As Retirement Plans Go, This One Is Fruitful

Last spring, my husband stuck 1,000 strawberry plants in the ground and said, "This is my retirement plan."
Um, sure.
Anyone driving past our property this spring would wonder if he'd given up on the idea because he didn't weed the strawberry plot. Ever. I can hardly look at it, it's so overrun by weeds (although there are a lot of daisies growing and that's my favourite flower). I should have had faith: the weeds don't stop the strawberries from growing and ripening. And it gives us a unique marketing angle: Our strawberries are wildflower-infused! And obviously pesticide-free.

 

My husband's retirement plan is already coming to fruition. He picked four flats today; that's 48 boxes in an afternoon. He gave one away to friends and I picked a box to give to my in-laws. Sold his first flat before 6 pm. I'd say this cockamamie plan of his is going to work out well. (He'll have sold all his berries before I've sold one book so whose retirement plan is better, I wonder?)

My contribution? I made the Strawberries For Sale sign that will sit at the end of our driveway. I'm also quality control: Had a handful on my breakfast this morning. Can't resist fresh, juicy berries.

 

 

How cool is it to walk across the driveway to the strawberry patch and pick some berries to cut right onto granola? Gotta love country life but c'mon, urban dwellers with backyards: No reason not to keep a couple of hens and grow a basket of strawberries. You shouldn't miss out on any of this instant deliciousness.

In Conversation With...Archan Knotz

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, June 19, 2013, by Sara Mattinson.

Archan Knotz did not pick up a paintbrush until she was 27 years old. The gesture could have been just another attempt at discovering something meaningful to do but the brush, the paint and the canvas turned out to be what was missing from her life. 

The young German woman was on the classic journey to find herself. Before taking her first art class, Archan had worked as an industrial sales person and a graphic artist, travelled to India, Greece and the Netherlands, and lived in a commune. It was a friend’s invitation to join her at a life drawing class that moved her forward in a completely unexpected direction. 

“My first show was in Frankfurt at the cafe off the club where I worked as a bouncer,” Archan says. “There was all kinds of people coming from Canada for a trade show in Frankfurt and one of them bought one of my paintings. That was how the connection to Canada was made.”

Emigrating to Canada three years later, Archan wrote to the person who had bought painting, suggesting she could stop by Nova Scotia for a visit.

She never left.  

A portfolio of photographs of her pre-Nova Scotia paintings reveal huge canvases that are bold and bright. 

“I did all kinds of mediums at first, sculpting, life drawing, acrylic, and eventually I moved into watercolour,” explains Archan. “I started out with very raw, emotional paintings. I worked very much with colour. That’s how I expressed what I wanted to express. It was a raw expression of colour.” 

She says the shift to watercolour, what she is best known for locally, came as  she settled into her new life in Nova Scotia. 

“I became more peaceful inside,” she says. “I didn’t need to be right in people’s faces. That’s what I needed to do when I was 27 and I was really searching, but now I don’t feel like I need to do that anymore. And also I got better at the technique. I took a lot of courses. I progressed to a different style.”

Yet buried beneath all these layers of paint is the reason she turned to art in the first place. 

“I wanted something I could be good at, that cannot be judged,” she says. “Art cannot be judged. It’s an opinion. And that was from my own school experience so it was such a relief for me that I could do something where I’m not judged. Even if people don’t buy it, I don’t have to take it personally.”

Archan grins and shakes her head.  

“When I started to draw, I was not good. I was horrible. But it was freeing, it was something I could do on my own. It made me feel special and nobody could judge. That was really important to me and that’s why I think I still paint.”

Like most artists, Archan needs a job to support herself. For the past seven years, she’s worked as an educational assistant (EA) at schools in Pugwash and Oxford, bringing her passion for art to the high-needs students with whom she works. 

“Sometimes special needs students are really good at creative expression, drawing or dance, but rather than letting them do that, we medicate them or make them do things they aren’t good at.”

That idea motivated her to start studying for a degree in English and psychology with the goal of becoming a teacher but four years of part-time studies later, that plan has changed. 

