Point Prim is one of those spots.

Our daughter took most of the photos in this post.

The geological formations are so varied and so interesting and tell an ancient tale about molten lava forming millions of years ago.

The body of water is part of the Bay of Fundy and the wind was still quite cold for a warm day in May. The water was a deep blue and it felt exhilarating to be there.

Just us and the ocean waves.

We stayed for an hour and only saw one other couple as we were leaving so we really had the whole ocean to ourselves. It’s hard to describe how wonderful it was to spend time together, on my birthday, in this magical place, with the people who mean the most to me in the world.

The textures in the rock formations make interesting patterns.

I watched our offspring climb over these rocks that will still be here in another million years. I thought about how fortunate we are to be right here, right now. If you are coming to Nova Scotia, anyone in Digby can tell you where Point Prim is.

Lunch in Digby.

The rocks are eternal and so is the interconnectedness and the love that so many parents and children and siblings share. What a perfect birthday!

Insights from the Blueberry Patch

The greatest difficulty in living in beautiful Nova Scotia is the geographical distance from friends and family. Thank goodness there is email and telephone and Skype, but even those modes of communication cannot replace spending a good chunk of time talking and sharing and laughing together. It’s very special when friends are able to make the trek out here.

Painting in the studio with Dianne

So it is wonderful right now to spend quality time with my dear friend Dianne, one of the founding Urban Guerillas. It’s been almost a week now and we still haven’t run out of things to talk about….if anything, the subjects have increased exponentially. Everything from Buddhism to painting to aging to popular culture to therapy to Tai Chi to creativity to communal living to globalization to our grown-up kids and more.

Larry learns Tai Chi from Dianne

Some of the ‘and more’ has been talking about Bear River and the life that Larry and I are building here. I have always valued Dianne’s opinion. For me she is one of those maverick people who can look at many pieces of the puzzle simultaneously and figure out where it all goes. So, it is important for me to show her some of the pieces of our Bear River experience. For me, that experience is a combination of people and scenery.

We’ve introduced her to some of our Bear River friends and one of them taught Dianne how to attach slate tiles to a roof, another showed her how to load a pottery kiln and another showed Dianne how to thread a loom. All of these gestures were, for me, more evidence of the friendliness and generous spirit that is Bear River.

Tapping a nail hole into slate

One morning we were invited to pick blueberries in Jane’s field. Jane showed us her garden, the moveable chicken run and took us up to the blueberry fields.  We sat about 12 feet away from each other and picked for an hour while we talked about home-schooling, education systems around the world, raising chickens, travel and gardening. 

Picking wild blueberries

When we were finished, I saw an amazing thing. Each of our containers held berries that were slightly different sizes and colours. That 12 foot distance put us all in slightly different eco-sections of the blueberry patch. I was astounded at the variation in the fruit.

Dianne's blueberries- medium sized and dark

I wondered how it’s possible that the grocery stores are able to get uniform fruit when we had such differences in colour, size and flavor in a relatively small part of the field.

Jane's blueberries- large and light blue

I had experienced this non-uniformity of eggs when I started buying them at Stone Farm last fall. but I hadn’t thought about it extending to other kinds of foods. 

Flora's blueberries- smaller and some are almost black

This variation in the natural world extends, of course, to people; although sometimes the workplace or societal systems we find ourselves in, try to make us conform to a uniform way of thinking and being.

My friend Dianne is a fiercely independent thinker and that’s something about her that I’ve always been drawn to. That thread goes through a number of people that we’ve met here in Bear River. I think it’s easier to be a free-thinker in Bear River because mass media and popular culture don’t penetrate this valley as efficiently as happens in the big city. Why, we can’t even get cell phone reception here!

Trying out the neighbourhood toys.

Still, it’s good to get the news from the front line and to share the spirit of our lives here with a friend who helped me hang onto mine when Bear River was still some far-away fantasy.

Hanging out at Gilbert's Cove