By Heart: Notes from a small place in the country

"Lo, some we loved . . . crept silently to rest"

24/9/2016

© R.L. Whitney, originally published 13 January, 2004

Transience. How many creatures have shared our life since we came down here to stay. And how many of them are missed - gone but not forgotten!

I remember the first flock of chickens we had. They came, if I recall correctly, from the Coop sale barn the summer after we had bought this place.

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Wonders to be enjoyed close to home

18/7/2016

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For longer than I have been writing the columns in the Kings County Record, I have been making homemade wine. We are working on adding a new page to this site which will allow me to share some methods and recipes to help others who want to learn about making wine. Watch for that new page, coming soon (and subscribe to the newsletter if you want to be notified). Meanwhile, here is a post that explains how I got involved in winemaking in the first place...

(c) R. L. Whitney. Originally published June 22, 2010

We were living in England in 1971, the year King Tut came to the British Museum. The lineups to see all that mysterious stuff, we were told, stretched “around the block.” We gave him a miss, and did the same when he passed through Toronto.

This last while we have been involved in mysteries of another kind, mysteries that we didn’t have to go anywhere to see and that, aside from the cost of a few supplies, made no demands on the wallet. And it all happens right before our eyes.

I remember clearly how we got into this particular activity. We had just moved into the first house we owned in Toronto. Johnny Mack, a neighbour across the street, came over one evening shortly after we had moved in, introduced himself and gave us, as a house-warming present, a bottle of wine he had made.

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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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"Lo, some we loved . . . crept silently to rest"

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