"The Ditch"

Since we've moved out to the country, I keep hearing all these stories about people driving their cars into ditches. The way I understand it, it happens constantly. Especially in Winter, for obvious reasons.

When you live in the big city, there are a lot of driving hazards - and that's why car insurance is so darn expensive - but one thing you never have to worry about is... "The Ditch". There are cyclists right, left and center, wanton pedestrians darting from between parked cars, escaped dogs running wild, a myriad of confusing and often conflicting traffic signs, enraged drivers and countless other distractions.

By comparison, country roads offer only two dangers: ditches and animals (even domestic ones - cows, goats and chickens often do escape).  When you drive on a country road, you're mostly in a very calm state of mind, especially when driving at night in a snow storm, when snow flakes shining in your headlights transport you into an hypnotic voyage of intergalactic dreamy relaxation. And even more especially when you're driving The Spaceship, which is what we nicknamed our comfortable silver minivan. I can see how easily you could lose sight of the road edges during this kind of absent-minded traveling or even have to suddenly react to a night prowler running across the road and end up sliding into the ditch.

Last night, I was invited to a Tarot card reading with the gals and was asked to be the driver. On the way there, when I was cautioned to slow down on a sharp curve, I proudly expressed my confidence in The Spaceship and our expensive snow tires. Once inside and sitting around the table eating munchies, someone mentioned "The Ditch" and I innocently asked if everyone ends up in it at some point or other. Wylene laughed when she said "Well at least once, my Dear!". I suddenly felt a strange feeling of false confidence that I would never be one of them. You can guess what happened next.

The end of the night brought with it one of my country "christenings". As we were pulling out of Jenny's driveway, Terri yelled out "Watch out! You're gonna end up in the culvert!!!" I,  so innocently again, asked "What's a culvert?" when the right front end of the car dropped two feet down with a big clunk. I spun my tires and muddy water flew up into the air and Terri yelled "Don't spin your tires, we're gonna get stuck! You've got to rock the car back and forth!" So I did, or at least tried to. All that did was send more mud flying twenty feet up in the air. We were stuck.

Fortunately, I was amongst some very strong and independent women who knew all about ditches. It took half an hour, but resourceful Jenny got some cables from the house and succeeded in pulling The Spaceship out of the culvert with her truck. If I had been alone on a dark country road, I would have had to walk all the way home and possibly get eaten by one of our neighborhood bears. Thank you, Ladies! (Oh and I'm terribly sorry for ruining your beautifully white, postcard landscape just before Christmas time)

Now I know what a culvert is. The only problem is that I think it might be slightly different than a ditch, which means ... this story is to be continued.

Gone to the Dogs

City dogs and country dogs are two completely different beasts. Their daily lives differ in so many ways... and so does what we expect of them.  My two dogs were born city dogs, but like me, are now in the process of being countrified. It's been over a year since we've left our big city life behind and, just when I had convinced myself that my dogs are so much happier now and completely adjusted to their new freedom, something happened that made me reconsider the whole situation.














Emma was rescued from the Toronto Humane Society almost six years ago. She was a biter. Out here in the country they call biting dogs "ugly". With a lot of love and a little bit of discipline and a lot of avoidance (and some blood drawn on a few occasions), Emma became better and better over the years. And since we've moved to the country, Emma hadn't bitten anyone. Until today.

Today Emma bit "The Walker", Archie. Archie is an older man who lives down the road. He only walks during the Winter. Last year, we had a few issues and Archie had to wave his walking stick at Emma a few times until she got used to him and would only bark to warn me that a stranger was on our bit of road. We somewhat got along like that throughout the Winter months.

 
   

 

In the city, dogs are often confined to apartments all day long while their owners go to work in office cubicles. If they're lucky, they get to "own" pathetic little concrete backyards which they can protect against the occasional raccoon or squirrel. Their owners have to take them to the dog park twice a day, where they get to meet all sorts of people and play with hundreds of different dogs wearing pretty clothes who end up acting as their extended pack.

