My poor blog. I have neglected you of late. Cobwebs have gathered in the corners, opportunistic weeds have sprung up between the paragraphs. The proud capitals, the flagship of my sentences, have been overgrown by fungi. Decay has set in. I despairs--but there is so much else to do.

I’m struggling to get my first book (self) published, which puts all the onus on me. I have been toiling, designing covers, rereading the proof (just one more time), learning HTML, CSS, Java Script, just so I can build a supportive website.

I have also been fending off offers from promoters and book packagers, who are promising to boost the visibility of my book, all for a little or for a lot of cash. Success is just a check away, they promise.

No! Look for me on some street corner, selling from the curbside, while I offer to wash your windshield (as a bonus). You’ll not find me on Amazon, Indigo or Chapters. More likely I’ll be trolling Main Street with a sandwichboard, proclaiming the rarest books in print in all of Canada, perhaps the world.
Every book comes with a warranty: should you not understand something, I’ll be right over to your home to explain it personally.

But oh my poor blog! You have paid the price for my quest for glory and suffered the neglect. My garden of words in decline, forgetfulness eroding content.

It is a good thing no one is reading you.

The Storm

Sunday, August 9th, all day the heat has been building, turning the great outdoors into a Turkish steambath. I did some work in the morning but by the afternoon I have changed into a lethargic sponge, sweating after just two steps.

My wife loves the heat, energised by it; I hate it for sucking all vitality from me. It feels like breathing liquid humidity to be swallowed rather than inhaled. I hide in the relative coolness of the house, watching the windows fog up. The dog too is lying low, panting like a labouring steam engine. Only the actors on TV seem unaware of the overcharge of energy collecting under the lead dead sky.

"Shit!" My youngest exclaims, surfacing briefly from his videogame. "Look at the green sky."

"Gree..en?!" I bounce up from the couch and rush to the nearest window. Ever since 1985, in our house, green sky has been a code word for tornado. The sky is a sickly green pall, oppressively heavy and still. Just waiting.

"Tornado? Hell, no." But I run to the west window, peering toward the weather edge. Everything is calm; the leaves are barely shivering in the dead air. There is no sun, just a pale green glow.

I make quick rounds, upstairs, downstairs, checking in all directions. Calm, dead calm, exuding malevolence. I guard the line to the north-west, where the weather is expected to come from.

Then as I watch, the compression wave of the first wind gust blasts through the foliage. The leaves explode into motion and all the trees are rocking crazily, limbs twisting beyond endurance, branches snapping and whipped off to the east. I hear the hundred year old maple groan at the onslaught. The rain is pelting down in explosive drops, soon becomes horizontal, quickly washing out the distance.

From the mudroom door, my 31 year-old son, who was seared by the memory of 85, is watching anxiously to the west. "Is that hail?"

"No, no. Just water," my wife seeks to reassure him. The rain is coming in one door, leaving by the other. A new wave of gusts collide with the house, rebound from the brick walls, come bursting through the door like through a wind tunnel. With a machine gun rhythm, rain drops explode on the window panes.

Across the view a line of poplars are gyrating frantically, bending one way one second, then recoiling with a vengeance. 'They are not supposed to do that,' I repeat to myself as I watch one curve into a bow. These are nearly two feet across, for Christ's sake!

Hunting underfoot, the dog whines for the shelter of the house. I let him in and take a quick turn around, checking if we still have the screen door. The view out the windows is of trees dancing against a backdrop of murky gray. The question is, what is hiding behind it? Should we head for the basement? The lights in the house flicker, but stay on. Thank God, for as long as we have power, no tornado has cut the grid. It is the one reliable warning sign.

Jagged lightning strikes to the west, to the south, to the north. Continuous thunder rumbles overhead, with the occasional whipping backlash of a close strike. You feel the sound in your gut as it shakes the air. We are surrounded, in the epicentre of the storm. Still we hover near the doorway, feeding on the excitement.

"Fuck! Look at that. That tree is coming down! Right across the hydro lines. Jeez! See those sparks." Sure enough, the lights go off. A poplar, 20 inches in diameter, has given up the fight. The windbreak we had planted 22 years ago broke in the wind.

I started worrying about candles: we'll need them tonight.

"There goes another one. Going, going, gone!"

"Right across the silo," my oldest confirms. "Leaning on the barn."

