Bob-bob-bobbin' Along

The robins have arrived!
We were back at the duck pond yesterday afternoon when we heard the familiar sound, looked up, and there were four robins flitting through the trees.

The arrival of robins doesn't mean no more snow -- this is Nova Scotia after all -- but it does mean we're running downhill fast and Spring waits at the bottom to catch us with wide open arms!
Now we await the arrival of "our" osprey in mid-April.

*****
My husband came upon eagles feeding at the duck pond this week -- and realized there was a pair of GOLDEN eagles in the crowd. So we spent much of the weekend trying to capture a photo of them. A great weekend for hanging out on the shores of the pond, warm and quiet, but this is the only thing with wings that appeared:

But what a gorgeous sky!
Could have had a photo of some deer walking across the still-frozen pond but learned this lesson instead: When you are going into the woods to spy on wild animals, do not wear your red winter coat. Now, for the first time IN MY LIFE, I feel the need for camouflage clothing.

Busy Beavers

Spring and fall, in the morning, are the best times to walk around our river valley property. No bugs, for starters, and the nights are cold enough to freeze up the mud and puddles. The days are lovely, lovelier, admittedly, in the spring, but muddy. So very muddy.
We are inundated with wildlife now. The foxes have mated and the female is prowling around, looking for food to nourish her body; the eagles have mated and are building up their nests; the deer are in the pastures in droves; the geese are flying overhead. Soon, the bears will emerge from their hibernation.
We will see them in the back field, attacking ant hills. We will feel protective of the newborn fawns hiding in the pine plantation.
In the midst of all this, I walk.
As a writer who spends most of her time alone, I appreciate the company of others, even if they are wild animals who don't seek my company. Just knowing they are watching, listening is enough for me to feel not alone when I walk in what is, truly, their territory.

Two eagles, post "encounter". Top and on the left, in the shadow.

Back in the woods, the beavers are reappearing as the ice melts away. The young dog and I walked up the road to the beaver pond formed when they clogged the culvert and flooded the road. No sign of life under the smooth, dark water but they have been busy.

The tree felled over the road for its branches.

 

One route out of the water near the shore.

Two "access holes" with the denuded branches tossed out like toothpicks
minus the cocktail sausage.

 

Tracks to and from the snack bar, er, tree.

Baby beaver or raccoon?

I picture the beavers inside their house of sticks, going over the day’s list of things to be done now that spring is here. My feet crunching on the grainy snow on the road make too much noise to sneak up on them -- Smack, splash! -- and I have too much writing to do in my home office to spend hours sitting back there, just waiting to for them to crawl out of the water to feed, but I like to know they are there. Ah, but what an idea, sitting pond-side, meditating, waiting, anticipating.
As a writer, I relate to beavers more than any other wild animal. They are persistent, constantly creating, always maintaining, rebuilding when necessary. They keep to themselves, content to live and work in isolation, doing what they do best, even if others don't appreciate their work, the fruits of their labour, the point of their existence.
I leave my own calling card -- my footprints at the edge of the ice -- so they know that I, too, am emerging from my own den to soak up the energy of spring.

In Conversation With...Harriet Barbour

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, by Sara Mattinson.

