“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—-not fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
                                                                                                Henry Thoreau, "Walden"

This is blog number twenty-five and I’m still trucking along. Even though I was warned by a friend to be careful that I don’t write myself out and have nothing to contribute to my other writing tasks. Maybe that’s why I only write a blog approximately every two weeks.

However, this blog might be a little early. Maybe. Because we are going to a cottage on Antigonish Bay for a week and I might not get to do any blogging there.

Anyway, I have a little story for you. If I were going to give it a title I’d call it, ‘GETTING A NEW STOVE’. And I’ll juice up the story by adding this little tantalizer: Boy, oh boy, was Sue ever glad to be getting rid of our old stove. Which only had two working burners. Because I had removed two fuses. Because we couldn’t turn one burner off. And when we removed that burner's fuse, we found out that the other burner had suddenly decided to jump ship and be a copycat. So, out came two fuses.

I’ll start by saying we always have mice to contend with. There are lots of mouse stories, like this one from a few nights ago. That particular night I went to bed. Which I do pretty well every night except long ago when I was younger.

I opened the closet door to put away an item of clothing. I’d tell you what the item was but I don’t remember. However, on this night, I was greeted by a foul odour. A something-decomposing odour.  And this jarred my memory.

“Yes, now I remember, at some point in time, I had placed a loaded mouse trap in the closet. Because one night we had heard plenty of activity going on in there.” 
So, I rummaged through the shoes and whatnots and there was the trap and the mouse.

Yeck. I picked the trap up and carried it outside. Where I dumped the mouse. Which I knew would be a healthy breakfast for our young crow family. Then I sprayed a nice-smelling spray into the closet.

A few days later we went to North Sydney and bought a cooking stove. It was to be delivered the next day.

The next day, while we were waiting for the new stove, while I was outside painting the trailer, and Sue was preparing the old stove for removal, I heard Sue shout, “Guess what I found?”

God, I hate it when I hear Sue shout, “GUESS WHAT I FOUND?”

Guess what Sue had found? She had found, with her little eyes, a well-roasted mouse in the oven. How long had it been there? Had we, when we chowed down on the last roast chicken, actually been consuming roast chicken à la smoked mouse?

And that’s why Sue was never so glad in her whole life to get rid of a stove and the memories that went with it.

Well, I now have my new K50 Pentax camera. So, for the rest of this blog I will just post some pictures I took with the camera. I hope you’ll enjoy this pictorial journey around parts of Cape Breton.

For the first order of business, I’d like to mention that I’m buying a new camera. Why? Because my present camera is refusing to work.

There have been lots of other times when it went on strike. I’ve never given up on it and I’ve always gone to the trouble and expense of getting the scalawag repaired. But this time, nope, it’s over. I’ve had it up to my tonsils with its toxic, superior attitude.

You see, it’s not so much that it won’t work but that it goes all stubborn. Which is after I ask it to snap a picture of moi.  

The final straw was last week. I was at my beautiful meditation place located at our babbling river’s side in the Middle River Wilderness area. Where magnificent mountains stand tall and the forest huddles up close and intimate like a big protective, green blankie.

I wanted to take a picture of myself in this gorgeous setting. So, I set my camera on top of a fallen log, put the camera on timer, then ran like hell to get in position. When I was in the right spot, I stood in front of the camera’s blinking eye with a big “say-cheese” smile on my face while I waited for the camera’s shutter to say, “click”. Which it did. Like it was supposed to. And I did get one picture of me. 

But later, it snapped a few shutter clicks and then it stopped working. Three times it’s done this, and yes, I’ve always taken it personally. Maybe I’m one of those writers with a big ego, but as before, I took it personally and this time I was ready to say, “Good-bye, old camera. Hello, new camera”.    
 
Maybe, when I get the new camera, I’ll take some pictures of places and things we pass when Buddy Lee and I are on one of our cycling trips. Buddy Lee never lets me down. Good boy. Pat, pat.

Last Sunday, Sue and I had a night in hell. Oh lordy, lordy. Hell.

You see, we had workers come to our trailer to install new doors. They got the front door almost done except it’s missing a suitable knob. At the moment it has an unsuitable knob. Who knew that doors that cost a lot of money don’t come with their own knobs? So we had the old doorknob put in the new door and we sealed it with tape to stop the outdoors from getting in and the indoors from getting out. 

