I live in a rural area where fishing and farming are still major economic activities, so when the cold and snow of winter turns to the warmth and mud of spring, our community comes alive.

Dories on trailers sit in yards waiting for the ice to move out of the coves and bays so oyster fishers can resume their work. Large lobster boats, perched on their huge stands, are being cleaned and stocked, engines and pumps tested, so they will be ready for the boat hauler to back in, hoist them up on their trailer, and carry them to the local wharf for the start of the lobster fishing season in May.

Snow blowers are removed from farm tractors, and scrapers installed to smooth muddy, rutted lanes. Manure that piled up next to barns all winter has been hauled and spread on fields that remain frozen in the mornings. It’s a bit too early and the ground too soft to plow most fields, and way to early to plant grain or potatoes, but supplies are being readied.

A friend and I walked a back road near her house this afternoon, and saw pickup trucks stopped on bridges, people looking over the railings to gauge how ready brooks or streams will be for the start of angling season in a couple of days. Birds are returning: robins, red-winged blackbirds, ducks, grackles, and Canada geese flying north. Crows fly by with sticks in their beaks for their nests.

As we walked, we waved at every vehicle that passed. Some we knew, some we didn’t, some we weren’t sure, but we waved anyway because that’s what you do here. To not wave would seem unneighbourly and cold. We waved at the school bus driver, who we do know, twice because he dropped off some children and returned the same way. And everyone waved back.

While I was driving home from my walk, I passed some cousins of mine standing next to – you guessed it – a boat in their yard. They waved, and I saw in them at that moment their father and grandfather and great grandfather, the same turn of the head and looks and smiles. The strong genetic connection between us strengthened and solidified by hundreds of interactions, some involving meals or parties or conversations, but many just waves from yards at passing cars.

We wave as we drive as well. If you are holding your steering wheel with your hands at the 10 and 2 o’clock positions, as everyone was taught long ago (air bags make that unwise now), when you meet a vehicle driven by someone you know, you flick your right hand up, usually just the index and middle finger, in greeting. Sometimes you will wave your whole hand, maybe at someone you were just speaking to on the phone and happen to pass on the road, an acknowledgement of how funny it is that you were just talking and now, look at us, zooming down the road!

I have a cousin (it’s always a cousin with me, as I have dozens of them around here) who I always suspected waved at every car he met, whether he knew the driver or not. I never dared to ask him, because he would have probably thought it an odd thing for me to notice, or the question might have made him self conscious. I confirmed he does wave at everyone when I was driving home for the first time in my present car, with its unusual blue colour that can’t really be mistaken for any other car around here. I met said cousin in his truck and he waved, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t know it was me. He’s just a super waver.

I realise that there is a limit to where I wave. I wave at most everyone within a five kilometre radius of our house, and that can occasionally extend as far as the village of Tyne Valley 16 kilometres away if I meet someone on the road I’m sure I know. No one taught me to do all this waving. It is just the way it is.

I live here because of the waves.