Attack of the Giant Zucchini

It took Fern a couple of days to walk by this zucchini without giving a wide berth or stopping to check it out. It took us a couple of days to get it all eaten. Our favourite zucchini recipe? Sliced, sauteed in olive oil with garlic, oregano, pepper, walnuts and Parmesan cheese.

In Conversation With...Mark Murray Stevens

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 by Sara Jewell Mattinson.

The kitchen of Mark Murray Steven’s bungalow in Malagash is white, bright and spotless. It doesn’t fit the stereotype of the bachelor pad for a musician who performs rockin’ country tunes. 

A few years ago, a reporter might have walked into a completely different scene but today, Mark is committed to a clean and faithful lifestyle.

The 33 year old admits that’s still a day-by-day journey. The cleansing of his heart and soul didn’t come early and it didn’t come easy.

“In elementary school, I had my own desk in the principal’s office,” he explains. “I was always getting suspended for something. She’d send me home with a suspension slip and I’d throw it out the bus window. When I got home, I’d try and play it off that all was good but she caught on after awhile what was going on. It went on throughout high school,” Mark adds. “I was smoking and drinking and skipping class and running around with girls and stealing cars.”

When Mark says he’s been in jail, he’s not using a metaphor for being spiritually lost; his first taste of incarceration arrived when the police showed up at the door on his twelfth birthday and took him to the Shelburne Youth Centre.

“I was in jail in total 11 years,” Mark admits.   “Six years in juvenile and jail and another five years in prison.” 

Those 11 years inspired a song called “Do My Best” on his recently released collection of gospel songs. Mark wrote all the songs on the self-titled CD and produced and recorded it in the living room of his Malagash home. 

Mark shares his home in Malagash with his dog Mika.

As a boy growing up in Pugwash River, Mark spent his childhood hunting and trapping, working in the woods, working with dogs, but his father also handed Mark the tools he’d one day use to rebuild his life and make that CD possible.

“My dad bought me a guitar for Christmas when I was eight years old,” Mark remembers. “I started banging on it, broke all the strings. It was the first thing I ever refinished, that guitar. I took furniture stripper to it and stripped it all down, sanded it, stained it then put polyurethane all over it. I had no idea that I even knew how to do it.”

But the affinity for music was no match for his proclivity for bad behavior and it wasn’t until he was lying in the infirmary at the prison in Dorchester, healing a broken ankle and plotting revenge against a fellow inmate, that Mark discovered a way to change.

He knows the date and time of his life-changing moment: May 23, 2003, shortly after midnight. 

“For three days, I’d been wracking my brain how to get back to Springhill to get those guys,” Mark says. “I said to myself, ‘God, if you’re real, I need you to show me right now.’  Just like that, in that second, I don’t even think I’d finished saying ‘now’, I felt an invisible hand reach into my stomach and grab a hold of all the garbage, all the hate, the fear, the anxiety, the worry, the pain, everything I’d been holding onto, everything I’d been carrying around, the whole reason behind why I wanted to get back at these guys, all of that was grabbed hold and pulled out like a handful of tar. When that let go, I took a deep breath and for the first time in my life, I felt completely clean.”

Mark says that feeling terrified him.

 “I cried myself to sleep and when I woke up the next morning, I automatically took a deep breath and I thought, ‘Wow, it was real.’ At that point, I knew God was real. I knew God had intervened in my life.”

Having only gone to church once in his life, when he was 12, Mark says he knew nothing about God or Jesus or the Bible.

 “The only thing I related God to was a cross. I knew a cross was at a church and that had to do with God and these religious freaks who would lay down their drinking and smoking and good times.”

While that experience in the prison infirmary opened a new door, it also opened a long-closed one.

“That same day, I wrote my first song,” Mark says. 

The clean and sober life was a hard one for Mark to maintain. Although he started working as a commercial painter and gained success in Moncton as a musician, his demons kept rising up and he hit rock bottom again and again. 

“Little by little, God revealed himself in my life,” Mark says. “What’s known as the Holy Spirit has been nudging me to do certain things, like clean up my lifestyle and quit drinking, quit smoking, quit doing drugs.”

It didn’t happen in a day or even a year; it’s been happening over the past ten years. Now, Mark has been clean for a year and a half and has chosen to live alone while he follows what he believes is God’s true calling for him. 

With that choice, though, came perhaps the hardest lesson of all: In learning to be true to himself, other people were hurt.  He’s coming to terms with that as he supports himself with his own painting, refinishing and restoration business while embracing what his musical talent really means.

