Post-Fiona Maskwi

Updated my page documenting the healing journey of the maskwi (birch) trees that were first harvested in July 2021 by my friend Kay, an amazing Mi’kmaq porcupine quill artist who uses the bark as the backing for her pieces.

The trees seem to be doing very well, the dark bark starting to peel off on some of the trees revealing a lighter layer underneath.

Dark bark coming off, lighter layer underneath

Storm Fiona was not kind to parts of our woodland, but the trees I have been documenting all survived in the midst of severe damage all around them. Birch are bendy, and they seemed to whip in the wind better than the white spruce that toppled all around them. Before Fiona, the “group photo” had been easily accessible along a trail we have had for decades; this time I had to climb over and under piles of trees to get there, the trail completely buried. The devestation remains breathtaking.

It’s difficult to capture, but this was a stand of towering 60-year-old white spruce, all felled by Fiona.

If you live in Mi’kmaki and are settled on land that has white birch, I hope you will consider allowing a harvest to take place. It is a different aesthetic, to be sure, and some people who see the trees near our house think they have been damaged or vandalized. I have, unfortunately, had some uncomfortable conversations with people about why I would allow the trees to be stripped, how ugly they look now.

I think the trees look beautiful, and the ceremony used to harvest the bark is a lesson to all who take from nature. Offering tobacco and a prayer to the tree is part of the bark harvest, and a relationship is formed between the harvester and the trees. I can’t imagine someone getting ready to mow down a bunch of trees in a huge machine making an offering to the trees they are about to destroy.

Where some see vandalism, I see justice, respect, and 12 millennia of history.

Inventory

At our first meeting with an insurance agent 20 years ago, she gave us a booklet for new homeowners that included a form to help us do a very basic household inventory. Being a lover of making lists and filling in forms, I started right away to go around the house and write things down, and had planned to do a more, but never did. I remember later downloading an app that prompted me to take photos and record serial numbers, cost, age, and many other details. I probably used it for 15 minutes, got overwhelmed with just how much stuff we had, and never finished it.

Today, looking over my ongoing list of household projects, Household Inventory is still lounging there, taunting me, reminding me that, despite years of paring down and purging, I still have too much stuff.

Then suddenly I realised that if, heaven forbid, our house and its contents were to disappear, I would be content to not reacquire everything we have now. The family mementos (I nearly wrote heirlooms, but our family was too poor to pass on anything of much monetary value) would be the only things I would possibly miss, and they couldn’t be replaced no matter how much insurance money we received anyway.

Household Inventory is now “take some photos of the stuff you have in case it disappears and you might miss it later, (but you probably wouldn’t).” That should take about five minutes and not 20+ years it took me not to do an inventory.

I would miss this clock, the heartbeat of my great-grandparents’ house (that’s them, Ernest and Eva Hardy, in the photo).

Cookie Diplomacy

One of the joys of being my mother’s daughter is acting as the courier of her kindness, most often as the deliverer of baked goods to family and friends, and even sometimes to strangers. From a young age I was often sent to neighbours with fresh muffins or bread or whatever had emerged from her oven just because she thought they needed a treat, casseroles and dishes of soup to those unwell. She did the work, but I received the thanks and could bask in her goodness; I have slid far on her cookie diplomacy!

Last week I delivered some of my mother’s Christmas baking to a friend, who had a little card and gift waiting for me. It is a beautiful pine needle basket made by an artist from Maine called Morning Star Wolf. My friend said the basket might look empty, but it was filled with gratitude. What a gift.

Powerless

I am writing to you from a house without electricity. This is the third time since post tropical storm Fiona blew through here at the end of September that our power has gone out from wind knocking trees over onto the line running along our lane. The electricity was out for nine days after Fiona, and this time it’s only been 22 hours, a dawdle.

We (have to) have a generator to keep the furnace, water pump, refrigerators, and a few lights going, but we usually only run it a few hours during the day, not constantly. It’s a Honda 6,500 watt that we bought in 2003 and it has given great service, even with shamefully little maintenance. It lives in our outbuilding and feeds underground to a sub-panel in our basement. I’m hoping very soon to replace or augment it with a battery backup system that would ideally be able to connect to our solar panels, which are grid tied and essentially dead during power outages.

Thankfully our internet provider stopped trying to restring our fibre line above ground and decided last month to bury it most of the 1,000 feet from the road to our house. When the generator is running, or the backup battery on the modem is in use, we can be online and make landline calls; this is a big improvement from pre-Fiona.

I’m not sure how we are going to deal with the remaining trees in our lane. There are dozens of white spruce to be cut, each about 60 years old and 60 feet tall, and it will be a big job, more than I can handle, and potentially dangerous near the power lines. We will also look at paying to have our line buried, though I have no idea what that would cost.

Since Fiona changed the structure of our forest, so many trees are exposed and keep snapping off or falling over in strong winds, and a few onto our power line. I’ve not been able to find the words to describe how Fiona destroyed parts of our forest. I still can’t believe how quickly the woods I knew so well were flattened.

I am aware that these minor hiccups and inconveniences are insignificant bumps on a privileged, gilded road. Many will never have the luxuries we have right now, even without electricity. It could be worse, no doubt about it, but it has been tiring and disorienting.

I developed a bit of a mantra to get through the days and weeks after Fiona, the endless lugging of brush and cutting of massive trees: At least a tree can only fall once. If they could only leave the power lines alone.