“I turned 50 in May,” she says, both excited and shocked by this milestone “And because I’m taking my Bachelor of Arts and I’m 50, there’s this feeling that I’m this certain age so what am I willing to do? Am I really willing to do what it takes to go into a new career?”

It’s a question Archan is now struggling with. 

“I was going to be a teacher but that has changed,” she says. “I would not be good at classroom management. I work better in small groups.”

She still plans to graduate with her degree in the fall of 2014 because “I think a person needs a degree for whatever they want to do. Anything I want to do with my life needs psychology in it.”

Because it influences her art as well. According to Archan, creating art brings balance to our lives.

“First of all, it brings gentleness into a person’s life, and self-discovery. [Your drawing] is not looking like anything you want it to look like. That’s really eye-opening. It doesn’t give you instant gratification, it’s not your masterpiece, not if it’s the first one you do. So it teaches you not to judge yourself because if you do, you will never pick up a paint brush again.” 

Even though her work sells, Archan believes art for art’s sake is more important. 

 “It is a very mindful thing to do, to just let it be, to not be constantly looking for something out of it. Maybe somebody likes it and buys it but maybe you don’t even want to sell it because it is too valuable to you.”

What amazes her is the reaction she gets when people find out she is an artist.

“You become famous. Art isn’t valued but at the same time – ” she puts her hand to her face to mimic people whispering with excitement – “they  say, ‘Oh, Archan is an artist. Did you know?’ You are an instant celebrity in some ways. I don’t get it because culturally, art isn’t valued but they seem to see you as special. Maybe because they think you are born with that talent.” 

That’s an idea Archan makes sure she debunks when she speaks to a class about being an artist. 

“What I think is very important to get across to the students is that I struggled, and still do. I show them stuff nobody has ever seen because you just don’t show people the stuff you aren’t good at. But they need to see that because they think you are born with the ability. Some are but most of us aren’t. We have to work really hard to get something on canvas or on paper or whatever. I think everybody can be an artist if you work hard enough.”

Archan in her home studio in Streets Ridge, NS. 

A Father's Badge of Honour

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, by Sara Mattinson.

A few months ago, one of our great-nieces suffered a loss: Her hamster died. ‘Precious’ died on a Wednesday but her passing wasn’t totally unexpected. 

“I knew on Monday she was dying,” Mackenzie said to us, a group of women gathered in her grandmother’s kitchen for a family meal. “But she died just before I left for school. That was the problem.” 

Actually, the problem was that her mother was not home. 

We all turned to her mother, Kendel, with a collective, “Oh -- ” of sympathy. Kendel is an OR nurse so she was already at work when Precious breathed her last hamstery breath. With Kendel unreachable even by cell phone, Mackenzie could not even use the sound of her mother’s voice to induce the proper paroxysm of sobbing that comes with saying, “Mommy?” into the phone.

So Mackenzie turned to her father for comfort and support. 

Let’s compare for a moment the different responses from a mother and a father:

Mom - “Come here, baby. It’s okay to cry. Why don’t you stay home from school today and we’ll have a funeral and eat cupcakes?”

Dad - “It’s just a hamster. I’ll dig a hole in the woods and bury it when I get home from work.”

Now, I’m not quoting directly from Mackenzie’s household and I’m not disparaging fathers. It’s just that when you hear that a young girl turns to her father instead of her mother in the moments after the passing of a pet, you expect that something might get lost in translation. 

And yet why not Dad? Sometimes you need to eat cupcakes but sometimes you need to dry your eyes and get on with it. Either way, a father should be able to provide the support and comfort his daughter needs, even if he thinks it’s only a hamster, only a prom dress, only a boyfriend. 

The latter being the biggest challenge for any father when it comes to expressing sympathy. And yet one of my best memories of my dad came from an evening when I was heading out to break up with a boyfriend. Dad met me going out as he was returning home from walking the dog and when he said to me, “Be strong,” there were tears in his eyes. 

Likely tears of relief as much as they were tears of sympathy. Long after I’d reached adulthood, my mother explained that my father had been so protective of his teenaged daughters “because he remembered what he was like at that age.” I don’t recall my father being overly protective but that comment made me wish my father had spoken to me more about young men, men in general, about relationships, commitment and love. Looking back, I see how important a good father’s perspective is in the life of a young woman. 