“What I’ve come to realize is that it’s not about playing in church. It’s about why I was playing,” Mark says. “Before I was playing to glorify Mark Stevens; that’s what God wanted to cut out. There’s a lot more to it than saying ‘I’m going to play gospel music’ because there’s all sorts of singers who play gospel music but they’re only in it for themselves. There’s also country singers because they’re in it because they want to glorify God. It’s all about why are you doing this music. The first time that I said ‘I’m going to do it for God,’ it succeeded. I just sold my first hundred CDs.”

Mark admits he’s provided what he calls “the pulpit version” of his story.

“It’s been such a dramatic process getting to this point,” he says. “It’s far from the end point but hopefully those crazy, crazy times are behind me. I have ten years in now.”

But he admits even those ten years since May 23, 2003, just after midnight, have ben crazy. 

“The only explanation is that angels were holding me up.”

He believes the point of telling his story, in words and in music, is so that someone can see there’s always hope. 

“Nobody’s trash,” he says. “Nobody’s written off. Anything is possible.”

Perk of the Job

While doing an interview for an upcoming article in the United Church Observer magazine, I had the brilliant idea of taking some photos of my subject dressed in his "circuit rider" garb and standing next to a horse -- which he and his wife happen to have four of on their rural property -- to go with the theme of the article.
While I waited for him to change, I wander out to the fenced pasture to look at the horses and this paint, named Sioux, was one of two that wandered up to the fence for attention.
There was something about her eyes that caught me. They were different than the other horse standing at the fence, different than the big grey fella I meet while walking the dog. In Sioux's eyes I sensed a deep intelligence, an intense awareness. That's the best way I can describe it but I have heard enough stories about the spirituality of horses, about their intuitive nature and intelligence to understand I was seeing something important.
Growing up, I knew the story of my parents having dinner with friends and my mother couldn't understand why her allergies kicked in badly in a house with no dogs or cats; turns out the daughter of their friends had riding clothes hanging in the front hall closet. For me, this story meant horses were meant to be seen but not touched, admired but not enjoyed. The irony of this is that if there had been no allergy and we'd wanted to ride horses, my sister and I would have with my father's full support -- he likely would have bought us our own horse if we'd showed enough interest.
But horses are wandering into my life now. Partly because I live in the country but perhaps also because I am craving more and more the interaction with and the learning of horses. And cows and donkeys and goats. I am attracting them, I'd say, in small, delightful doses. With every interaction, their enchantment of me grows.

Old Dog On A Hot Day

 

Stella came along on our walk yesterday afternoon and I didn't realize just how hot it was. Both dogs were panting before we reached the church.
I could see Stella eyeing the ditch; she has this habit of flopping into the grass in a ditch if she gets hot while walking and now that she is old and fat, I wouldn't be able to move her until she wanted to move.
"Just a bit further, Stella," I pleaded, trying to make to the horse field with the bag of carrots I was carrying. "You can lie down when we get to the gate."
On the way back, we cut down into the field next to my in-laws' place and Stella was much happier. So happy, she had to roll around in the grass for a bit.
We made it to Nanny and Grampy Donn's for a big bowl of water and some digestive cookies -- which restored Stella enough for the rest of the walk home.

Egg-traordinary

We've been down in our egg supply, the hens giving us five or six eggs a day, down from a high of 12 during the summer. Dwayne blames old hens (they're "retired", thank you very much) and the change of season. Well, he discovered yesterday another reason: someone has been laying her eggs outside. There are 14 eggs in this little pile, not deep inside the hen pen where we would never find them but hidden behind a clump of asters. Dwayne was tipped off by an egg lying out in the open and when he looked around to see if there were anymore, he found this cache.
And rotten! He dropped one inside the coop where he took the collection to wait for transport to a far-away location (no rotten eggs allowed in our composter, I guess).
This is not the first time this has happened.
In 2009, when our flock was it's biggest, around 24 hens and a rooster, Stella was intensely interested in the bushes behind the garage, the kind of behaviour that made me realize something was in there. It was a hen, soaking wet from a heavy rain the night before, sitting atop a pile of 19 eggs. That had been going on for weeks -- and we hadn't missed her! It might have been in the spring when we let the hens out to roam free before putting the gardens in because I remember thinking it was a case of egg-tortion.

