SUMMER METAMORPHOSIS

And now, for something completely different. We’ll be caravanning across Canada this summer.

Granville the dog, OrangePekoe the cat, and us travelling in our 6.5 metre caravan. Camping spots are booked in national and provincial parks across the country. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, because sometimes we will stop to visit family and friends, and we are hopeful that some family and friends will find us at our camping spots along the way.

We leave on July 1st, Canada Day. It’s a classic Canadian road trip, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, eight provinces in about as many weeks, a bit rushed but still.... And with a complete change at the far end of the trip.

I’ll post snapshots from along the way - on Facebook, and on a Blog.

What brought about this trip?  We had planned to caravan west across Canada, taking a couple of summers to complete the trip (no fun caravanning during a Canadian winter).  This summer we'd planned to travel just about half way across the country.  Then next summer we'd continue to the west coast.  It has all been truncated to happen this summer.

Why?

Sometimes life throws us a sweet curveball.  

At the end of April I signed a contract for an interesting job in British Columbia. It'll mean a couple of years in Wuikinuxv, a village in a remote part of the BC Central Coast area, north of Port Hardy but south of Bella Bella.  It's a fly-in community, with a supply barge every couple or three weeks, depending on weather.  

We were flown out for a recce, and both of us loved the environment (an iconic Canadian landscape of mountains rising straight out of the water). We enjoyed the people we met, and the job is just enough of a challenge to be fun, but not so much as to be daunting.  

Nigel plans to fish a lot, and generally putter around. That's pretty much what he does now; well here he plays golf.

So - changes are happening.  Change is good.  Both of us like to see what's over the horizon, and experience new places. We'll have it right here in our own country. Perfect!

SPRING FLOWERS

This has been a damp spring. The flora are enjoying their long, tall drink.  Here is a small sampling of what is readily visible up our road this week:

Our second magnolia tree is blooming.  I have no details about this tree except it was a much appreciated gift from colleagues when I left the school where I had worked for several years.  

It has gorgeous, fairly large, yellow flowers that shyly bloom after the more flamboyant magnolia has finished showing off. 

We have a couple of these shrubs in the yard. Both were purchased at end-of-season sales. The label has long since disappeared, and because I am generally haphazard with garden records, I have no idea what it is.  I love the small, pink blossoms, and the purple leaves.  
It might well be a sand cherry, but who's to say. At the end of the day, it's all about giving beauty and pleasure.

A few years ago, Nigel stuck a stick in the ground to hold some string at the edge of one of the vegetable gardens. That stick decided to grow. To our delight, it is now a small apple tree, with those beautiful flowers on display at this time of year. 

One of my favourite spring-time sights is the carpet of blue forget-me-nots sprinkled with bright yellow dandelions found along the road verge.  This is such a cheerful colour combination that a viewer can only smile with pleasure.

Of course, dandelions are not always welcome spring flowers, because they seem to take over the more usual, ornamental gardens. However, apparently they help nourish bees when there is little else available for them. If you like the bitter taste of the leaves, dandelions help nourish us as well. 

And finally one of the iconic spring flowers in the Maritimes - lilac shrubs make a beautiful display with their mauve flowers complementing the green foliage.

The white lilacs are pretty, but somehow not the visible flower that we see on the mauve variety.

Very suddenly, the soft, gentle splashes of nature's palette will disappear as spring turns into summer. The road will be green, and the colours will be concentrated in the few garden beds in the yards. It will be beautiful, but in a green monochrome, restful for the eyes, and requiring long, lazy days to enjoy the subtle variations in the landscape.  That's next season.

FAIR ISLE

 A trip down memory lane. 

 

After far too many years absence, I  have returned     for a short visit to my ancestral isle. 

My distant cousins have been as warm and welcoming as ever.

The familiar landscape has,  once again, endeared itself,  imprinted indelibly on my heart and soul. 

 

I have wandered along the cliff edges of  memories,

visited old haunts, 

and spend many long minutes with beloved persons. 