"Let me see," my wife insists.

"Where? Where?" My wife and I try to squeeze past the boys to get a better look. I get a blast of wind in my face and the rain instantly obscures my glasses. I swear, pull back and try to find a dry corner of my T-shirt to clean them off. We are besieged. Trees are falling, the wind is blasting, lightning may strike us any moment and there is a tornado is lurking out there, hiding in the storm. We still have a roof but the basement is probably flooded. All that water has to go somewhere. The metal roof is drumming with ferocity. A branch sails by and gets tangled in the crab apple tree. Our lives are in danger and all I can think of is that it will cost us a bucketful to get all this fixed.

The violence doesn't last long. The storm cell moves on, leaving us in a light following wind. Everything is calm again. But there are trees down, branches and leaves all over the grass.

"That had to be a micro burst," my oldest inform us.

"Whew, that was close." The excitement is slow to fade, released by worry about the consequences.

Inventorying the damage. Two 20 inch poplars are leaning on the barn at about a 40 degree angle. A large poplar is across the hydro, the lines are on the ground. The cottage feed has also been ripped. Walking up on the access road, we find two more trees across the way, cutting us off from the world. I swear, the hydro trunk won't be able to get to us. I call them anyway. I am told that the region is experiencing an unusually high demand and 7,500 people are without power. Please be patient, the recording advises in a neutral tone. Not a drop of sympathy in the mechanical voice.

Darkness comes and we huddle around candle flame, wondering how our neighbours are doing.

The Corner

I was trying to squeeze through the midmorning traffic, hurrying for an appointment downtown. I was on schedule but had little margin for error. The light at Jarvis and Wellesley turned red just in front of me. I cursed under my breath as I brought the car to a halt.

Pedestrians flooded the walkway, in their many colours and varieties. That’s Toronto for you, an ethnic melting pot. Large and small, the world crossed in front of me. One ought to expect the unexpected. On the near sidewalk, however, the sight of a woman sitting on a sleeping bag spread out on the pavement arrested my sight. That in itself was not unusual, many major street corners came with one, begging for change: for hot coffee, for booze, or for a fix. People ignore them as best as they could. Me too, usually. But this person was reading a book. That, as a writer always gets my attention. Was it a novel? Nonfiction? Self-help? Not likely, if she could help herself she would not be there, exposed and abandoned.

Then the incongruity of the sight struck me. Get this, a homeless person, with all her possession wrapped in a bundle, was reading a book. Her entire library in her hand. That she was off somewhere was obvious ... somewhere the book took her, gave her access to. And why not? She had more reason than most to find escape or at least a diversion. She licked her fingers and turned the page, ignoring the world hurrying past her.

I was trying to sort out my feelings. For some reason, I was unsettled. Was it because a book needed a home, a bookcase to be safe and protected? The company of other books? Here, there was no promise of such. Most likely she found it in the trash and it would end back in there. A book deserved better. Woah! Hold on. A PERSON deserves better. She was a living book, with many chapters of her history written on her many pages. Some of the harsher chapters were etched in the lines on her face. And here she was - discarded.

Still, I felt that she had no right to the book. As a homeless person, reduced to barest of existence, survival ought to be the issue. Food, shelter, protection ... then maybe diversion of entertainment. Reading was an intellectual pursuit. What right had she to that? She was not playing according to script. She turned the page. She read that page fast. Was she skimming? No, the concentration was visible on her face. I couldn’t have consumed the page that quickly. But if she was smart what was she doing here, on the street corner? What set of events and circumstances had reduced her to this?

A quick second look. The sleeping bag was neatly smooth, aligned to the sidewalk, not underfoot of passersby. Her few possessions were in a tidy bundle at hand. Even her hair was combed. Whatever had got her onto the corner had not robbed her of everything. She still had a sense of self. The book too confirmed it. She had interests and implied what? Desires?

How old is she? Hard to tell. Sitting on the sidewalk in the harsh morning light, bent over a book, cocooned in her own intent, she gave no clue to her age. Squalor is ageless. The need is to the forefront obscuring all else.

I tried coming at the puzzle from another way. She can’t be very aggressive. Jarvis and Wellesley is not a prime location as say Yonge someplace, with more people streaming by with a better chance at a handout. No, she had found a place here, a less desirable, less competition, less need to defend, at her level of comfort. Even on the street there was a definite pecking order. And she was someplace in the middle. Not high, but not the lowest of the low.

