Lambsquarters (35 page)

I PLANT MY GARDENS
with tender touch, urge seeds along in the house, transplant them on dusky days, protect them from too much sun, from predators, from drought. But just when they reach adulthood I rip them down, steal their fruit, bouquet their blossoms, dig their roots. I am self-serving with my gardens, hacking out what doesn’t blend, what doesn’t taste, what doesn’t suit my current design. I train ground lovers to entwine upwards, prune tomatoes to increase production, pinch flowers to amass their blooms. And the weeds better watch out. I show no mercy.

I conserve my land, keep it growing, but consume it as well. There is little summer fallow around here anymore. Every acre grows every year. I love the wild but hate the burdock. I appreciate the brilliant Scotch thistle but hack it down as inedible, prickly, insidious. How does that fit with conservation? I save my deadhead flower seeds every year, sprinkle them on the roadsides that someone else trims. They proclaim their survival with glorious bloom, yet are weeds to the crops if they slip from the ditch.

Trying to be conscious of the needs of the farmers, the constant push to increase production and make the life pay, I acquiesce to the stockpiling of manure across the road, to the widening of the lane for access. But I ask for the plan, question the practice. We compromise. Some trees go, but not all. I still have my view, my borrowed landscape, my precious cedars that house all
manner of songbirds. But I will never know how this places me with my neighbours. Their concerns are so different from mine.

I LOVE
the solitude of life without houses in sight, yet I crave community at times and feel blessed with the village down the road, the way dotted with barns and houses containing lives connected to each other and my own. The sparse winter necklace of scarce and precious lights spread out on an invisible thread into the distance of the night. There is freedom in the space here, the open vistas and expanses, the tight forests and arcades. I can go for days without seeing anyone else, just the faint view of the odd vehicle on the snowy road, a vision that summer leaves obscure.

But the isolation can be frightening at times. On my first summer night alone in the house there were thunking noises repeated over and over near the window. The fear of investigating fought with the need to know. Who was out there? What was happening? I crept closer, lights out, and watched small apples, one after another, drop from the tree to the ground, bounce and roll away on the grass.

I remember the night when a tractor from the barren east drove into the lane, pulled up by the barn, turned off and stayed in the dark. Nothing else happened. No knock on the door. Nothing. We had puppies for sale, Zoë’s litter mates. We had put up a
crude sign at the road, and a gentle neighbour (developmentally delayed) had come to pick one out. He always stayed outside until greeted, yet how was I to know that then? The longer he remained out in the dark, the fiercer my imagination. I envisioned phone wires cut, weapons glistening. I telephoned the flying Dutchman, who chuckled, and rushed over while I stood in an upstairs window waiting and watching for him. And still I fretted, for after he had arrived no one came to the house. Only when the tractor left did I hear the story of the man. He returned the next day to pick his pup, and both of us were happy with the transaction.

I’ve been worried by visiting evangelists, who catch me in the garden where I have no escape. I’ve given eggs to tramps who’ve walked in from nowhere. I’ve held tight to my hoe in the presence of an aggressive salesman and followed my intuition more than once. I listen to my body when it bristles. And I’ve been known to hide in the barn or to bring the axe inside the house on occasion.

Countering these moments of fear with strangers are the moments of care from the community. The door-to-door collections when someone dies. The cards of thanks. The inevitable help that follows trouble. The gifts of food and flowers, eggs and vegetables. The rides to the hospital, tows from the ditch, boosts of batteries, help with chores and the sharing of all the knowledge there is. As constant as cream rising. Alderney cream.

IN GREY COUNTY
there is brutality and gentleness, side by side. There are constant binaries of black and white. Bluebirds and cardinals, siskins and finches. Chickadees sleeping with their heads perched under wing and phoebes nesting in doorways. Crows kidnapping robins’ fledglings. Cowbird cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests. Blue jays ravishing hatchlings. The predators and the prey, side by side, all within view.

A sharp-shinned hawk, splendid, slate-backed, with rufous breast in bars,
accipiter striatus velox
(Blue Darter to those who know it well) spent a day on the apple tree this late winter. Right beside the house. Right over the bird feeder. Not interested in seeds, it froze on its perch, its feathers impervious to the winds whipping by. Its red eyes were wide and nothing moved but its neck, which seemed to swing completely round, keeping its prey in view. I was struck by its majesty, that Hughesian conceit, creation in its foot. I was mesmerized by its presence, by its purpose and plan.

I could have frightened it, made noise, opened the door. But I watched, transfixed, as it eyed the small oblivious herbivores below. I was implicated in its crime, for I knew and did nothing. The hawk took its time, sized up the perfect kill, the perfect meal. Just when I thought nothing would happen it swooped, clasped a sparrow in its talons and held the bug-eyed birdlet to the ground, smothering in the grasp. Too late I banged the door, hoping it would drop its prey,
fly away. Hoping I could be witness and judge both, view the catch and prevent the kill. But there is no such power here. I thwart or I watch.

The hawk heard me. It spread its wings and rose, leaving angel patterns in the snow, holding the sparrow firmly in those thin feet on shapely legs. The hawk took its prey to the cedars beside the house, balanced on a crotch in a branch and tore off its head. Eating it whole. Down through the body it hooked the flesh and ate, small feathers flying in the wind. Not a bone dropped. Not a drop of blood. It took an hour for the hawk, its feet and beak red, to finish. Nothing was wasted, nothing left.

IT SEEMS
spring will never come, that the snow will never go as the children, who are no longer children, go back to their lives in separate cities after their holiday. We return from the bus stop, the airport, and Sydney runs up to lick our hands. The sheep call from the barn to be fed. Frontenac and Lanark purr their pleasure when we reach the feed room.

Chores done, we stroll back together to an empty house. Now calm and still, the bustle of a full family stretched out behind us. The house we had never meant to fill. We enter the warm yellow light of the kitchen, fighting the emptiness, the empty nest, and something stirs on the floor. I look closely and find a butterfly. In winter.

Attenuating then slowly draping its wings, it sits on
the maple floorboard, bewildered. Some chrysalis somewhere, on a plant I brought in months before, must be shrivelling and falling apart, breaking to dust. The female lepidopterous
Artogeia rapae
, small white, is out of its cocoon too soon. It’s a sign of spring, of hope, of rebirth. A sign of metamorphosis in brilliant yellow and white with velvet black spots.

OUR METHODS
are different and our resources more varied, but the vision that spirited us here carries ghosts from the past. Our ancestors, like those of our neighbours, pioneered the land, just not in this place. Their lives course through our veins from pre-memory. The first moment we saw this property that dreams are made on, we knew it was the place we would steward and carefully guard. Made up of woods and fields, hills and valleys, swamp and dry land, its history is a vast effort of human hope, labour, tenacity, frustration and love, and would be protected and nurtured in our still learning hands. We are growing old here.

The wind freshens. A gust shivers across the loose snow and scatters a handful of flakes. They land in a flower bed, are caught by a crinkled leaf wintered brown and rotting. With another rush the leaf shifts, flakes flicking, and lifts, falters, waves farewell and sails away. A single flower, a nodding snowdrop, shelters there pushing its way up from the bulb in the depths, announcing spring.