When you ask around Pugwash, you’ll discover a variety of reasons why people decided to move to the village. For 38-year-old Harriet Barbour, moving here 12 years ago was her first step towards independence, opportunity and an entire community of friends.
After opening a door with a very loud squeal, Harriet invites me into her one-bedroom apartment above a store. Her apartment is very tidy and filled with comfortable furniture.
Harriet was born on the last day of January in 1975 in Nain, Labrador, where she lived with her parents and siblings until the age of ten.
“I had to be taken away from my real parents to go to Goose Bay for foster care,” she tells me.
She doesn’t remember much about that situation but she did see her parents again, although never to live with them.
“I’m the youngest,” she says of her family. “I have two brothers and a sister. Well, there was seven of us altogether but two brothers and a sister are in heaven.”
So, too, are her parents, her mother dying of hepatitis and her father of lung cancer. I ask if the photo on the wall across from the couch is her mother.
“No, that’s my sister. She’s 41. I went up to Goose Bay last fall to visit her,” Harriet says, adding that she and her older sister maintain contact through email.
“Today is my anniversary for being here in Pugwash for 12 years,” Harriet tells me so I ask her why she left Labrador and how she ended up in Pugwash.
“My foster family moved to Antigonish,” she explains. “Mom wanted me to move out of Goose Bay because there’s too much trouble at home in Labrador with drugs and alcohol. I was supposed to be living in Antigonish but Mom wanted me to come to Pugwash to stay at the home at Sunset. I’m in my own apartment now.”
The door to her apartment emits its loud squeal and we hear footsteps coming up the stairs. It’s Wanda Munroe, Harriet’s resident counsellor, doing her daily check-in.
“I’ve known Harriet since she came to Sunset,” says Wanda, sitting down in one of Harriet’s arm chairs. “She was the first person in our independent living program in 2008. She’s the only person who came out of Sunset into the program.”
According to Wanda, when Harriet first moved into her own apartment, there was a lot of hands-on help for her.
“She needed support with banking, menu planning, grocery shopping, paying her bills. She needs no support with any of that now. Now, if I come in and spend five minutes a day with her... She doesn’t need any more than that. We see her at work. And she’s a whiz on her computer.”
“It was social services who decided I should move out,” Harriet says. “I was happy about it.”
She was ready, not scared, to be on her own.
Wanda describes Harriet as very outgoing.
“For the short time she’s lived here, she probably knows more people than I do. She’s very independent. She loves to socialize. She loves Bingo [at the Legion] – she’s quite lucky,” Wanda leans in to say and Harriet laughs.
“She’s involved with Community In Blooms, painting tables or mowing lawns,” the longtime Sunset counsellor continues. “It’s nothing to drive by and hear a whistle or a yell and there she is, pushing a lawn mower or painting a table.”
When I point out to Harriet, who also works through the week as the receptionist at Sunset Industries, that the cast on her foot must be slowing her down, Wanda jumps in.
“No, it hasn’t slowed her down a bit. She broke her foot and the next day she was doing her banking.”
Harriet chipped a bone in her ankle playing floor hockey at the Special Olympics winter games held in Yarmouth at the end of February.
“I went to score a goal and I twisted my ankle.”
Harriet has been involved in Special Olympics since she was a teenager in Goose Bay and now she is a member of the Amherst chapter. For the summer games, she competes in the 100-metre dash, the running long jump, and shot put.
When she’s not working, Harriet likes to cook, sing (“She knows the first line of every song,” says Wanda), go for walks and watch hockey on TV. She has been a Habs fan since she was a kid in Labrador.
She and Wanda trade insults over Facebook when their teams play each other.
Harriet seems proud of her Inuit heritage but is adamant she won’t move back to live closer to her sister and brothers.
“There’s too much trouble,” she says with a shake of her head. “I have a lot of relatives back home in Labrador. A lot of people want me to move back home. I’m afraid someone might do something bad to me, like already happened to me when I was younger. Plus a lot of people want money from me to buy booze and cigarettes.”
Her life is in Pugwash now. So this is the story of the emancipation of Harriet Barbour.
“I have friends and family here,” says Harriet while sitting on her comfortable couch in her tidy living room. “I’m loving it. I meet all kinds of new people and I love my job.”

Field Notes Column Nominated

** Breaking news! I assumed the wrong column when I wrote this last week.
Updated Tuesday, March 27:

I'm pleased to say that my "Field Notes" column is nominated for an Atlantic Community Newspapers Award in the Specialty Column category.
Writing a column, especially the slice-of-life style that comes naturally to me, is a wonderful challenge. Excavating my own life for stories that appeal to a broad cross-section of readers is something I've done since I was twelve years so getting the chance to write a bi-weekly column for a community newspaper is a lifelong ambition fulfilled.
(Problem is, whenever I attend family gatherings or meet friends for coffee, I'm hearing, "You're not going to write a column about this, are you?"  Well, actually, I am. Just made notes from last night's family supper for a Father's Day column!)
I'm pleased, too, for the long-awaited recognition for The Oxford Journal, which is 115 years old.

 










Best Specialty Column
Sara Mattinson – Oxford Journal
Nick Mercer – Carbonear Compass
Jonathan Riley – Digby Courier

Congratulations to my fellow nominees.
The awards are handed out in May in Halifax.

Hand Delivered

Big spring snow storm. Roads are in bad shape.
Our Halifax newspaper did not get delivered this morning, not the fault of our delivery person but likely the truck didn't get out of the city.
The post office might not deliver our mail today, again not the fault of our delivery person but likely the truck won't leave the city.
And yet...The Oxford Journal is getting delivered -- as we speak and since 7 o'clock this morning -- to every store and every post office in our part of the county.
More proof that bigger isn't always better. Our small operation gets the job done regardless of the weather.

The Face of Timeless Devotion

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, March 6, 2013 by Sara Mattinson.

It’s an unmistakable face, the face of an old dog. The white muzzle, the white hairs in the eyebrows, perhaps a pair of rheumy eyes that may or may not be clear yet still sparkle, even tuffs of white inside the always-listening ears. 

It’s the face we love, only whiter. Sometimes it’s hard to remember when the muzzle was all black or all brown, or just not quite so...white. 

We look at a human being with grey hair and wrinkles and do not immediately think with some compassion that time is pawing closely at that person yet a dog whose face has whitened means only one thing: heartbreak and farewell are surely coming too soon. It is the face of “short-gevity”, a brutal reminder that what we love most deeply and what loves us back most unconditionally soon will greet us at the door no more. 