She turned the page. What was she getting out of the book? Who wrote it? What was it all about?
Something that would attract her and hold her interest. A romance? A crimi? Sci-Fi? Or some info book? Or was she so hungry that anything would do?

The harsh sound of a horn behind me brought me to my senses. I accelerated through the green, muttering, "Man doesn’t live by bread alone ..."

The Bus Ride

This morning I did not feel like driving. Not with the barium cocktail percolating through my system from the night before. I still had half a bottle to drink, an hour before my scheduled CT-scan.

I wasn’t nauseous, just unsettled. Unwilling to fight through rush-hour traffic and to worry about finding parking downtown, I decided to take the better way, the GO bus. Let the driver worry about those things and get me there safely.

It was a good thing I wasn’t going to the States, I thought, setting off the radioactive sensors at the border. I would probably be arrested for terrorism, trying to smuggle in a "dirty" bomb.
So it was that I boarded the southbound bus almost full with regular commuters. Halfway back I found a seat and gratefully slid into it. The bus lurched forward and eased into the traffic. I tried to relax, swallowing the back-pressure of the barium. To divert my mind, I tried to calculate how much money I saved by not driving, not using gas and not having to pay the exorbitant ransom they demand for parking in the City.

The thing was I now had an hour and a quarter with nothing to do. I brought nothing to read, nothing to amuse myself. I used up not quite 10 minutes cleaning up my cell phone, getting rid of unsolicited numbers from the memory.

Now what? I looked around at my fellow travellers and tried to guess about them. The seat ahead was occupied by a burly Italian, the type I recognized from working in construction. Hardworking, hard-driving men, swearwords punctuating every sentence. Him I knew all too well. My eye skipped to a young man, phones in his ear, listening to his music; he was in a different word.

Across the aisle sat a Middle Eastern woman, dressed in ethnic getup that covered her from head to toe, but her face was free, radiating a healthy, burnished glow. She had a wonderful smooth complexion that reminded me of sandalwood. No blemish to be seen. Her nose was straight, delicate, what one would call aquiline. Her lips were precise, perfectly formed. Graceful thin eyebrows arched across her forehead. Everything about her testified of her heritage, the composition of her face, the quiet repose of her features.

Her dark eyes flashed at me, saw me looking, and just as quickly veered away. I too averted my eyes, but soon found myself returning to her.

She was dressed in layers of colourful flower-print cloth, slightly bulky in the manner of eastern fashion, hiding female contours. All the covering, though, directed the viewer’s gaze back to her face, so unlined, so radiant, the kind advertisers stage in skin commercials. But this was not applied or airbrushed, it was natural and unaffected.

She had a tote bag cradled in her lap, something native in texture and design. Her hands rested around it, the fingers interlaced. From time to time she shifted her weight, her hands moved gracefully to counterbalance the motion. Mostly she was cocooned in an aura of calmness that expressed a dignified reserve.

She wasn’t willowy anymore and I guessed her age at 35, though her face did not say so. Time had left no marks on her smooth skin. More than likely she was a mother, and given an early marriage, maybe even a grandmother. There was a sense of maturity about her, even a suggestion of wisdom. Was I reading too much into her self-possessed repose?

Personally, I know no Mid-Eastern people close up. What I knew came from movies, news flashes, and prejudices built up over many years. And those haven’t been kind of late. In reality though I had no reason to despise them, or to like them for that matter. I was largely unaware of the cultural nuances.

For instance, did her calmness came from resignation, that she, as a woman, was powerless in her own society? Was it her dignity born out of endurance, that had experienced the full range of good and bad? Marginalized perhaps, even repressed? Was it just a quiet fortitude? Her part of the world was in turmoil. Full of wars, conflicts and terrorism. Centuries of ingrained customs and inflexible conservatism.

Yet she did not have the black dress of martyrdom. No bitter lines marred her expression. No frown crossed her brows, no tension etched her cheeks. She was a piece of polished sandalwood, sculptured, balanced and centered within herself.

Was she perhaps high born? An elite of her race, entitled? No, that not. Or she would have worn something internationally elegant, high quality but muted. She was committed to her heritage, her attire declared it.

Was she happy in Canada? Did she assimilate successfully? Certainly not fully, again her clothes set her apart. Probably she had to balance between two values, from the old country and the new.

