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These columns were originally published in the Kings County Record between 1984 and 2016.
The illustrations are by Alice, most of the photographs are by Lee

Spring must be around here someplace…

25/4/2019

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Giving Old Winter A "Bronx Cheer"

18/4/2019

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Picture
Originally published April 18th, 1995... another weather piece that is slightly more optimistic. Enjoy

As that little bit of meteorological madness uttered a final shriek or two and toddled on, it crossed my mind that all those people making gloomy remarks in January as the warm weather went into extra innings, were probably nodding sagely and saying a collective “We told you so.”


Get a nice day somewhere between November and May and you are sure to overhear someone saying, “We’ll pay for this.” It’s a remark that seems positively engraved on the Canadian psyche. There is no news so good that someone won’t feel compelled to throw a bit of metaphorical salt over his shoulder with a gloomy, “We’ll pay for this.”

I don’t know about you but as far as I’m concerned “We’ll pay for this” is up there in a class with  “Have a nice day” and big yellow happy faces as mindless modern garbage, the verbal and visual equivalent of toxic waste. I mean, there I am, doing the best I can to get through another of our interminable winters with some measure of grace and style and suddenly, all unlooked-for, the sun comes out and the mercury in the thermometer loses a few of the wrinkles it had acquired while it was huddled down in the bulb for the past month. And what happens? Is joy unconfined? Is there dancing in the streets? I should think not! Instead I hear a chorus of gloomy voices saying, “We’ll pay for this.” I can tell you, it makes a person feel like rushing home and working on the income tax.

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Wait til the sun shines, Nellie

11/4/2019

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Picture© Alice Whitney 2019

Originally published on or about the 3rd of April in 1998, this is yet another post about a seemingly never ending winter - or the equally pessimistic never arriving spring. Please enjoy.

“ ‘April is the cruellest month,’ ” my wife quoted as we rounded the corner of a building in Saint John, and were met with the full force of a nasty east wind the other day.
It certainly seemed as though T.S. Eliot was right, although he goes on to talk about “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,” a feat that around here is going to have to wait for the nearer side of two months hence.
Somehow, that spectacular last day of March, when the sun shone and the temperature in the shade got up into the middle seventies Fahrenheit, severely dislocated our thoughts, and made the inevitable return to a grudging spring a good deal harder to take. And an east wind, I don’t care when it arrives, tends to set one’s teeth on edge.
 
When the wind is in the east
  ‘Tis neither fit for man nor beast.




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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

4/4/2019

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Picture© Alice Whitney 2019
A lovely piece about the ambiguous nature of the changing of the seasons. Originally published approximately fifteen years ago on the 19th of April, 2019... yes, late for snow.

Snow!  At five o’clock this morning even though day was (theoretically) beginning, the view out the windows was no view at all. Later this morning when Environment Canada was telling us that we were getting flurries, we could barely see the trees at the back of the home field below the road. And now three hours later it is still snowing. Hey, ho, it’ll all be gone in a day or two.

Or, was that what I said last year around this time and a week or so later the snow was still with us? Only by then it had congealed into ice and the ruts we had made with the car when the snow stopped had also congealed.  The car, as I recall, slipped and slithered in the grooves and the steering wheel was quite useless. By the time it became clear that the snow had no intention of going in the foreseeable future, it was also clear that nothing short of a bulldozer would budge it. Our little snowblower ran happily about on top but when directed at an edge, behaved like a small dog who has been told to tear a concrete lion limb from limb.



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    Words & Images

    We moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. 

    For over 30 years of our life there, I wrote a weekly column for the Kings County Record in Sussex chronicling the little events that are the heart of ‘daily life’ in a small place in the country.  These blog posts are drawn from those columns.

    The weekly column became, over the years, a series of bench-marks or surveyor’s stakes to record the contours of the place we lived, its dreaming hills and fertile valleys, icy chasms and swift-flowing streams. 

    While I no longer live on the farm, we continue to share the columns from time to time on this blog.  And very soon you will be able to read my book!  To be published in December 2019.  

    ----
    Images on the blog are drawn from my own photography,  and my wife Alice's artwork.  We occasionally resort to other people's images when nothing we have on hand suits the content of the post.  

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