 

In the country, space isn't so limited. There's loads of it, all around. The pack is smaller - it has its main original four (Stuart, Karina, Emma and Chico) plus a few chickens and ducks. There is also the extended pack, consisting in human and dog friends, but we only see these other pack members during dinner visits, as opposed to meeting them twice a day without fail at the dog park.

Out here, there are all sorts of intruders the pack needs to be protected from. There is the rare trespassing non-pack-member dog. There are coyotes. There are wolves. There are bears. There are fishers and minks. There is a multitude of field mice and rats.  Most troubling is, there are also Winter walkers, like Archie.

In the city, your dog is on a leash until you reach the safe zone - the extended pack meeting place - the dog park. Country dogs have a different lot. Some live outside in a dog house (animals don't belong in the house), some are chained in place to ensure that hound noses don't lead them astray. Some have a job, like guarding a herd of sheep and live in the barn. A few have a similar life to that of city dogs and get daily walks on leashes. Most are free as a bird and come and go as they please. 

I should walk my dogs on leashes more often. Cesar Millan, The Dog Whisperer, insists that it's the best way to establish yourself as a pack leader and that walking together, exploring uncharted territory, is what actual packs do. Pack leaders don't send submissives out on their own to hunt and protect the den and surrounding territory, which is what I've been doing, I guess. When I let her out, Emma goes around the whole property and checks that everything is secure, after which she sits in the driveway and barks at the mail man's car, or at tractors that roll by pulling shit spreaders (giant trailers full of cow manure), or at other dogs barking in the distance. Once in a while, she threatens a "walker". 

One would think that all this "freedom" would be doggy paradise, but to be honest, I think my dog is bored. Last year she went on a lot of "errands" until we found her in the neighbor's cow field. This is not good. A farmer can legally shoot a dog found bothering his livestock. What's worse is that if, for example, a dog makes a cow trip and break its leg, the (likely dead) dog owner's got to foot the bill (I imagine approx. $1500 for a cow).

I'll admit that I don't walk with my dogs as much as I should due to my fear of all the animals we share this beautiful land with. The coyotes, the bears, but mostly, the neighboring dogs who are just like Emma: if you walk in front of their properties, some *will* bite you. So I sometimes walk with them to this corner, and to that corner, but it gets boring pretty quickly, especially in the winter when all is dead and still.

After Emma bit Archie this morning, I resolutely put her on a leash and went out onto the road to meet him. I figured that if she got to walk with him, he might become a part of her extended pack. Archie showed me the puncture wound on his leg. He said it was okay, that since she was a rescue dog, somebody must have done something bad to her in the past, that he understood, that he loves dogs. Archie is a very kind man. I assured him that I wouldn't let her loose by herself anymore. He warned me that if she ever bit a kid, we could lose her. I asked Archie if I could accompany him on his walks sometimes, and he said that he wouldn't mind. 

My new year's resolution (starting right now) is that I'll get myself a walking stick just like Archie's, and I will walk Emma every day. Maybe that way she'll be good and tired and won't have to protect our bit of road from walkers or even worse, from the lady who rollerblades by with her stroller during the Summer.

Homegrown

I worked as a gardener back when we lived in the city - but aside from small herb gardens and container cherry tomatoes, I never really had the opportunity to grow any food. Last Winter, I wrote in an early post about all the seeds we had ordered for our very first vegetable garden. It almost seemed like a dream at that time, with snow on the ground and a fire in the wood stove.

With the help of some very helpful books, we planned and "designed" our gardens and got to work starting seedlings indoors. It was difficult to find enough window space with adequate sunlight to get these little plants going. I had to bring tables up into the guest rooms to accommodate the many flats we had set up.

The seeds that were started indoors were leeks, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, thyme, rosemary, lavender, basil, broccoli and potatoes. Every morning, I spent about an hour spritzing the small pots with water and checking on the little seedlings' progress. Some seeds sprouted, some did not. Some seedlings survived, and some did not, but all in all, it was an exciting success!