Coming from a different word myself, I knew what it was to be considered alien, a stranger, stupid for not knowing the language, low caste for an accent and the funny way of talking. Yes, I felt sympathy for her, sympathy for myself, for the boy who had grown up trying to fit in. Could I say all that with a single look?

Sensing my scrutiny, she turned her eyes on me. This time she did not veer away, but looked on, challenging. She caught me staring, an act considered rude in her culture. With difficulty, I kept my eyes locked on her. And for half a second, we traded looks. Her eyes were deep obsidian, the kind of darkness that swallowed light. Did I imagine seeing sparks in them?

As we maintained this lock, the eyes spoke their own language. The biases and preconceptions melted away, the contact became human in which her gender, her ethnicity disappeared, it became a face to face contact, undefended, unpretentious. I felt a flush of kinship with her, a feeling of sharing and a connection so rarely found in life. She was feeling something similar, I swear, she had to be, the connectivity had to be induced from both sides. I was mesmerized by the experience, one on one, human to human, without an agenda or other ambitions.

Then ... then my male reactions betrayed me. My eyes looked down on her chest, unintended, on their own, I swear. Mortified I looked up. Her face had become blank, her eyes guarded as she looked out the window. Whatever it had been was lost. We were strangers again.

Why had I done that? There had been such a sense of sharing, and now like a gift snatched away, by my own foolish reaction.

Next stop, she got off and I registered her walk, compact and purposeful, her posture ever dignified. She knew where she was going in life. Again I chewed on myself for losing an opportunity. But for what exactly? Perhaps for a rare insight that flashes and illuminates everything else, the connected and the unconnected. I felt like I had been on a threshold of something, but now the door had closed. I had mishandled the situation.

A black man sat down where she had been. He was so dark that all his features disappeared into a black hole. That is until he smiled. The teeth, whiter than white, dazzled me. Then I saw the eyes, dark orbs in a dark face. Again I was conscious of a rising recognition. However, having been burned once, I looked away and closed my eyes. I had no energy to decipher a new language.

Later on in the day, as I was lying in my hospital gown on the board with the donut of the CT- machine over me singing its electronic song, I found the technician looking down at me reciting her standard caution, "You might feel some tingling or a flush of warmth as the dye diffuses into your blood stream . . ." She was fussing with my IV, injecting new chemicals to increase contrast, she said. Was the liter of barium not enough already?

I looked up, she looked down, her eyes distant above her face mask. What did she see? Me? Or just the sickness she was trying to measure, to diagnose or monitor. "Take a breath and hold it ... now you can breathe normally." The machine about me hummed, taking electronic slices of me. Cross section after cross section. Hold still, do not move, I told myself, we want clear resolutions. "My God, she gets to look at all this, slice by slice, and she will know me more intimately than my wife knows me. She will know in detail, what was deteriorating, degenerating, atrophying, or enlarging, swelling and growing, what is out of whack. But still not know me at all. She sees only the container but not the real content.

Her eye remained solicitously professional. And again I had to wonder about the language of the eyes. What they say, what they read and take away. Did she see anxiety reflected in mine that ... that she might find something?

I closed my eyes to shut her out of my mind and soul, trying to think of something else.
"I wonder what are we’re having for supper tonight?" At the thought of food, the barium lurched and glowed in my stomach. I wonder if the CT-scan caught all that?

A Day to Remember

We were going much too fast and I didn’t know why. Hell, I knew nothing. Tilson was driving, booting it north on the 400, hitting 150 an hour. At that speed I had tunnel vision with blurring on the sides.

"What the hell Tilly," I squeezed through clenched teeth as we veered around another car.

"What’s the rush?" He just laughed and kicked the car into overdrive. Was he crazy or just suicidal?

We flashed by a large rig and the trucker gave us a long blast of his horn.

"For God’s sake Tilly, slow down. You’ll kill us!" He just laughed again, his eyes blazing with excitement. He pulled around another vehicle, the tires squalling on the pavement. This was madness. I braced my feet against the firewall as if that would help me in a crash at this speed.
I smelled the smoke of oil burning in the engine compartment, pouring through the vent. "Tilly . . ." I was now begging. One thing worse than crashing at this speed was burning to death at 150 k’s an hour. Like a meteor. "TILLY!" I was becoming desperate.