Anyway, the workers arrived on a cloudy Sunday afternoon. Two men and a woman. They were also going to put up a new gutter and replace a piece of floor board in the kitchen. It got soft after we had a leaky pipe. We had placed a chunk of plywood over the soft place, as it’s right in front of the sink. Sue put some nice wallpaper or whatever you call it over the board. Which covered up my red coloured smiley face, but hey, I think her design idea was better.

So the workers came with their tools and enthusiasm and began work on the front door. The sun came out and the wind, which had been blowing fairly briskly, settled down to a whimper. What with the sun warming things up and the wind dying down, the area became a vacation getaway for mosquitoes and black flies.

The door installers worked on our door from about two pm to about seven pm. Once the door was in they replaced the floor board and then headed home. These hard, steady, capable and careful workers will return later to replace the screen door and the gutter.

You may wonder why it took so long. Well, one reason was that the guy who sold us the door didn’t read the instructions very carefully. The instructions that the tradesman gave us to show to him. Another reason is that Sue and I don’t have a sweet clue about doors and so while it said the door should be 36 inches wide there were some extra bits in the description that would not have gotten us a 36 inch door but a smaller one. But that was okay because it meant they had to make the door space larger which meant that they had to remove all the dry rot they found there. Which was there because we didn’t have a proper gutter in the first place. See a pattern forming?

Anyway, when they were finished, they left us with words similar to ones we’ve heard from so many workers who come to our trailer. Discouraging words too often heard. You have dry rot. Your roof will leak in a few years if you don’t do something. Copper piping can give you all kinds of trouble. Do you have a boat in case of floods? Who picked the pink paint for the kitchen? Those sorts of things.

The workers, bless their hearts, left us with a new door and a new floor board and about one zillion #$%^&*()   mosquitoes. Because the door had been open so long, no matter how many we struck down, flattened or killed in mid-air, they just kept dive-bombing us until the sun was high in the sky. Not the sun we said good-night to but the sun that came the next morning. I’m assuming it is the same sun that left us on Sunday evening, but who knows, after the night we had?

I hate mosquitoes anyway. I tried to sleep, but I kept hearing the irritating whine of mosquitoes or feeling the prick of their probing proboscis. So I jumped out of bed with hate in my heart and went into the living room. I wore shorts. This was my bait. I turned on the television, snapped on the lamp and with fly swatter in hand began to slaughter the buggers. I battled as ferociously as any warrior would be expected to. However, they never stopped. There were dead mosquitoes everywhere. On my legs, my tee shirt, the couch, the floor and the walls and ceiling. Blood and squashed mosquito meat.

The only consolation is that I learned on the TV that God has a financial plan for me, where to buy books about the End Times, how to cube up cucumbers, why this pope is the End Time Pope and I watched a woman have a talk about sex with five gay fellas and gathered lots of other info I will need to know as I head towards my eternal resting place.

Finally, I had to retreat. I knew I couldn’t sleep so I went to my office. I stood in the middle of my tiny office and looked at my computer, my CD player, my lamp, my candle, my pens and pencils, my stapler and all the other objects that are part of my writing world.

Then I drew a line on the floor with my big toe and said, “All of you who are willing to stay and fight, cross this line. If you don’t cross my toe line I won’t hold it against you.”

They all crossed the line. Right down to the tiniest pencil stub. I’m proud of them all.   We hung in tough until after two am when finally it was just too much, so we surrendered the office and I retreated to my bed.

What to do? What to do? I could hear the whining sounds coming from everywhere. Well, what I did do, was first of all dig around in the closet and drag out my hiking knapsack. Inside the knapsack is a bug mesh I sometimes wear when I’m hiking. I slipped it on, lay me down to sleep and didn’t. But instead listened, bug-eyed, to the incoming hordes. The mesh was holding them back, but it got so stuffy. I could hardly breathe with the screening in front of my nose. So, I got up again, and found a bottle of Vicks. I stuffed the Vicks up my nose. Which gave me the cool self-hypnotic sensation that I was breathing freely. Even though another part of me knew I wasn’t.