It’s not to be rude to point that out (not like saying, “Geez, your dog is old. Are you going to put him down?”). No, it’s pointing out the one thing that gives us our humanity, that keeps us humble about our role in a dog’s life and grateful for this strange mix of blessings on four legs. In our dogs, we see that ultimate responsibility for a good life and a good death, for everlasting love and enduring heartache. In our dogs, we see ourselves, our future, the inevitable. If we are lucky, we see this several times in our life.

Aye, there’s the rub. We do this over and over again. Hold an old dog in our arms, say good-bye while dripping tears into that beloved fur, vow to never go through that again, yet in time, the longing for the sound and feel and company of a dog starts tugging on us like a leashed dog wanting to run free. 

My old dog, Stella, turned 10 last Sunday. That advancement into double digits makes me aware that we are approaching the end of the road, miles away or just around the corner I cannot tell. Every dog involves a journey of hope. 

The road we have walked together has not been easy. She came into my life when I was going through a divorce and taking care of a father with dementia, sending her protective instincts and her dominant nature into overdrive. We’ve mellowed a bit over the years although we revisit old battles periodically, the not-coming-when-called-because-this-carcass-needs-rolling-in skirmish most often, but we also create new ones, more benign now that the chaos of youth has given way to the routine of middle age. Every morning I say to her as I prepare food for the younger dog, “Stella, get out of the kitchen. You are not getting a second breakfast.”

In a new collection of essays about dogs by author E. B. White, he writes about his old dachsund Fred, “Life without him would be heaven, but I am afraid this is not what I want.” 

When I look into Stella’s familiar, frustrating face, I am not sure how I will feel when I hold her in my arms and feel her life end. Stella is a larger-than-life kind of dog, in ways both memorable and challenging, and she will leave a gaping hole in our home. I will appreciate her more when she is gone, unfortunately. I am afraid this is not what I want.

My favourite moments these days are those when Stella runs through the field and grins that wonderful toothy dog grin. It gladdens the heart of the companion of an old dog when she wants to play, when she forgets whatever aches in order to indulge in the pleasure of exploring, of accompanying, of being the dog she once was. These moments are also bittersweet; the fact that they do not occur daily reminds me of her age and how it is affecting her body, and I am reminded of the dog who came before her and how we went through this back when. 

But always together, to the very last breath from that white muzzle, holding on to our dignity, and hers, as best we can, the dog more accepting and gracious about her death than we can ever be.

Are We Losing the War Against Bullying?

I'm working on my column for this week and I'm trying to write a short, cohesive piece about bullying. 

I don't know if that's possible. What a multi-faceted, complicated subject -- except for the "bullying is wrong, stop it now, what is wrong with you people?" angle. 

Perhaps I should just go with that. 

Over the weekend, as I was mulling various angles for the column over in my head, I remembered the three times I was sort-of bullied.  I use "sort-of" because they were not really bullying; just growing up bullshit. While the first two, from when I was a pre-teen, have made it into my column, the third incident exists on a totally different level. From today's perspective, it scares the crap out of me.

Back in 1988, I lived in a town of 15,000 people in Ontario; the high school had a student population of 500. On the last day of high school, when I was 18, I drove my mom's car back to school after lunch. That meant parking in the student parking lot and walking into the school through the King Street doors. In the days when you could still smoke on school property, that's where the smokers hung out, along with the kids that we referred to as "skids". This tended to be, but wasn't exclusively, the crowd that wasn't all that keen on school.

It was my last day of high school ever, so I was wearing a spring dress and anticipating the annual awards assembly that afternoon as I passed through the crowd quickly, holding my breath and not looking at anyone.

I heard a girl say, "If I had a gun..."

I knew what she meant. Back then, it didn't scare me. I didn't freak out and report it to the principal (now I only have the vague recollection that I knew at the time who spoke) nor did I tell my parents. If it hadn't been the last day of school, I simply would have avoided using the doors in the future. 

But today. 

If I heard that today, in our culture of violence and bullying, of Facebook and cyberbullying, I'd be terrified. These days, you just can't disregard a comment like that. Now you just never know. Regardless of what the experts consider the randomness of the shooting at the movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado or at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, gun violence is on the rise and one simple comment like "If I had a gun..." can easily escalate if the wrong person overhears those words. 

I don't have an answer, not even a theory. I just know that there has always been bullying and there will always be bullying but these days, it seems so much worse thanks to Facebook and Twitter, web cams and Instagram. Half a dozen kids gathered around a set of double doors versus 1,000 so-called Facebook friends and followers...Who's gonna lose in that battle? 

Feel free to help me find an answer, hone a theory. Thoughtful comments always welcome.