Early Morning

We call it smoke but it’s smog and we better get used to it.

Up early. Tough week. I let my temper get the better of me a couple times. Luckily I am only caustic with my tongue, not like before.

It would be easy to say they got what they deserved. Tourists, rich, entitled, put in their place. But it makes me sad. So it can’t be good. I used to love putting a bully in his place. Punching up has hurt my family immeasurably. I am a fool not to go along. Look how good the people who punch down do.

The garden is up. Plenty of smoke on the horizon and on the water, early morning. The spuds could be ready, who knows for sure, the grasshoppers have eaten the blossoms.

July Garden

Even Willow was powerless against the grasshoppers.

The garden is doing it’s best after being ravaged by grasshoppers. The grasshoppers are still around in abundance but not eating as much as when they were small. When we have vegetables from the garden for dinner I remark my thankfulness that the grasshoppers were kind enough to leave it for us. They were ravenous bastards.

No carrots this year. Almost everything had to be replanted. Strangely they didn’t like peas, which are about 6 feet tall and covered in pods. The tomatoes, they mostly left alone. Same as the zucchini. Everything else was at their mercy.

The cannabis is coming and I’m about to trick it into thinking it’s dying so it will flower. The grasshoppers ate it as well, but it fought back on its own. The grasshoppers who indulged were last seen, wearing dark glasses, listening to jazz, riding vans, driven by a ladybug, down to SF, Haight Ashbury, to find themselves. I’m happy I could, at least, convert a few. The stoned grasshoppers remaining are degenerates, happy to listen to Led Zeppelin overflowing from the gardeners earbuds. They are hard to motivate, but great to have a conversation with once you get them going, unfortunately they still like to snack.

We will miss the carrots. I planted zucchini in many of spots in the garden that the grasshoppers destroyed. We are going to have ‘chini coming out our ears. I won’t be able to give them away. My friends will see me coming and scatter.

Canada Day

Lisa and I were up early and heading for the bush to miss the tourists and second home owners, who are out in force.

Once we made the corner after the first bridge on the Kootenay we were free and never saw a soul, except the most important, a black bear, a murder of crows circling something dead, plenty of deer, bucks in velvet, a shiny muskrat and birds singing songs, so beautiful, that I will never understand no matter how hard I try.

We picked up a load of wood. Tomorrow I will split it. It is birch so the sooner the better. It will keep us warm. Summer is when you should think of winter.

Picked a litter of lettuce in the garden. The grasshoppers have wings but aren’t eating like they were when they were small. As far as I can tell they don’t like peas or tomatoes. Everything else has taken a shit kicking.

We sure have a good country. I may bitch at the folks running it. The country and citizens are so strong even the politicians haven’t been able to screw it up. 🙂 Aboriginal people are seeing a future where injustices are acknowledged. There is no making things right. There is no returning justice. MY small spot on this land belonged to someone who didn’t agree to sell it to me.

Our future is dependant on immigration, that’s a good thing. The ideas and hard work coming from abroad will make us strong.

Whenever I meet someone wanting to make Canada their home I think of my Grandfather coming from England in 1912 looking for a better life.

I live in this time in history when immigrants made my life easy in my youth and will help me in my old age. How lucky is that?

Most of the creeks are still high. I followed a spring, out of nowhere, a hundred yards through a grove of birch, then disappeared underground to cripes knows where.

The country is alive and beautiful. I can’t contribute like I used to. I don’t expect much. That’s how it is when you are happy.

Somehow we have to grab rocks, but instead of throwing them, we have to lie down on them and feel the warmth.

Rain

The rising sun catches the ridge in the west. Dark storm clouds above, shaded valley bottom below. Taken about 6am from the garden.

Came through a good bit of rain. It was welcome. In the mountains it was snow.

We planned a trip into the high country last Wednesday, but postponed it to this coming Wednesday. The youngsters from work were disappointed. I didn’t welcome trudging through a foot of wet snow on the mountain side. The truth is I’d end up sliding on my ass coming down trying to dig my heels in yelling whoa!! It can be fun, but I’m too damn old for such hijinks. I didn’t want to lose face so told them the scenery would be better when it cleared.