Well, would the buggers give up? Crap no. They just kept up the irritating hum thing they do. So, I removed the mesh, got up once more and tamped tissue down into both my ears so I couldn’t hear the buggers very well.

Alas, after a terrible night, we arose from our bed around eight-thirty am. I think I got a few hours of sleep. I was surprised that Sue had slept better than I had until she told me she’d taken a sleeping pill. But that had presented problems of its own. Mainly that it had presented many more dining opportunities for the little critters.

The first thing I did when I got out of bed was take a shower. Well not the first thing. The first thing was to check the mouse traps. I tossed one dead mouse out for the waiting crows to breakfast on. Then I showered while Sue began the fun job of cleaning the blood and dead bodies from the walls. It was carnage. Absolute carnage.

Later that day we went to the hardware store and bought a large can of bug killer. We returned, doused the trailer with spray and then left for a few hours.

That day we both discovered the same thing. We had red marks all over our feet. Sue’s left foot and my right foot. Which meant that I had slept with my right leg outside the blankets and Sue had hung her left leg outside the blankets. Which had presented the little vampires with the opportunity to sup freely. I like to think of it as their very last supper.

Anyway, we have new doors, and we recently bought new knobs. Last year we put a bunch of new windows in our living room. Which means, according to the various tradesfolk who periodically have to visit our trailer, that we will, sometime in the next few years, have five windows and two new doors standing proudly in a pile of wood and metal trailer rubble.

Amen and so be it.

(Note: Apologies for the dearth of pictures on this post, but Weebly won't let us upload images this week for some reason. )

“When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

     Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

What a whack of snow we’ve been getting! I haven’t been able to park my snow blower since last Thursday. Today is Thursday, which makes it over a week and I will have to use it again today. Even though I was out in the blizzard last night freezing my organs off.

We know we’re living in an out-of-the-way place when the weather forecasters tell us that a big storm is coming and that we’re now experiencing the quiet before the storm. What friggen quiet? Is there such as thing as a storm in a storm?

You see, Cape Breton is stuffed full of micro-climates and these days my muscles are threatening to bring out the guillotine and start chop-chop-chopping off the cloudy-headed mini weather pattern’s barometers unless they cease and desist.

A couple of weeks ago we were hit with hurricane force winds and rain. So the snow left over from a previous storm began melting away and pouring its juices into the river. The winds and the flood waters took at least another six trees down. Two fallen trees also blocked our lane. Out came the chain saw.
Test question: what’s one of the main differences between a maple tree and a spruce tree? Answer: the maple tree is a deciduous tree and the spruce tree is a coniferous tree. Deciduous trees are hardwood. Coniferous trees are softwood.

See, I know the answer. So why didn’t I think about this piece of info when the chain saw was cutting and zooming merrily through the spruce tree? Why didn’t I recognize that a maple tree is a different kettle of corn? Because it is “harder”. So why did I stupidly not bother to make an undercut beneath the incision I’d inflicted on the top of said maple trunk? Which led to the maple tree putting a death grip on my chain saw’s guide bar and chain. My excuse is that I was in a post-flood-plus mice-piss-in-snow-blower-foul mood. Anyway, I used an axe to get the tree to let go while I tried to shout over the river’s incessant babbling, “Let go, you basket!”

The next day, I was in a small engine shop, where I had the nice mechanic put a brand new guide bar on my chain saw. And after I paid him and was heading for the door, so I could get home and wreck another piece of equipment, I heard the mechanic say, and I quote: “There’s another one here with your name on it.” Good to know. Har, har, har.

We live in a forty-five foot trailer. It falls a tad short of being a palace. Yet when I got up one morning, (as I usually do, thank goodness), and peered out of our bedroom window, I witnessed a beautiful sunny day. I then hitch-hiked to the front of the trailer, where our living room resides, put some wood into the wood stove, started the fire and when I turned around to look out the living room window, guess what? It was pooping snow. I kid you not.

However, there are positives. For one, I don’t need to go to a gym to keep fit. Here’s another negative turned into a positive. Our road is one of the last roads to be ploughed. Do you know what that means, aside from our being trapped? It means it’s a perfect surface for me to ski on. Up to the mountains, through a gorgeous grove of snow-laden birch, spruce and fir. Until the snow plough arrives.