Springtime came along and it was time to dig out the garden plots. This is where the real work began. Without any machinery, we had to remove all the sod by hand. What a thankless job. You get absolutely filthy trying to shake most of the dirt out of the grass roots and then you get stuck with all this heavy plant material that you have to dispose of. We also had to hand-till all this bare soil. We de-sodded and tilled just under 1,000 square feet of garden space. Beatrice and Charlotte kept me company and got paid in earthworms.

April came along and it was time to put some of our seedlings into the ground and plant some onion sets. The first salad greens were such a sight for sore eyes! What a delight... Our first salad consisted of lettuce, chives and radishes and I don't think I've ever tasted anything so fresh.

 

 

The garden grew and grew and we enjoyed the fruits of our labour. Stuart and I were in a constant marvel at the wondrous taste of the vegetables we grew. It is just incomparable to the taste of grocery-store bought veggies. We would often just walk by the garden and pick a spinach leaf and eat it right there on our path... the pure taste of the water of life (with a bit of dirt). 

Of course, there were some successes but also some failures. Despite being under the impression that I had used correct spacing between plants, the garden grew some more and became quite crowded!

One interesting experiment was trying to grow food completely naturally - no pesticides or any chemicals (organic or not). This of course led to some unwanted pests, but I told myself that there was enough for everyone and that these little guys were also the foodstuff of some other, welcome visitors. So our lettuce had holes in it. The cabbage didn't do too well despite my efforts at handpicking those horrible green cabbage worms (which I would bring over to the chickens as treats). It never really recovered from the infestation and ended up looking like lace. Our potatoes were not perfect but they were delicious. The tomatillos and ground cherries got eaten a bit by flea beetles, but they made it and bore wonderful fruit. On a particularly flea beetle busy week, I did concoct a mixture of onion juice, garlic juice, cayenne pepper and natural dish soap to spray some vulnerable plants but that's as far as I got in terms of pest management. 

What hit our garden the worse were the incessant thunderstorms that plagued our Summer. The 6-foot tall tomato plants got flattened more times than I care to remember. Our cucumber plants grew to satisfyingly monstrous proportions, baring hundreds of fruit-producing flowers only to be attacked by some sort of fungus just as the fruit were starting to grow. The disease killed the plants in just about a week and I only got to make two jars of pickles.

The goal of growing all this stuff was partly to enjoy it during the Summer, and partly to help us along in our attempt at a more independent, sustainable way of life. The idea was to grow enough vegetables to sustain us over the Winter. Well, I did expect that there would be pitfalls and that it would take a few years to figure out exactly how much of each veggie we consume and have to grow to reach this goal. We did quite well with the tomatoes, but we didn't grow nearly enough root and winter storage vegetables. We didn't even get to building a root cellar this Fall because aside from a few small squash (not enough compost), about 50 carrots and a few onions, we have nothing really to put in it.

When you grow more food than you can consume before it goes bad, you have to learn ways to preserve it for later use. This is where my new-found love comes in: Canning. I love canning. It kind of makes me understand how a squirrel feels, putting food away for the coming Winter. It gives me such a warm feeling inside. When we're all snowed-in, all we'll have to do is open the cupboard door and pull out a jar of crunchy dilly beans, close our eyes and be taken back to the fresh taste of Summer!

My friend Terri, who is a wonderful cook, taught me how to can. It's great to have someone to talk to and have a drink with while you spend hours chopping and dicing vegetables for relishes! I also bought a few books with recipes and got to work, making a cornucopia of canned goods: sauces (hot pepper, spicy plum, cranberry ketchup, peach and tomato ketchup), hot pepper jellies, pickles (cucumber, baby carrot, beans, onions), relishes (corn, zucchini, swiss chard), chutneys (rhubarb, peach), jams (blueberry, peach, raspberry, strawberry, blackberry), salsas (tomatillo, pear and pepper), conserves (peach, rhubarb in honey syrup, blackberries in red wine)...