"Shit!" Tilsen exploded, hitting the dash with his fist. He was trying to push the accelerator through the floorboard.

"What. . .?"

"Look behind us," he hissed, bending over the steering wheel, careening us around a minivan.

I looked back and saw flashing blue and red lights closing in on us. It was a police car, slowly gaining on us. And then I heard the wailing of the siren. "Shit, shit, shit." I said. "The cops." The full impact of our predicament hit me. "Slow down."

"I can’t."

"Why the hell not?"

"I got drugs in the glove compartment." Shit! This was not what I wanted to hear. We were doing 160, maybe on fire, a police car chasing us, and Tilson had drugs in the car.

"How much?"

"More than recreational . . ." His voice broke and he was sweating.

We blasted by a dump truck as if he were standing still, coming upon flashing red and blue. We were bracketed, police in front, police in the back. "Shit, shit, shit . . ." we chorused. Finally Tilson allowed the car to slow as he edged to the side. The police cars closed in, and the cop in front motioned us to pull over. Tilson eased onto the shoulder, praying under his breath, "Please don’t look in the glovebox . . . and not in the trunk. . . " For Christ’s sake what was in the trunk?

As we ground to a stop, spraying gravel, real smoke was coming through the vent, and I was fumbling with my seat belt. It was stuck and my panicked fingers could not release it. The cop ahead got out and approached us with his gun drawn and pointed at us. The cop behind likewise. The wailing of the sirens was still shredding the air, and I could not think. Somehow I rolled out of the car into the ditch. The next thing I knew, Tilson was helping me to my feet, and the two of us were standing there like plucked chickens, hands in the air, with two automatics covering us.

The car was smoking and I could hear Tilson cheering it on. "Burn baby, burn. Please, please, please. . . " Of course, he was ready to sacrifice the car if that would get rid of the incriminating evidence. But no such luck. Smoke was still rising but no flames.

"On the ground," the nearest cop barked at us. "Lie flat on the ground. NOW!" In one hand he had his Glock, in the other a Taser, both aimed at us.

This can’t be real, I told myself, as I threw myself on the ground. Tilsen did not and he was tasered. With arms flailing and legs jerking he collapsed like a wet rag.

"Hands behind your neck." the nearest cop commanded, "Lace the fingers. . ."

I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed. "This can’t be happening. Just can’t. . ."

And it wasn’t. I opened my eyes and found myself in bed, napping at midday. "Shit, it was all a dream," I said, as huge relief washed through me. I was sweating from fright, from the sudden save. All a dream.

Not quite, there WAS smoke in the air, the smell of burning. Ever since chemo I can hardly smell anything but I could smell this. I snapped upright. "Was the house burning?" I rushed into the hallway-- nothing; up the stairs--nothing. Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the mudroom.

"What the hell?" I looked south through the window--nothing. Ran to the north side and saw smoke flowing through the trees, driven by a sharp westerly wind. My God, sixty yards away the cottage was on fire. My heart hammering I ran outdoors and up the driveway toward the place. Grey smoke swirled around and over the one story wooden structure. My son and his girlfriend just moved in, their stuff all over the place. Neither was home and it was all burning. I saw no flames, but smoke as I pushed into the swirl of it. I looked through the glass, no flames inside. I ripped open the door, pushed inside. No smoke--so it was not the cottage, but then what was it?

I went outside and tracked the smoke upwind. It could only be coming from the neighbouring farm property; something was burning there. They had just completed a new house there last year and moved in. Hope it wasn’t the house. But the smoke was light grey, not black from burning plastics and modern building materials. It must be the old barn, a wooden, sun-bleached structure from the turn of the previous century. Thank God, there were no animals, as the farmer grew only corn and grains.

Then I heard the sirens up on the concession road. Just like in my dream. It cast me back into the same dread.

I ran into the house and yelled upstairs, "Melanie, the neighbour is on fire. I’m going to take a look."

I ran for the Jeep, jumped inside and was hurtling up my driveway to the concession road.

Looking west, I saw a police car blocking the road, its light flashing just as in my dream. I pulled next to him and walked up to his window.

"Don’t go up there." he said officiously. "The firemarshall asked us to keep people away."

"What is burning?" I asked. "The house or the barn?" I peered toward the place, but the trees and bushes along the fence line blocked my view.