To keep sawdust out of your work boots, take an old pair of socks, cut off the foot, and use them as gaiters. A hack learned from my forester pal Bruce Craig, put to much use the past three months.

The Saints

Peter captured so beautifully the rollercoaster that November is for me. I always find this time of year a bit unsettling: the shorter days, the cold north wind after the tease of a warm day, the chores I should be doing and can’t get to, the looooong lead up to Christmas, the passing of another year.

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone who has read along with this blog that I am often thinking of times past, but lately the people who are long gone are gathering around me in ways I’ve not felt before. Most days I drive by the houses where generations of my family have lived and I picture them inside, or working in the barn, or standing by the road chatting with a neighbour. These houses are empty, uninhabited, so available for my imagination to fill them again. It is comforting but strange, as if something happened on All Saints’ Day this year that released them back into the world. I’m not going mad, but perhaps there are things I need to learn from these people.

Freeland 1935. My grandfather has stooks of grain in his field at the top of the photo, and my mother is living with her grandparents at the farm in the bottom, on the corner of the Barlow and Murray roads.

You know, that guy on that show

US President Joe Biden’s granddaughter, Naomi Biden, will be marrying a fellow called Peter Neal. Saw this photo of the couple this morning.

Peter Neal and Naomi Biden

Hmmm. There was something about Neal’s eyes and smile that reminded me of someone, a television actor from my childhood, but I couldn’t remember who it was, or what show he had been on, but I knew the actor I was thinking of had dark hair and a moustache.

I showed the photo to Steven, who is a decade older than me and has a much better memory, but he drew a blank. So I added a moustache.

Very natural.

Funnily enough, this still didn’t help Steven, and neither TinEye or Google Image Search could pinpoint the 70s star with my life-like rendering. I mean, come on, that moustache looked so natural! You know, that guy on that show! Nope.

Needing to scratch this pop culture itch, I searched for “1970s US sitcom casts” and scrolled until I found him.

The cast of Petticoat Junction and not Peter Neal.

Gomez Addams, Commander Sherman, husband of Patty Duke – John Astin! I didn’t watch either the Addams Family or Petticoat Junction, but there he was, sitting in a dark corner of my tv-addled brain, barely discernible, but just clear enough to let me match him with someone who looks absolutely nothing like him. Good try, brain.

Measuring Garlic

My third crop of garlic went in the ground this afternoon. I started with two bulbs of Phillips, a hardneck variety purchased from Hope Seeds, in 2020. That duo yielded 22 bulbs that I planted last fall, with the miraculous result that all 150 cloves planted grew! I credit the aged chicken manure produced by our little flock for the good outcome.

Phillips proud of Phillips.

I kept the 50 largest bulbs to plant this fall and the rest I have been using in the kitchen. Local garlic is wonderful but expensive, so it really is a worthwhile crop, even in my small garden. It doesn’t take a lot of work, and having something to plant in the fall when everything else is going dormant and there is less to do in the garden is very hopeful.

I plant garlic in rows 6″ apart. Luckily the dibber I use to poke the hole for each clove has a shaft that is exactly 6″ long, so it’s easy to space them out in the bed.

But equally as lucky, if I just want to poke a hole with my finger, is that I know that my hand is 6″ long, and my index finger is almost 3″ long, pretty much the perfect depth for a garlic clove. One of our set design teachers at the National Theatre School taught me that trick, to measure your hands and fingers so you would never be without a measure. It is one of the “handiest” hacks I know!

My hand is a half a foot, but a whole hand!
And 3″ wide.

A Flock of Robins

Just now, as I was looking out the living room window trying to decide how to spend this day, a flock of robins bounced down our lane. Two, then three, leapfrogging over each other. Moving from the red dirt road to the green grass, all of it covered with leaves from the white birch, the maskwi.

I counted seven in all, running and hopping, turning over leaves that were nearly the same colour as their beautiful rusty breasts. They were finding little earthworms and the ancient sowbugs, tiny crustaceans that walk on earth.

As the last robin hopped out of my view, I was still undecided as to what I should do with the rest of this day, still fresh and new, but my robin friends certainly reminded me to walk lightly on the earth and appreciate whatever I find. The sun is finally up and the maskwi are glowing in its light.

Stoic Week 2022

Modern Stoicism are offering their ”live like a Stoic” week again this year starting October 24, and you can still sign up. I’ve been participating in this free program for many years, and while I probably couldn’t call myself a devoted Stoic, Stoic Week has given me tools that I believe help me feel more balanced and happier. It is now a rare morning when I don’t think upon waking: “Today I will encounter things I can control and things I can’t control, and I will try to deal with both calmly.”

I have not yet written about my family’s experience with post tropical storm Fiona, but I was surprised at how I was able to emerge from our house after the storm, faced with weeks worth of cleanup and an altered landscape, and just look at it all but not pass judgement. It was what it was. I have said many times over the past three weeks: ”At least a tree can only fall once.”

For someone who has always predicted, planned and prepared to try to stay ahead of problems, this calm and, dare I say, Stoic outlook was proof that at least some of what I’ve been studying these past few years has worked. Stoicism is not at all about becoming emotionless or robotic; it is about finding balance and perspective, and learning how to ride out the storms of life, both literal and figurative.