I also made soups and pestos with roots, squash and leafy greens for the freezer, and froze piles of produce for later use.

The garden has now been cleaned-out and leftovers have been given to the chooks. The soil has been tilled with  manure and old straw and turned over for the Winter. The garlic bulbs have been planted. And I am waiting for our first snow, thinking about next year's garden delights.

Our First Summer on the Farm: DUCKS

When we first moved to the Farm last Fall, our friends Anthony and Sarah generously gave us some birds from their flock to start us off. Among those were three beautiful ducks, who initially lived with the chickens in the coop.

This Summer, Stuart fixed the old concrete pond that used to be filled with weeds and built a duck house/pen to provide our friends with a much-desired waterhole.

Moving the ducks from the coop to the pen wasn't as easy as I thought. These ducks are extremely skittish and shy and therefore, instead of traumatizing them by trying to catch them I thought we could just neatly shew them towards their new pen through a coral. Not so easy. The whole thing turned into a comedy of errors and we were chasing ducks all over the place. The ordeal catapulted the birds into a molt and they instantly stopped laying, which threw a wrench into our plan of having them raise some ducklings for us to eat (we still haven't gotten our hands on an incubator.)


Indiana, Gwendolyn and Batman loved learning how to swim in their pond! They say that it's easier for a drake to mate in water. After a long two-month molting period, Indiana started laying again and instantly set up a nest and began setting. Gwendolyn quickly got the picture and followed suit. After about 30 days of exhausting setting (ducks sit on their nest all day and all night, with only about 10-15 minutes' break to go eat and drink), the little ones hatched - what a magical sight to behold!

Out of approximately 35 eggs between the both of them, 14 hatched, and 11 ducklings survived. These little ducklings took to the water instantly (it is said that ducklings hatched in an incubator cannot go into water when they are young as they will get chilled, but ducklings reared by their mothers get a protective coating from mom which renders their feathers waterproof).

Both ducks and even the drake were endearingly good parents, protecting them from me, herding them together, letting them eat before themselves, teaching them to muck about in the mud, showing them the ropes so to speak....

And they grew - astonishingly fast! Which meant that their time was coming.... a chilling thought at first. The problem with ducklings is that as they grow, so does the amount of duck poo in the pen and pond. Anyone who has raised ducks will tell you what filthy creatures they truly are. They poo copiously and their excrement stinks like nothing else... So after a while, I just couldn't wait to go through with the butchering.

Catching these young birds was even more heart-wrenching than catching the chickens because these were my darling ducks' children! And just as they were good parents in rearing their young, so were they at trying to shield them from capture. They painstakingly tried to protect them from me and it broke my heart to steal them away. It was so sad and awful that I decided to be a kind killer and leave them two of their daughters. It just seemed too cruel to have them do all this work and be left with nothing but terrible feelings of fear and pointlessness. Call me crazy. That just means that we'll get more duck eggs this winter.

Nine ducks were slaughtered and eight of them are resting in the freezer. The ninth will be cooked as Stuart's birthday dinner in a cranberry and orange sauce. The skins of the younger ducklings have been rendered into fat (since their feathers were virtually impossible to pluck and they had to be skinned). Their heads are drying outside in the sun (I think Stuart wants to make art with them). Their stunningly beautiful feathers are being saved for some later artful use as well. Their giblets' fate is to be used in my very first terrine (which is a kind of pate). Their feet have fed the dogs and their guts are feeding the compost.

But by and by, my husband echos my feelings when he says "gosh, killing them wouldn't be so hard if they didn't make them so darn beautiful!"

Our First Summer on the Farm: CHICKENS

My last post dates from all the way back in March, as we tapped our Maple and made our first batch of glorious maple syrup. 

It's been a busy Summer here at Hillcrest Farm.  We've learned a lot about vegetable gardening and its related joys and pittfalls. We've had some births and some deaths. We've had a lot of lovely guests and some unwanted pests. And finally we come full-circle: we've now spent one entire year on the farm.

