By Heart: Notes from a small place in the country

"Mud, mud, glorious mud"

30/4/2020

Spring on the farm was always welcome - as it is everywhere in this northern climate. But before you could really enjoy it you had to get through mud season. This was originally published in April 1989.

Spring puddles by Alice Whitney, 2003. Pastel.

Do you remember the Hippopotamus Song? It was first perpetrated in about 1956 by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann and has a very singable chorus, which begins like this...

Mud, mud, glorious mud;
Nothing quite like it
For cooling the blood...

(There you go. If you listened to the song on YouTube you'll now have it stuck in your head for hours! You're welcome.)

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One of those weeks!

10/4/2020

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On this snowy Good Friday (April 10, 2020) in the midst of the social isolation brought on by Covid19, we thought this little glimpse into life on the farm in April 1989 would bring some chuckles.

Snow in April always feels unexpected and unnecessary, however, when this was originally published in the Kings County Record on April 18, 1989 it was snowing then too!

Farmhouse in the snow. Photo by R. Lee Whitney

There is a school of thought that says that the universe is unfolding as it should. Don't believe it for a minute. Whatever the universe is doing, it is not unfolding. Cancel the unfolding idea.

What's going on is more like spilling a box full of those Styrofoam chips that are all the rage as packing material: no matter what you do you can't get all the chips out of the box, but the ones that do fall out of the box cannot all be rounded up because they immediately fly off to stick to the underneath of the couch, the dog's tail, the

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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.

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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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"Mud, mud, glorious mud"

One of those weeks!

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