We live in an area of Nova Scotia known as cattle country. The land undulates between fields and forests, with handsome red or weathered-grey barns, and dusky cemeteries with tombstones like worn teeth. There’s even a hamlet called Old Barns. The fields grow feed corn and hay. Tractors roll down the roads. There are also …
Night In This World – A Journey, Part VII Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: – We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. — from …
Night in this World – A Journey, Part VII For years I’ve been drawn to the story of Jumbo the Elephant. Though I don’t recall when, at some point I saw the life-sized statue of Jumbo erected in St. Thomas, Ontario, and learned that the most famous of Elephants died violently in this small town …
Night in this World, a Journey – Part VI It’s mid-August, the days of goldenrod. After an unusually dry winter, then a spring of localized wildfires, summer has brought record humidity and rain. Floods have been troubling yet the land feels nourished again, exuberant. Uncut hay fields ripple chest-high in the wind, snaked through with …
Night in this World, a Journey – Part V It’s the early days of spring here in Nova Scotia. The ground lies wet, brown, and bare. Days are often cool and windy. The first wildflower to bloom – little Coltsfoot, which opens a bright yellow face before it grows leaves– has just appeared along the …
Night in the World has been getting around! It was included in the Top 22 of 2022 Books of the Year chosen by the Canadian literature folks at 49th Shelf. Recently it was selected for the 2023 Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for Sustainability in Higher Education, one of only four books on the club’s reading …
Our world has a nighttime face. Growing up in the suburbs, I never knew the darkness of the wild, yet I did know night.
On Halloween near dusk, I lit a fire outside for the ancestors. This was a special fire made only of ash wood—windfall from the tree that towers at the back of property, the one we call Grandfather.
Near the Fall Equinox I began to write this piece about harvest season, intending to publish on that day. For various reasons—from the high-intensity whirl of the school semester starting, to an unsettled feeling I had about the topic—I set the essay aside. Just for a few days, I thought.
In the summer of 2014, lightning struck the large old apple behind the house and split the tree in two. We had just purchased this property: two couples and one elderly parent pooling resources and risk, negotiating a five-person mortgage on a former farm in Nova Scotia.