It's Fall now and our Maple stands proud but naked again.

CHICKENS

One of the most exciting experiences we've had this Summer has been that of raising chickens for meat and to add to our layer flock.


We ordered twenty-eight day-old chicks from Frey's Hatchery. The wee Plymouth Barred Rock birds arrived at the local Feed & Seed store on April 14, tightly packed in a tiny cardboard box that looked like Chinese take-out.

The  little ones were just so sweet that it was difficult to imagine that we'd be eating them in a short while. We tried not to think about it. We made our very first brooder box out of an old bathtub which we set up in a separate pen of the chicken coop.

As Summer arrived, the little ones grew into beautiful teenage chicks and we allowed them to join the general population (consisting of two Red Sex Link hens and our little banty rooster, Stuster). We sent them all outside to play in the grass and catch flies and mosquitoes.

We arranged for them to have a jungle gym so they could grow into healthy, happy chickens, which they did.

Out of the twenty-eight chicks, three roosters came out. One of them matured before the other two. He was so glamourous and gorgeous that we initially decided to keep him for breeding next year's batch of chicks. We named him Clarence. He kept himself very busy with the gals.

Maybe a bit too busy. Clarence quickly earned the nickname "You Sexy Beast". He became extremely aggressive. The girls were constantly running away from him and fighting him off. He even started challenging me when I entered the barnyard, puffing himself up and darting at me - even as I challenged him back. One morning, he figured out that he was four times bigger than our beloved Stuster, our very small pet rooster, and beat his face into the ground - nearly killing him (our little Stuster never fully recovered from this attack and became ill and died shortly after despite all our efforts to make him better). Clarence became more than we wanted to handle and we decided his time had come.

Clarence was served up in a beautiful soup that night for dinner, with some dumplings. It was sad to see this splendid bird go. He was very delicious, however.

Of our remaining twenty-seven Barred Rocks, we traded four hens and a rooster for a deep freezer. Summer came and left and it was suddenly Fall. We needed to start butchering our feathery friends and place them in our new freezer.


It's not easy killing your friends. But such is life on the farm. You feed your animals and in turn, they get to feed you. Catching a chicken is not easy either. Physically or emotionally. You've got to really get in "the zone" and come to terms with the fact that this was your purpose from the very start, even as you first picked them up in their little Chinese take-out home. After catching the chicken, I like to make a little prayer of gratitude and then thank the bird for its generous gift before I hand it over to Stuart for the killing. I've killed once and decided that it was enough for me. It's now a "man job". I get to catch, pluck, clean and cook. I'm fine with that.

It's amazing what you find inside a chicken:

Every egg that chicken was ever going to lay is already formed inside its belly and you get to pull them all out. From a fully-formed, ready-to-lay egg with shell to a large, shell-less yolk to a medium one, a small one and loads of itty bitty ones, some even too small for the naked eye to see.

We meant to perform the slaughter in one day but due to inexperience, we've had to extend it over many following Saturdays. Seven is the most we've been able to do in one day. I guess we're not very thick-skinned in that department yet. It  is a daunting and exhausting task. I've come to the conclusion that maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. 

When I lived in the city I often wondered whether I should become a vegetarian when looking at the meat counter in the grocery store. Where do these animals come from? How have they been raised? How did they live? How did they die? I never knew. My conclusion was always that I love to eat meat and could never do without. I put my head in the sand and purchased another piece of mystery meat, neatly packaged in plastic and Styrofoam and absorbent napkins.

This new experience of raising our own meat allows me to be more comfortable with my eating choice, but most importantly, more uncomfortable with it. My conclusion is that maybe it's not meant to be so easy to eat meat. It's not at all easy for other carnivorous animals: they have to go hungry and chase and hunt and kill and succeed and fail. The process is not the same for us, but perhaps I'm supposed to look death right in the face and know EXACTLY what it is that I am eating. It tastes a lot better in the end, as strange as it seems.