For better or for worse, biology has designed us so that a woman needs to talk about what’s wrong while a man need to fix it and there are endless jokes -- and arguments -- because of it. But, gentlemen, really, sometimes you just have to talk. Talk to your daughters. And listen to them, whether it’s about the dead hamster, the ugly prom dress, or that boyfriend (maybe particularly then) because when the moment arrives when she needs you to bury the hamster (or the boyfriend), you want to step up and be the man she can count on. 

When your daughter turns to you with tears in her eyes, the only way to fix whatever is wrong, and the best way to empower her for the rest of her life, is to let your own tears show while you tell her to be strong. She’ll never forget it. 

A true badge of honour on a father are the mascara stains on his shirt. 

Now Our Summer Truly Begins

This morning, 8 am. My good reason for being late to work!

It's official: three heads. 

This makes it the third summer in a row that the ospreys successfully hatched out their offspring limit in the nest on our property. That brings their total reproduction since 2009 to 12.

The interesting thing about this summer is that this sighting of the babies is a week ahead of every previous year (since they laid their first egg on the nest in 2009). Usually, we get to count heads after Canada Day. 

Then again, this osprey season began differently. Normally, one osprey arrives around the 12th of April and about a week later, the other one arrives and they begin mating. This April, however, they both arrived at the same time on April 11 and mating began immediately, as in the night of.  For some reason, this year's mating seemed more frequent and more obvious. Yet their results were consistent: three hatchlings. 

Perhaps they've heard the reports that this is going to be an active hurricane season and they want to be out of here earlier in September. Or maybe they know something we don't: It's going to snow here in September!

Or maybe they were just happy to be home. 

We -- or they, I suppose -- also have had a osprey checking out the nest. We have no way of knowing if it's an offspring from earlier years coming to say hello to his parents or hoping the nest will be vacant and he can take up residence (although it's an eagle trait to take over nests). It gives us hope that another osprey will decide to build a nest on the pole and wheel my husband set up on our vacant lot across the road. When you are a bird otherwise known as the fish hawk, a roost along the river is the best real estate going. 

Regardless of supermoons and solstices, summer doesn't begin for us until we see the babies.  My husband, who is off this summer recovering from shoulder surgery, spends much of his days on the west deck keeping an eye on the nest. He staggers out of bed, blearily fills his coffee mug, mumbles something to me, then heads out to his chair to wake up with coffee and the birds. 

Lucky guy: Can't imagine a better way to start each day. 

Lucky to Live Where We Live

Perhaps if you live in the Rockies or the Arctic or Newfoundland, this is commonplace but for us, every close encounter with wildlife makes us happy. We enjoy sharing our little piece of earth with those who truly belong here. 

Sighting of two baby heads in the osprey nest.

Enjoying clover in the field behind the house.

Hey, maybe I'll watch YOU for awhile.

Mama telling a bedtime story as the sun goes down.

Lasting for 115 Years Means You Know A Thing or Two

On the cover of today's issue, the Amherst Daily News has announced that as of Friday, August 2, it will change its name to the Amherst News and become a weekly newspaper.

"Over our 120-year history, we have transformed and reinvented ourselves to remain relevant in the ever-changing media landscape," says the To the Readers letter signed by both the editor and publisher. "Our brand is moving with the times. As the audience is shifting more and more online....it's the best way to serve our clients and readers, and to secure out title's long-term future."

Small communities need their newspapers; even weekly is enough to keep the sense of community and connection that is vital to rural areas. Attending the gala evening for the Atlantic Community Newspaper Awards this past May made it very clear that community newspapers are not only necessary but thriving. The reporters and photographers at these community newspapers are dedicated and hard-working and a very enthusiastic crowd of storytellers.
I am proud to work for a weekly newspaper, proud to write about the people who live and work and flourish here in Cumberland County, many having done so for generations. I am also proud that the family who has owned this paper for 115 years made the right decision regarding the Internet: our paper is available online only by subscription. My boss once said that if he had put The Oxford Journal online for free, it would have been the end of the paper.