The doe deer are busy with their fawns. A few days ago I freed a fawn that got caught in fencing. Today Jack shooed one from the pool court back to its mother. It was held up under patio furniture and was starting to gather quite a crowd of guests. Jack said he had done it plenty with lambs back in England. He is a good man that Jack.

***

Some warm weather is expected. The recent rain has done its best to cool the bush. That’s more than we can ask.

Mid June

A good spell of rain put the grasshoppers on pause. The buggers got all of the carrots, beets and some of the lettuce.

***

Skipped town early for the bush. Lisa and I fell a dead fir. Willow and Lola ran around while we knocked off branches and bucked it up.

***

Cormac McCarthy passed away this past week. He wrote many good books. Suttree, No Country for Old Men, The Road, Blood Meridian and others.

When I read Child of God, I wondered how he could write it. How did someone, a loved one, tell him, you can’t write that.

It is in that space where conscience and violence takes hold, deep down, where truth dwells. Cormac McCarthy had a seat next to this other world and reported back in prose that could stun.

When I broke my leg I was higher than hell on morphine awaiting an operation. My sister Wynanne gave me a copy of All the Pretty Horses.

I read and reread until I could say it in a slurred voice:

They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

***

I rarely get angry anymore. I’ve paid dearly for things I’ve said, but I stand by them all.

Recently my name came up at a District of Invermere (DOI) council meeting. Somebody had left an anonymous message in a Facebook post criticizing the Mayor and Council. They attributed it to me without proof.

It is true I have been critical of DOI council and the mayor on this blog. My name and email is beside everything I say. I give reasons for my criticism.

I despise anonymous comments and the people who leave them. They are seen everywhere on news sites. My feeling is, if you have something to say you put your name to it.

When I heard Mayor, Council and DOI staff were attributing critical anonymous comments to me I was pissed off.

I had a talk with one of the Councillors today. Of course getting to the bottom of who said what is like herding cats. The more I tried to shake him the further down his tongue went.

***

The hot weather is picking up speed. It will be winter before long and the wood will come in handy.

Monday

Rain today and we needed it. Work was a missed mash of issues. Most got the better of me. Lisa has a small white board where I get dressed that says, ‘Make good choices’. She knows I don’t always, but I’m getting better from my younger days where it didn’t take much for me to fly off the handle.

The birds enjoyed the rain, they chirped and sang and were grateful for the worms that came to the surface, making eating easy.

You could almost watch the grass grow. I fear a hot dry summer. We have been lucky the last couple of years. The tourists are coming, no longer slowed by Covid, and each will have a pack of matches and a few fireworks, not content with turning off the lights and watching the much more magnificent Milky Way.

Anger still bubbles in me. Deep down. Watching the destruction. The waste, pollution and noise. Nothing changes fast, I remind myself. It takes time they say. In the meantime I try to make good choices.

Pray

Wind and rain signalling winter is officially over and spring is here. I feel colder in this weather than I do when it is minus thirty.

It will green things up. Some of the kids at work are wearing shorts while I still have on my long underwear.

Lisa asked today, do I wish we prayed. It is a good question.

Easter

There is plenty of reason for the way things work out. For instance, we’re told, a person works hard and they prosper. However, the biggest reason that things work out is random. The universe is chaos. It doesn’t consider us or our feelings. It isn’t Jesus or Santa Claus or cares if we have been naughty or nice. If it was most people would live forever and a few would pay for the shit they caused.

Bad things happen to good people. Bad people prosper. Not always, like I said, it’s random.

My brother smoked and drank from the time he was 12. Instead of liver or lung cancer he died of a rare blood disease. He thought it was funny. It also killed his fear of dying. So many doing everything right and dying. He was lucky.

We’re all lucky in the end.

The stars keep time. They swarm over the mountains. Turn south and back. It takes more than a lifetime to know them, to become an expert.

Spring

Every season has its colours. The sky in spring is always interesting, where it can be minus twelve in the morning and plus twelve in the afternoon. That does things to the sky.

A brilliant full moon cutting through the clouds here and there. Big puffy orange clouds in the longer evenings.

This morning the moon went down later, a little more light, so I didn’t have to take the picture in the dark. The purple colour on the horizon drives me crazy with joy. Only in Spring.