A few weeks ago we were in the city, where we were enjoying its attractions. Pubs, taxis, libraries, movies, stores, malls, people, cars, more people and cars and noise and restaurants and buses and noise and smoke and fumes and a part of me was loving all the stimulation and conveniences. But the other part of me soon began to give me the elbow and clear its throat and nudge, nudge and it didn’t take me long to get the message. I was missing the quiet, the fresh air, the quiet, the animal sounds, the cawing, my snow blower farting its way down our long lane, the quiet, no exhaust fumes and nights with bona fide darkness. Where we can really see the stars when the clouds aren’t dragging their asses across the firmament.

I have a theory. Like most of my theories, it’s probably rife with error but here it is. I think that people become slightly neurotic when they are in an environment of constant stimulation. Maybe their brains close up a bit so they won’t become overwhelmed by the excitement and the constant exposure to others.

David Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I’d also like to throw this quote out, seeing I’m in a quoting mood: ”Ah,” exclaimed the old man, “such is the strange philosophy of the white man! He hews down the forest that has stood for centuries in its pride and grandeur, tears up the bosom of Mother Earth, and causes the silvery watercourses to waste and vanish away. He ruthlessly disfigures God’s own pictures and monuments, and then daubs a flat surface with many colours, and praises his work as a masterpiece.”

Who needs wilderness nowadays?  Don’t we have the virtual world? Don’t we have poorhouses?

Couldn’t resist.

Here comes another quote, except this time it’s a writing quote by Sydney Cox, taken from his wonderful book titled, “Indirections for Those Who Want to Write”.

 “When you tell a story or write a poem, it is from your point of view that you select, reject, arrange, make form. The thing you write about must interest you wholly, must seem so vital that you accept no current or approved view of any item of it, but look at every constituent from your point of view...”

And maybe that’s what we’re doing. We’re living life from our point of view. Creating, just like somebody created a Walmart or a Costco. Creating something different is what makes a life or a story or a poem vital. Our story.

Hang on, one more quote from Sydney Cox: ”You can hardly fail to notice that the writers who most delight and challenge you do not look at anything from quite the angle that any of the broad terms designate.”

A brief mention of my friend and bicycle, Buddy Lee. He is miffed. Ticked off. Because he was evicted from his wood shed apartment and put into the tool shed. Which is not convenient because it’s way back at the corner of our yard. And he is sharing his living space with the bad, destructo mice who maliciously attacked Grinder, who is now living in Buddy Lee’s old bachelor pad. I just didn’t have room for both, and I specifically told my bike that he would not enjoy living with Grinder. Not unless he likes mice pee perfume.

Next blog I might try to explore why I like to give names to such critters as my snow blower and bicycle. Have I mentioned that my truck’s name is Basque?

Have a great week.

We’re back. With a tale of two cities: Halifax, Nova Scotia and Kingston, Ontario. Whew! Busy. So different from the life we live here in Cape Breton. On the Middle River, which, believe it or not, holds our mortgage. Because if the river decided to pump itself up and become like the mighty Nile or Fraser Rivers then we’d be carried away. High rubber boots, trailer, mortgage and all.

As we were crossing the Canso Causeway, heading toward the ‘Welcome to Cape Breton’ sign, I told Sue that it felt like we were emerging from some kind of tunnel of love. Only we would call the tunnel we’d been living in, ‘The Tunnel of Noise, Chaos and Stimulation’. Mental and physical.

The city must have had a considerable effect on my partner. Because on the way home, she mentioned that she wondered where she’d stored her gun cleaning kit. Said she had this hankering to take her rifle to the shooting range to brush up on her skills. First time I’d heard her mention this.

However, only after we had arrived back at our little Cape Breton trailer did we realize just how different our life is from normal city life. I’ll tell you one of the reasons I knew. It was the story titles I was hearing from either Sue or myself.

Speaking of titles, I’ve noticed that many of the best titles that have occurred to me have come from brief statements spoken during a conversation. I think I have even recorded some of them. I just don’t know where I put the folder. Do you have that problem?