What remains to be seen with the Amherst paper's move to publishing weekly is if it will drop its national news and editorials (available from the Internet or from the provincial paper) to focus entirely, and rightly, on local news.

You Like Chickens, You Know You Do

Speaking of chickens (and you know we were), I love this lush little book by Lauren Scheuer http://scratchandpeck.blogspot.ca/
If you know someone who keeps chickens or has mentioned wanting to, if you know someone who likes to draw chickens or other birds and animals, if you know someone who likes dogs...this book would make a lovely gift. If that someone is you, you deserve this book as a gift to yourself.
The high-quality paper needed for Lauren's photos and illustrations pushed the price up a bit but those are what make this book unique. It's worth buying and reading and giving as a gift.
It's a delightful book.
Brewster thinks so, too. Although he's disappointed there are no roosters in the story; he doesn't understand why people are offended by the sound of a rooster crowing (neither do I, Brewy).

I was walking by the independent bookstore, Blue Heron Books, in downtown Uxbridge, ON, and saw this book in the window. It crowed at me, I swear it did. I immediately went in and bought it. Started leafing through it in the car on the drive back to Nova Scotia then just had to read it on the road.
Reading this book reminded me of why I enjoy keeping chickens.
(Read my Field Notes column about it here.)
In fact, it made me miss my chickens. I'm so busy with work that I'm not hanging out with my "chookies" like I used to. Maybe that's the problem; chickens and the gentle berk-berk-berk they utter as they peck and scratch is rather relaxing but I'm not spending enough time with them to reap that benefit.
Too much work, not enough chicken in my life.
You can have too many, though. In the spring of 2009, my husband went crazy and ordered a whole whack of chicks. I heard him say on the phone, "Oh, sure, that sounds good. I'll take a couple of those." We met the breeder at the half-way point and transferred 34 chicks to the backseat of my car. And we didn't lose a single one!
So the following summer, we had a flock of 24. Sold lots of eggs but the outside hen pen took a beating. This small flock suits me fine but with three brooding, we're down on eggs and I can tell that the hens are getting old; while their yolks are still deep orange, their eggshells are getting thinner.
You can get attached to chickens, you know. The chickens in Lauren Scheuer's book are part of her family, the way a dog and a cat are. Chickens have distinct personalities and Lauren's descriptions and drawings of her hens are lovely. They give me chicken-envy.
Our flock is down to nine now. It's hard to find chickens; we don't seem to be able to call up anybody and find someone with a couple of young hens to sell. When I arrived home from that road trip, from reading Lauren's book, I told my husband that when the rabbit is gone (we started with three), that side of the mini-barn will become a breeding room; I want to raise from chicks some of my favourite breeds: Americaunas (they lay green-shelled eggs) and Barred Rocks (Lauren has one of those).
Brewster is a Barred Rock. He is now six years old. Is that old for a chicken? We don't know. He's the only one left from our original flock so he's our experiment in the longevity of a chicken.
We've been lucky with our rooster; he looks after the hens as he's supposed to but towards humans, he's not aggressive. When I get photos taken for the potential cover of my potential book, I'm going to have him sitting on the hay bale next to me. (He, along with Mimi, our lace Wyandotte, once were the models for a painting class; every time Brewster crowed, the ladies tee-heed and took his picture).He was born to model.
Then there is our toeless hen, NoNo, who manages to sleep on the roost despite the fact she is missing the ends of most of her toes. Gabby and Beulah are still left from that gaggle of chicks; they are Plymouth Rocks and rather chatty. They like to hang out in the garage with my husband when they are free-ranging in spring and fall.
You can't be in a bad mood when the chickens are around. 
This is Mimi, she of the baleful eye. Doesn't she look Victorian?
After seeing this photo, my mother said she wasn't going to eat our eggs anymore. "Now that I know what's in them," she said. And yet this is what makes our eggs so good. Happy hens produce good eggs.

Which brings me back to Lauren Scheuer's happy, good-for-you book. If you've ever thought about keeping a couple of chickens in your backyard, this book is the place to start. You'll learn all about it but you'll feel it in your heart how right it is.
On my rating scale, it's a double yolker! I recommend adding it to your egg basket.