"The old barn."

Up the road, a firetruck pulled out and headed toward Middletown. A tanker truck, going for more water, I reasoned. In the other direction a line of cars were forming, as the curious were coming to see what was going on, but the police blocked the road, so after staring at the trees for a few minutes they left reluctantly. Another police car arrived and the two cruisers were parked nose to tail while the drivers talked over the situation. With nothing to see, I decided to return home as well.

Just as I was pulling up to the cottage, Melanie was emerging from the smoke. She backtracked the flow across the field to the fence line and reported that she saw flames consuming the old barn. Luckily there were no animals inside, and no expensive farm equipment, otherwise the smoke would be darker and smelly.

The wind was still brisk and forced the smoke to flow along the ground due east, the cottage directly in its path. No wonder I thought at first that the cottage was burning.

I called my younger son on the cell, who was who-knew-where, and told him about the fire. He had already heard all the details. I asked him to text his older brother, to let him know that it was the neighbour, not us, burning and that his stuff was safe. I was glad I had been home, as it would have given me a heart attack, seeing smoke rise in to the sky near my place.

Later, I drove by the neighbour. Fire trucks were still on the scene, dousing what was left of the barn while an industrial-size backhoe was dismantling what little yet remained. A line of cars were cruising along the concession checking out the aftermath.

Over coffee, Melanie and I talked-out the event, bleeding it of anxiety. Inside my head I was still arguing with myself what was worse, emotionally, being arrested for possession after a high-speed chase or the shock of believing the cottage was on fire. The dream or the reality?

Paul Tee

In my garden of delights.

For the hundredth time I dragged myself through Travis, the story of my somewhat psychic hero, still finding errors. Very discouraging. There are still typos, despite the fact that my wife and I have been over this work with a magnifying glass. These are not just guerrilla punctuation hiding in the folds of a sentence, these are bonafida errors. Things like hose instead of house, hat instead of heat. I can’t believe my eyes just jump over such obvious mistakes. And it’s beyond me how they escaped the eagle eyes of my wife with an almost supernatural sense of right and wrong.

I developed a number of theories to explain the unexplainable. Aliens, YES aliens, insert these just to keep us off balance, sapping our moral, before they launch their "final conflict." This became clear to me during a SciFi movie on TV last night.

Another hypothesis centers around the inherent self-determination of any length of text to undergo spontaneous mutation. Hence house can easily become hose, and heat transmute into hat. Why then, you may well ask, does not house produce an equally likely fouse? A reasonable question that aims at the natural selection criteria, the survival of the fittest. Only those mutation that can fool the Spellcheck have any chance of success. Any maladaptive alteration would be instantly recognized and obliterated. Successful errors try to mimic righteous text.

A further theory would cast the phenomenon into a more organic context. Like weeds, these errors insinuate themselves into the lines, disguised as other beneficial words. I once had an acquaintance--a confirmed urbanite, who had just moved from a high-rise into a house, and who was experimenting with horticulture for the first time--point out with great pride a robust plant growing in her flowerbed. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was nurturing a thistle that would grow to seven feet and attack any passerby with barbed implements. Agreed, that was an overdrawn example, but successful weeds are able to mimic more desirable varieties. And so it is that house turns into hose (or even horse) and heat into hat. The eye jumps over the minor variation. Expectations fill in the gaps.

So I have to constantly tend my garden of words. Painstakingly riding shotgun among the rows, patrolling the pages, annihilating any aberration. Watch out for that predatory quotation mark, laying false claim to a line of text, they do not belong--at least not there. Be on the lookout for derivatives, such as spun off by, say, cat; bat, cab, car, eat, fat, hat, mat, rat, sat, tat, vat... and so on. Be on your guard for a shift of emphasis, such that would transmute slower into a shower; read into red, or sad into sled. And my personal nemesis, text that slips from the past into the present and back again. Believe me publishers don’t want to go back to the future past.

The permutations are mind boggling. Add to this phenomenon the ability of technology to propagate errors at an incredible speed. Say for example, during a long editing session you want to change a misspelled feat to feet, and unleash the change function to make the conversion, not realizing that inadvertently all eat’s are changed to eet’s. Later one wonders where the hell did cheet, beet, cleet, meet, and ... sleet came from.

Alas, what does it all add up to? Sadly it seems I have to go through once again and again ... working in my garden.