Anyway, after we got home and I’d had time to unpack and pop a cold one, I heard myself saying, “I’m not going to caw anymore.” I certainly never thought such a thing while I was watching my hat get run over and destroyed on a windy Halifax street, or when I discovered a twenty-five dollar parking ticket on my windshield. But here, back in Cape Breton, this phrase made perfect sense.

You see, I don’t think I understand crow talk. Every time a murder of crows gets cawing from trees above my head and I try to answer with my crow call, they usually flee. Cawing and croaking all the way across the land. Except for one, who remains to make sure all the crows have completely evacuated. Then he or she takes off in a flurry of caws. I have an authentic sounding caw. It’s not that, it’s just that I don’t know whether I’m cawing, “Bugger off”, “Good morning”, or “I have a hankering for roast crow”.

And it wasn’t long after I’d made this profound statement that my partner shouted through the screen door, “Would you pick up my deer teeth, please?”

Pick up a quart of milk, a loaf of bread or a case of beer, but I’d never heard anybody ask to have their deer teeth picked up. Not in the city. But out here, resting on our porch railing are a moose skull, a deer jaw, some antlers, a couple of old bottles and several rocks. So it makes perfect sense when you live here and there’s been a high wind all morning.

However, yesterday I didn’t come up with any smart titles for what I found in the tool shed. I’d wanted to get the snow blower going. Move it closer to the trailer. Unfortunately, I’d left some insulation in the tool shed. There are a lot of mice out in the world that think pink. I pulled the cover off said snow blower. A mouse leapt out. Ran for his or her life. A ball of insulation fell to the wooden floor along with mouse doo-doo, pee-pee and some other kind of pinkish coloured liquid. Which took me a minute or two to figure out. Gasoline. The little bugger had chewed the gas line and now it has to be repaired.  The title for that story: “Pass me the &%##@#&& traps, dear.”

As I stepped through the trailer door, mumbling some distinctive old English words, I smelled something shitty. The aroma seemed to be coming from my boots. I took a look. It was doggy doo. Apparently, when I’d walked to the mailbox, I’d stepped in a deposit that our neighbour’s dog likes to mail to our residence. And believe you me, we’re both pretty sure that there is a message in that soft brown envelope.

Anyway, I took the boot off, scraped most of the poop off with a stick and then ran water onto the boot from our outdoor tap.

Have to run. Sue is shouting that an animal is banging around inside our wood stove.

CAW! CAW! CAW!

Holy Helvetica font, Batman. This is my seventh blog post. So thank you to all the readers who have actually landed on my website and have taken the time to read it.

Last weekend, the Cabot Trail Writers Festival hit North River. Sue and I attended the Friday and Sunday events. Well worth it! We enjoyed the readings by authors Russell Wangersky, Carol Bruneau and Peter Robinson, their panel discussion on Sunday morning, the music of Otis Tomas, Carmel Mikol and Buddy MacDonald and all the tasty food. The fall colours were nearly in full display so the venue was about as perfect as one could wish for.

So, I got myself all educated up, by listening to excellent writers throwing out their writing wisdom and then I went home.

Last Monday, I was working on a short story. Previously, I had read an article on what judges are looking for in a good short story. I’ll give you a partial list. Here it is: The writing should be sincere, hold few generalities, pack an immediate punch, show rather than tell, be character-driven and have knock-out sentences. There are others too. Aren’t there always others?

The one point that stuck with me was the grab-the-reader idea. To fill my stories with zip - wild sex if need be. To grab the readers by the shirt collar, lift them up off their feet, stare them square in the eyes, and shout, “Read my story, damn it, or I’ll melt into a puddle of talking-head verbiage.”

So, I was sitting in my back-friendly chair, tapping away on my old, somewhere around twenty-year-old Performa 580CD MacIntosh computer. A workhorse. I was attempting to write something that had sticky plot claws and would save me from becoming another wicked witch in a meltdown. I’m not sure, but I might have even been wearing coloured striped socks, when did I not see floating by my window a scary looking woman wearing black, riding a bicycle with a little black dog in the bicycle basket? Oh, probably not, but as I shook that image away, I thought I’d stumbled upon a real zipper. Which I can’t share, because I’m still considering it. Because that’s one of the rules of writing. Don’t talk away your story before you have written it. At least it works for me.