Our raising meat has been fraught with successes and failures. Our chickens are a little bit skinny. Their meat is a little bit tough. We've learned our lessons and hope to make different choices in terms of breed and feed in the years ahead, but we now find ourselves changed and humbled by the food that will feed us throughout the winter.

Maples Are a Girl's Best Friend

We have one, glorious, maple tree on our small property. We fell in love with it as soon as we arrived. It stands tall and majestic at the very end of our "park" and seems to beckon to us whenever we're outside. We've already climbed it numerous times, either trying to peer over the corn field which it borders to find out what lays behind in the distance or just to sit there on one of its branches to admire the landscape. We've watched numerous sunsets while leaning on its massive, sturdy trunk. Last Fall, I marveled as its thousands of leaves turned from green to the most vibrant, fiery orange, then to a deep cadmium yellow before dropping to the ground to form a warm and inviting carpet around our sad little picnic table.

I've never had a property before - and I've never really "had" a tree. Now we live together with many a tree, and a few of them have made an impression on me, but I can easily say that this is the tree I love.

I grew up in the city of Montreal and every year when March arrived, just about everyone made a day-trip to the country to go to the sugar shack. It's just one of those things us Canadians look forward to all winter long. The maple syrup yes, but also the maple candy laid over some hard snow and twisted onto a wooden stick, the baked beans, pancakes, bacon and eggs brunch, the sugar-pie desserts, the learning about maple syrup production, the log cabins, the fiddles, the songs and the dancing... all bring back such warm memories for me.

In March of this year, our friend Matty started making maple syrup. He's got a whole lot of maple brush, all the equipment needed to tap the trees and collect the sap and even a sugar shack in which to boil the sap over a fire. It's all so very exciting! My husband Stuart decided that maybe it would be a good idea to tap our beloved maple but I told him he was wasting his time, since I didn't believe it to be a sugar maple, Acer saccharum. Shortly thereafter, I learned that any maple can be tapped, and that actually, almost any tree can be tapped: Matt is now making birch syrup as well, which I can't wait to sample! We bought a tap and tapped our maple. We didn't have a proper stainless steel bucket for the sap, but decided that a plain plastic pail would do the job just as well. I was pessimistic about the whole thing at first.

Well, oh well, was I ever wrong. First of all, after doing a bit of research I actually realized that this tree is most probably a sugar maple. And this amazing tree's sap has flowed and is still flowing quite well... Tapping our own tree and making maple syrup at home has been a fantastic and unexpected new experience.

This tiny red squirrel was caught stealing sips of sap from our red pail. This of course infuriated my dog Emma to no end and they both literally started a game of cat and mouse over the situation:

This experience has taught me just why maple syrup is so expensive. Of an estimated total of four full pails of sap collected, I have made approximately 500ml of maple syrup. The first small bottle (of about 150ml) is the best (I would rate it myself as a Grade A light) since it was made at the beginning of the season (see maple syrup grades on wikipedia). The flavour is very delicate and the colour is extremely light. The next batch I made yesterday (350ml) is much darker and the flavour much stronger but just as delectably sweet. I look forward to making, if we're lucky, one other 350ml bottle this year! Perhaps next year we will drill two taps into our friend and double our tiny operation.

The liquid gold:

Maples, and not diamonds, are this girl's best friend.

Lontra Canadensis

Spring is in the air. 

In an earlier blog entitled "The Dead of Winter", I mentioned how everything had become so incredibly still over the winter. It's so different from the city out here. In Toronto, it doesn't matter what time of year it is - there are always millions of squirrels squirreling about, rounded-back raccoons scurrying over our roofs and through the alleyways at dusk, pigeons riding the subways, sparrows chirping, cats strutting... and dogs, well, abounding.

I've been very lonely out here these past few months, though I must admit that our neighbors have welcomed us with the kindest, widest open arms, for which I am so very grateful.