The Pond

(again from a work in progress, The Beaver Diaries)

I could never find the headwaters of the flow that feeds the pond. A large steel pipe protrudes from the bank of the concession road, disgorging its contents. In spring the flow is an angry rush that comes shooting out of the pipe but by midsummer it is reduced to a lazy stream. I suppose it drains the fields of the vegetable farm to the north, but I could discover no trace of it.

From the road the land drops steeply into the ravine, and the water falls from the tube the last 5 feet into a splash hole. From there it heads south, carving a meandering course through the soft alluvial sediment held together by tall grass and shrubs. Eighty feet in, it turns east through a hedge of pines to come upon the access lane from the side. A quick thaw, a sudden downpour adding to the runoff from the hillsides, dramatically increases the volume and energy of the creek that rushes head on at the access lane. Brown with silt, the swollen stream tries to squeeze through the two pipes buried under the laneway, but at times the overflow crests the bank and floods the road surface. On the other side, it quickly descends a good ten feet to join up with the pond an easy stone’s throw further on.

The rush gentles, and like a cloud, the silt spreads through the becalmed volume of standing water. 90 feet on the far side, the water finds a spillway over an earthen dam and tumbles 10 more feet, to lose itself under the tangle of branches and roots of water-loving shrubs. Heading due east still, it traverses the short distance to cross under the link wire fence to empty into an even larger artificial lake on the neighbouring property.

Actually, the pond was not always there. When my parents bought the 50 acres back in the late 70’s, all this was a swamp of reed infested soft muck, but no open water. It would flood with the season and drain to feed the lake next door.

My father had the middle of this wetness dredged, uncovering a number of springs below that doubled the inflow. At its largest, the resulting pond extended about 90 feet with maybe 25 at its widest. On the far end an earth dam held the water captive, the overflow finding its way over it to collect 10 feet below and continue eastward.

In its infancy, the pond was 14 feet at the deep end, the water refreshingly cool and clear, excellent for swimming. I spent many hours drifting about wedged into a truck inner tube, just tracking the clouds above, afterward sunning myself in the lush grass of the bank.

With rains and floods over the many years, the pond gradually silted up, with a deposit of pure clay washed out of the surrounding soil. Treading a way through this was sheer sensual pleasure, of silky smoothness caressing one’s flesh. During one bush party thrown by renters (of the cottage) I came across a couple making love, half in, half out of the water, plastered by this clay. I quietly withdrew but I always wondered afterward how that enhanced the experience.

With time the whole ecosystem transformed itself. Now sedge, water lilies and pond weed proliferate in the shallow end, overlooked by tall cane that wedged itself into the soft muck, giving shelter to varieties of frogs and aquatic insects. Tadpoles swim confidently among the stalks, silver sides of minnows flash as they dart away from any shadow and long-legged water bugs skim on the surface. A tribe of frogs moved in, and loudly advertise their presence.

In the dry season, when the water recedes a little, a strip of mud is uncovered, in which all the visitors leave their calling cards. The hoof prints of deer sink deep into the black muck when they drink in the morning; racoons leave their paw prints, as do possums, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks and an occasional muskrat just passing through. Like hieroglyphs, the claw marks of birds are everywhere: webbed for the more aquatic, sharp and deep for the ones used to clasping branches and twigs. A rare sighting are the peculiar s-marks of a snake winding its way across the moist flat. But the high summer sun soon bakes the exposed mud into a hard crust that cracks as it shrinks.

Most times, the air is filled with swarms of insects. Mosquitoes, midges, dragonflies, damselflies, deerflies and the seasonal mayflies. Birds swoop into the clouds of them. Butterflies give a flash of colour, opening and closing their wings in display. Bees visit the plants, bumblebees drone about loudly. The sharp buzz of a dragonfly fades in and out. An army of grasshoppers pop in and out of the sweet grass and the wild rye, bouncing off the unwary visitor trying to push through the waist high tangle. Preying mantises cling to stalks, sharp toothed bugs chew on the broad leaves. Spider webs span twigs and stalks, the host patiently awaiting visitors. A ladybug climbs to the top. Aphids scurry about and beetles browse the bark of a solitary elm.