I sometimes hit upon topics that emotionally seem to be so far outside my comfort zone that they induce guilt in me. Scare me, and having been raised in a religiously conservative tradition, I come by this feeling naturally. So, there I was, tip-tapping away, while noticing that my back was beginning to complain. I put the pain down to the damage done to my back years ago when it prevented me from being crushed by a falling, fully-loaded fridge, or to a psychosomatic reaction to writing "no-no" stuff. I adjusted my chair and kept on slogging away and suddenly the paragraph I was working on was jumping all over the computer screen. What the h---! I started banging on a few keys to make it stop. It didn’t. The wild, grab-you paragraph I was writing just leapt to another page. Then another and then back and then I was getting dizzy.

As if that weren’t bad enough, I realized that I had added about fifty blank pages to this story. I ran my fingers over the keys, hoping I could hit a key that would stop this nonsense. I’d lean forward to try another key and my paragraph would high-tail it for another page while more blank pages were being added. I started to wonder if my muse had something to do with it, but he was nowhere to be found.   I whispered, “Oh my god, I think I’ve written my way into a perverse, dangerous, spirit-filled hell-hole. Maybe I should stop writing this story and change direction.”

Then I figured it out. It was so simple. Did you see it? Remember, my back was sore. I’d readjusted my chair. The right arm of said chair was resting on the <ENTER> key on the keyboard. So simple...yet I was a little disappointed. Because, if my writing had been able to get my inanimate computer’s attention, just think what it might have done to the reader. It frightens me to think about it.

Of course, I had to clean up my chair’s interference and cut and paste to another document so I wouldn’t be saving about a hundred blank pages. Sue’s printer would not appreciate it, nor would Sue.

So, as you can see, writing is a psychologically dangerous profession. And even though I had solved the problem, I began to wonder if my chair was trying to give me a message. Not the computer, but my chair. I mean, what are the odds that my chair’s arm would be able to hit the key that would make my brilliant, Hemingway-like paragraph leap around like a jumping bean?

Thanks again for sticking with me and my blog. I hope this blog doesn’t make you nervous about the objects around you but instead gives you a good idea to use so you can grab your readers’ attention and throw them on their proverbial asses.

I know blogs aren’t supposed to be too long, because of the twitter world, but I just have to tell you that our bat is not far from us.

A few Saturdays ago, we were having new windows installed in our little ancient trailer. In preparation for this exercise, I had leaned a large piece of particle board against the woodshed and covered it with a large tarpaulin to keep it dry.

The contractor came to our door to tell us that there was a bat sleeping in the dark folds of the cover. Oh, we knew. She was back. We followed him to the board.

Yep, there was the little gal. Sleeping, and this is where it gets interesting. Sue is scared of bats. We have an understanding. I catch the bats and she catches the mice. So I found a box and tried to swipe the bat down into the box. The bat fluttered away. They do flutter like butterflies. Very interesting how they flutter and she fluttered to, you guessed it, Sue’s shoulder.

I walked around Sue, who was standing like a statue, and watched the little bat bare her teeth. They looked healthy and sharp. She seemed to like the material in Sue’s sweater.

Well, I did finally persuade the bat to drop off Sue’s shoulder into the box. Sue was the one who carried the box to the woods where she let her go. I expect to see both again.

I also must say that I was proud of Sue, who won’t let her fear of a creature get in the way of her understanding a creature. No matter how small or big it might be. 

Can’t believe it. Summer is hanging on by a few fingernails while winter is already beating his drum over the cooling night temperatures. It makes life seem as fleeting as a field full of dandelions.

But hey, we’re having an anniversary of sorts. We’ve lived in the Gold Brook Forest for a year. A whole year, listening to the whispering of the Middle River twenty-four hours a day. A relaxation tape without a machine.

Speaking of, one morning we were in the living room, listening to satellite radio. We had the nature channel on. They were playing music mixed in with the calls of birds and the sound of running water. I turned the radio off and my god, we were still listening to music, birds and running water without the radio on. We felt privileged and lucky.