  

There have been so many aspects of the past fortnight during which I felt like I'd cam heem. 

END OF AUTUMN

The poignant end of autumn's beauty lingers in the roadside palette. 

Rain soaked leaves vibrate with their remaining colour,  

dribbling and dropping splashes from an artist's palette, 

until there is a 'Jackson Pollack' style painting on the road's dark canvas. 

Brown, the quintessential colour of age and decay dominates now.  

Leaves, once colourful, have shrivelled and fluttered in despair to the ground. They lie sadly in puddles or ruffled to the side of the road where, with other aged leaves,  they rim the road with a strip of multi-hued brown.

Red, the colour associated with this season, no longer brightens the trees. Faded red leaves can be found on the road verge, adding a dull tone to the predominant browns. 

Occasionally a bright sparkle catches our eye, and leads to a smile on our lips as we remember the array of colours on the trees just days earlier.

Yellow  lingers the longest.  It creates a visual display of tints and shades  ranging from the saturated chrome yellow to the palest straw yellow. Yellow reminds us of the warm sun of summer that during autumn fades gently into the bright chill of winter.

This year we have enjoyed a determinedly pedestrian autumn. 

 It is November, and  the weather remains pleasant,   Swatches of colour remain on some trees and bushes,  and speckles the road. 

A long autumn, like this, is a joy and a blessing. It's a time to be thankful for our warmer seasons, and gives us time to prepare for our cold season.  In the midst of it, we can enjoy a multi-hued landscape.

AUTUMN COLOURS

  

Autumn, a time of transition from the growth of summer to the hibernation of winter. 

In autumn, the landscape is transformed into a blaze of colour, 

a celebration of what was glorious growth, commemorated by fireworks exploding on the hills, 

in the ditches,and across the fields of Atlantic Canada. It is a celebration of the last vestiges of growth, the varigated colours indicate the variety of trees in the landscape. 

The palette can be breathtaking.

This year the autumn colours have been vivid with red and orange.

Every year the autumn colour combination is different, unique to that year. 

Some years tints and shades of yellow dominate the scenery,   sometimes there is plenty of ochre,   and umber 

and some years there is a riot of red and crimson.  

The reds shades are quintessentially Canadian, the official colour of our nation. 

During an autumn such as this one, it is easy to understand why that colour was chosen as our colour of nationhood – the liveliness of the colour on the hills is just the vibrancy that our fathers of confederation would have been looking for in the citizens of this country.

That sense of colour certainly exhibits itself during the autumn, not just on the hills and dales, but in the chest-swelling appreciation of the beauty of this season. 

Canadians, for the most part, love autumn.   

We love the colour and the vibrancy. 

We love the last tango with warm weather. 

We love the crisp evenings that we know, scientifically, are necessary to create the colourful palette we see around us. 

We love the full glory of the apple harvest,   when rows of green trees have globes of red hanging from their branches, red in various permutations, from solid red to speckled gold or green apples. The sweetness of the apples sustains us during the winter, reminding us of the pending spring and summer, of the cycle of the seasons, and giving us hope for another fruitful autumn, months hence.

Autumn, a time of change and transition, a time of remembrance and hope, a time of preparation for the chill and cold of the frozen months ahead, a time to feast and enjoy the repasts of our recently harvested crops while putting some aside to feed ourselves for winter. It is a season to remind us to plan, for now, for the near future and for the future years. Caring for an apple tree today will yield fruit for years ahead, preparing and clearing the garden today will ensure that the soil is productive for another year.  Sitting on the porch, with the cool wind breathing down our necks startles us into realising the the precedence of winter winds, and nostalgically remembering the warmth of the summer breeze, which has recently wafted elsewhere.

For now, the transition is gentle and welcome with its array of primary colours and the celebration of the tasty products of the warm summer. Let us revel in the colours of autumn, which are our last sweet snippets of the softness of summer.