The weather over the past few days has been absolutely lovely. A balmy high of 10 degrees Celsius and a bright sunshine that entices rivulets to flow by the sides of the road. So after hanging some laundry out to dry in the sun this morning, Emma, Chico and I headed out for a walk to the wetlands.

The birds were singing in a multitude of voices. I caught a glance of a beautiful little gray and white Finch. Some geese traveling back North could be heard in the distance. The crows were crowing. There must have been a dozen of them up there in the sky at once. Emma was sniffing the air.

Suddenly, I gazed over the marsh and beheld Lontra Canadensis (identified over the internet after I came home). It was sitting on the edge of the ice, peering into the water. I paused. Emma was still sniffing the air. Chico barked. (Though neither dog actually saw this creature, I suspect they both smelled it.) Lontra Canadensis hurriedly dove into the water. I saw it resurfacing for a breath of air and dive again, its rounded back gracefully emerging out of the water for a second or two. I moved along, keeping an eye on the marsh and caught glimpses of it emerging and disappearing a few more times. The North American River Otter.


According to naturewatch.ca, "otters fare poorly in areas of human disturbance and have become extirpated from southwestern Ontario because of habitat loss, over-harvesting, and pollution. Monitoring otter populations is recommended as a biological indicator of the health of aquatic ecosystems."

 (I succeeded in snapping a picture when I went back around noon. Lontra was eating a catch and dove back in to continue his hunt.)

Shortly after that, I saw a small creature hopping towards us on the edge of the ice. At first I thought it was a squirrel, until it, too, dove into the water. It swam a bit, jumped back out onto the ice, and Emma caught sight of it. She stood up on her hind legs pulling on her leash, looking like a lemur watching it go. This new creature seemed like a tiny teeny version of the river otter. Mustela vison - the American mink. Back in the city, one of these minks decimated my father-in-law's koi population, one at a time, over eighteen days, by "fishing" in his beautiful backyard pond. There was nothing he could do to protect his beloved fish as all wildlife is protected in the city (except for mice and rats, of course).


Later, I saw a pheasant walking in the woods. And a dead snake by the mill.

I doubt this poor fella came out for the hot sunshine. His corpse must just now be thawing out from last Fall.

I'm looking forward to all the wildlife I'll get to know this coming Spring and Summer.  Archie - the walker - and I had a chat out front a few days ago, when I had to go rescue him from Emma's attacks again (he keeps saying it's fine, that she's a good dog just doing her job). Anyway, he mentioned that big, long fish (two-footers!) are coming - in about a couple of weeks (silly I can't recall what kind). And that soon, loads of huge snapper turtles will be traveling through and coming out onto the roads to greet us.

Oh March... I beg of you to forgo the snow altogether and bring us more of this warm sunshine!

20 Years of Art

In the past, my artwork has often been about being somewhere else than "here" and "now". (See kl-d.ca)

For many years, the focus of my artwork was old family photographs. I loved to dwell on those old memories that were not mine and dream about the people in my family whom I never got to meet, or gaze at my own mother's image as a child.

After that, I began painting scenes from my travels. Feeling the heat of the jungle from my tiny city studio on a cold and snowy winter day... hearing the sounds of the crashing waves and the rustling palm trees in my mind.... being "there" and not "here".

  

Now, I don't want to be anywhere else but here, in my beautiful countryside. I figured I would be spending this winter painting surrounding landscape, becoming a local, comfort-country artist. But I'm just not that into it for some reason. Maybe I haven't found my new voice yet. I did try to paint the neighbor's field:

And another neighbor's cows:

But these paintings just don't seem right. Pretty. Lame. I need a bit of an edge even though I'm a very traditional painter. Or maybe because of that. Something's missing. I've been thinking about how this great transition, this drastic change in environments is affecting me, and I guess I need time to stew a bit like a piece of tough meat. Maybe I'll just take my new inspiration with food and carry it over to my art and start painting "still" lifes like I used to back in my University days:

Who knows what will happen with my art in the future, but for now it seems I have to embrace this hiatus, and patiently wait for the meat to tenderize and fall off the bone.