But you know what? The river rules. We have little control over the river’s temperament. She can be a sleeping cat or a fighting tiger. You see, we live on a flood plain. Which means that every heavy rain or rogue hurricane that wants to dump on us can induce a flood. And with the climate changing, well, do the math. Forget the one-in- every-hundred-years storms like the one in 2010.

We’ve had two floods so far. The last one surrounded our trailer with determined, knows-where-its-going water. It gave us a few pennies of apprehension. That’s for sure. We even drove to the hardware store and bought two pairs of high, kick-ass rubber boots.

“Take that, Middle River! Make our day!”

Yeah, like they’re going to help. But we like to feel we have options. A life raft may be in our future.

After a flood, though? Exciting! It’s like when I was a kid and the fair left town. We’d be finding money and trinkets of all sorts that had fallen out of the fair-goers’ pockets. The river leaves interesting rocks, trees, pieces of docks and other interesting things when it calms down.

We get lots of other reminders that life is not really under our control. Like last night. We heard troubling sounds in the kitchen again. On further investigation we found mouse turds in different areas of the kitchen. So we got out the traps. Three of them. Loaded them with powder and peanut butter then cocked the triggers. Spread them around. We hate doing it but we do.

At one am we heard scurrying and rattling. We got out of bed. Reluctantly. I shone my flashlight around the kitchen. Spotted the little lassie. Looked like she was swimming in our butter dish. But what a shock when we realized the little critter wasn’t a mouse. She was a bat. She flew off before we could figure out what to do.

Probably the same bat we saw walking across our living room rug the other evening while we were watching TV. Walking, not flying, over the living room rug. Creepy, but the show on television was boring. What to do? What to do, seeing both of us are nervous of bats? Could be Dracula’s great, great, great---- grand-daughter.

Well, that little critter jogged across our carpet to my running shoe and took a break on the edge of said runner. I was able to gently carry the bat and shoe outside and let her go. I brought the shoe back in.

Last night we tracked the possibly same bat down. We found her hanging from the inside of our living room curtains. So we stood on the couch and cautiously and nervously removed the curtains from the window. The bat nonchalantly and not very nervously fluttered from the curtains to the curtains on the other side of the living room. Whereupon, after some deliberation, I stood on a stool, knocked the bat down and into a box with a towel and with the box covered and Sue getting the door, escorted the bat off the premises.
Then, in the wee hours of the early morning, we proceeded to bat proof our trailer. We screwed a board into the wall that covered the hot water heater, sealed the vent above the stove, taped the oil furnace cover to the wall with very red and very sticky tape and then we closed all the windows for good measure.

Afterward, we sat on the couch and watched a show about the history of Tupperware. I never knew Tupperware was so friggin interesting. Life in the forest. Can you beat it?

It was our passion for and love of nature which brought us to live in the forest rather than in town or in a place a little less remote. So we get what we get. Mice in the cupboards, birds at our feeders, tons of snow, floods, the sound of moose clomping around our trailer, humming birds trying to drink from our red truck’s key hole, minks skirting our property, a young grosbeak chirping madly into our living room window while sitting on the sill, deer eating plants in our back yard, crow babies squawking for mother to stuff more whatever down their throats, coyotes howling, owls hooting, eagles watching us, bats in our butter, bats in my shoes and all those folks who think we have bats in our belfries.

Loneliness, however, is not one of the results of living in the forest. That ladybug walking across the book I was reading is full to the brim with secrets that the scientists still aren’t close to discovering. Mystery and magic are great antidotes to loneliness and without them I find life boring, predictable, petty, enervating and lonely.

Call me crazy, which you might, but I believe societies that have no connection with the wild can yield a crop of aberrant, oblivious and wired-up citizens.

With a connection to and a consciousness of nature, societies become more whole, compassionate and alive.

Nature. Always unpredictable. In this world of rising greenhouse gases, forest destruction, water pollution, wars, false witness and species extinction, nature still lets us know that she holds the power. Keeps throwing the universal curve balls, hammers the trick slap shots and this is one of the reasons why I write about my love, reverence and respect for nature.

I leave you with a picture of my new bike standing proudly in a misty early morning on the shore of beautiful Lake O’Law. I call the bike "Buddy Lee". Can you figure?

Cheers!