On higher elevations, ant hill mounds raise themselves amidst the grass and wild strawberries. Moss and lichen cling to the few rocks poking through the soil. Animal trails cut through the vegetation, and matted down grass shows where deer have spent the night. A fox family dug a den into the hillside, unearthing a weep of yellow soil. The hole is abandoned now, though field rats move in from time to time.

From somewhere a willow mysteriously found a home on one bank and grew to majestic size, trailing its switches in the water below. On the other side sumacs multiplied, claiming more territory from year to year. Farther off pine and poplars crowd each other. A few Tamaracks, ash, alder and ghostly birches insinuated themselves into the press. On the property line a magnificent American beech spreads its limbs and branches to shelter a few ferns. In one corner, pussy willows thrive. Holly, blueberry, dogwood bushes fill in the rest. Swamp milkweed add a spray of rose-purple to the colour spectrum. South of the pond, a profusion of cattails, bulrushes and horsetails hide an alternate water course that drains the bypass overflow. In autumn the place is taken over by goldenrod as contrast to the crimson glow of the sumacs. Cattail seed heads shed their silky white strands.

Canada geese are regular visitors, especially at migration times. They collect on an open field to feed, but come to take a drink or bathe and preen themselves. It is a rush to see their take off, the short run, the powerful strokes, the white line they draw on the surface. As well a host of mallard ducks and an occasional heron put in an appearance.

The trees are full of nests, best seen in winter among the bare branches. Red winged blackbirds flash by, bluejays chatter noisily. Robins, cardinals, killdeer, orioles and goldfinch find shelter among the pines. A sandpiper patrols the flats; a woodpecker hammers at the trunk of a dead tree. Crows wheel about, having spotted some opportunity on the ground. An owl is perched on a high branch, scanning for movement in the view. An occasional hawk also shows an interest, circling lazily above. In the evening dusk, barely visible, bats flit by, hunting moths.

The focus of the site is the view of open water that mirrors the mood of the sky. The breeze rustles the leaves, ruffles the surface, making the sun dance on the ripples. A dry leaf sails like a boat back and forth until caught by the press of reeds near shore. Sometimes the pond broods under a cloud, waiting for the rain to start. The depth is often hidden by reflections of trees leaning out over the water, the lilies sunning on top. The dark bottom absorbs the light, blind to what goes on above. Frogs jump in to disturb the surface even more.

In ten years, the water washed itself a lower spillway over the dam, the water level dropped 4 feet and the bottom rose to a mere three feet and biology took over completely. The underground springs silted up, reducing the inflow. A scum of algae accumulated on top, pushed around by variable winds. In the shallows, reeds became thicker, and an eruption of cattails crowded the banks. Every step stirred up a stink of rot and slime. The insect population exploded. The geese came less frequently though the ducks were less choosy about the cleanliness. The deer still came to drink at night, and there were prints of racoons in the mud where they hunted for frogs.

By slow degrees, the picturesque paradise open to the sun and the sky, reverted to its primordial origins. It was shrinking, closing in. Less and less of it was visible from the road as a curtain of bushes screened off the view. Tall grass now hides the path we once walked to enjoy the swimming hole. Clouds of insects swarm in the air where we had sunbathed between refreshing dips. From a civilized park it had become a regenerating conservation area, surrendering to nature.

Still it remains a cross road. Trails of animals converge on it and radiate out in all directions. It is not unusual to catch a whiff of a skunk and have time to retreat from an encounter. Coyotes regularly pause to look over the place, seeking targets of opportunity. Sometimes wild turkeys gobbling in the undergrowth, heading to grouse in the higher fields. Voles and moles make their burrows in the lee of some shelter.

In winter the pond freezes over, a little thinner where the inflow eats away at the underside of the ice. Snow accumulates on top, showing the track of every inhabitant. I read the prints and from time to time take a census. There is a feral feline that regularly passes through; it is a mystery how she survives the rigours of winter. Prints of a neighbouring dog document his explorations. The symmetric marks of a rabbit are easily recognizable. Then a mouse track hardly visible as it scurries its light weight over the sun-hardened crust.

Infrequently a splash of red soaks into the snow, where a poor creature has found its end, victim of a predator. An owl preens itself in the crown of a tree; it can hear the mice in their tunnels dug into the snow. The pond is an epicentre of activity, attracting creatures large and smell. Not least, humans come to visit. And why not, it is one of the most recognized feature on the 50 acres. "I’ll meet you at the pond;" no one will get lost.