Morning Glory

I was about to write about mornings, about being a morning person, but as I gazed at this photo, it reminded me that these flowers are dying, hanging their lovely heads towards the ground, the entwined morning glories faded and shrivelled as October arrives, gently but definitely feeling like fall. 
Autumn is the perfect season because autumn contains so many different qualities, can represent so many different emotions. Sadness, joy, gratitude, anticipation, dread, transformation, hope.
Some of the most beautiful flowers bloom at this time of year, carrying us through the shorter days and cooler nights with bursts of stemmed sunshine. But, see, too, how we face those shorter days and what they mean. Less time outside, petals falling without our noticing. What I did notice while walking the dog after supper the other night was that it really wasn't light enough for walking along the road. It was only seven o'clock but the day was done.
And I did notice yesterday how yellow the leaves of the day lilies have become. Just like that, the garden has given up. It is over for another year. Now I must face the cutting and trimming, the cleaning up and the preparing for winter. Yet that preparation is not just for winter but also for spring. There is a circle we trace through the year and autumn is simply part of that endless, enduring and infinite circle of change.
Remember that at same time we lose the light, we gain so much colour. The reds! The oranges! The yellows!
(Which makes me look up to the window next to my desk to see these colours but the trees are gone, the colours are gone. Not from my anger, though; it glows molten red still. There is a new season for me since the woods were cut down -- a year-long, rest-of-life-long season of mourning.)
Where was I? Autumn. The metaphor for both endings and beginnings.
Most people see autumn as merely an ending -- the end of summer. They see autumn as the beginning of the end -- the coming of winter. Yet winter is as lovely and varied as autumn.  White, too, is a colour. Snow, too, is an invitation.
But that, my dears, is a post for another day, another day that is months in the future. For this day and the next, and for the following weeks, we are inside the perfect season.

All Smiles For Harriet

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 by Sara Jewell Mattinson.

Often a “celebration of life” column will begin with Pugwash has lost a well-known resident... but in this case, the celebration is of the life of a well-known woman who is very much alive and well. 

Harriet Barbour is about to begin a new chapter in her interesting life. 

Harriet sits in one of her favourite spots, Cyrus Eaton Park next to the Pugwash harbour.

Harriet is a Pugwash resident well-known for her friendliness and hard work both at Sunset Industries and for the village. I can’t remember when Harriet went from a familiar face to a bona fide friend but I imagine it happened after we started sitting together at the kitchen party Friday nights at the cafe. 

Harriet is originally from Labrador and was placed in foster care when she was 10. When Harriet was 26, her foster mother moved from Goose Bay to Antigonish, bringing Harriet with her but encouraging the young woman to live at the Sunset Residential Home. For the past six years, Harriet has lived in her own apartment above the hardware store. 

She was a pioneer in a program called Independent Living Support. Back then, she says she was happy to move into her own apartment, not scared at all. 

“I was ready,” she told me in an interview in 2013. 

But now she says living on her own is lonely. 

That’s why she’s moving. At the end of this month, Harriet, who turns 40 next year, is moving back to Antigonish because she wants to be closer to her foster mother. Even though she’s lived here for 13 years, to her, family is in Antigonish. 

“I have quite a lot of friends there because of Special Olympics,” she told me last week. “And I’m looking forward to meeting new people.”

This time, for this move, Harriet admits she is both excited and scared. Although the move is about being in the same town as her family, she’s not moving in with her foster mother; she’s staying in the ILS program and will have her own apartment. 

One of the things Harriet says she’ll miss about Pugwash is working for the village so I contacted Lisa Betts, the village clerk, and asked what it was like to have Harriet around.  

“Harriet has been working for the village one or two days a week for several years,” Lisa said. “She mows with the push mower, paints, cleans, helps with the banners and other decorations, shreds paper and any number of little jobs that need doing around the village hall or other properties.”

According to Lisa, Harriet loves to mow and had certain places she pay special attention to.  

“She made the cenotaph and the train station her special projects and helped to keep them well trimmed.”

Lisa wishes Harriet the very best. 

 “I will miss her happy smile, her eager help in anything she was asked to do.”

She won’t be the only one who misses those things. 

Although these didn’t happen nearly enough, there were several road trips to Oxford after Harriet, who can’t drive, called me up to say, “Can we go for coffee and a donut this week?”

What will I remember best about Harriet? She is a Canadiens fan, she doesn’t like spicy food and she loves rock ‘n’ roll. We would sing along to the radio as we drove along together. 

But most of all, I  too will remember her smile. 

Best wishes on your latest adventure, Harriet. Antigonish is lucky to get you.