It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I am quite sick, which may be a good thing since this is the first time in twenty years that I’ve had to navigate this holiday entirely on my own. 

Historically this was always such a lovely weekend because, as a childless couple, my ex husband and I were serially adopted each year by friends with lovely and convivial dinner tables who opened their homes and hearts not only to us, but to a vibrant coterie of other friends. The feasts were always Lucullan, the conversation sparkled and the spirit of friendship shone more brightly than the candles that graced the holiday table. In an odd way, this became my Thanksgiving definition of “home.”

This year, my ex lives with his girlfriend and my usual hosts are out of province working in theatre and film. I am far too ill to leave my bed and my novel. I have no appetite, I look like hell and yet I am oddly content. It is just over a year from the official date of my separation, divorce papers have been filed and at long last a chapter of my life that lingers only as a very sad memory is coming to a close. Feeling punky notwithstanding, I am eager to go forward and excited by the possibilities that lie ahead. Being in bed with a stack of books is a luxury right now and not at all a bad place to be.

Tomorrow, in honour of the holiday, I will drag my sorry carcass out of bed to pick apples from the old tree under which, in another time, we were married - a tree whose production this year has been abundant and still hangs heavy on the bough. I will bring these apples to the animals in the field and sit with them in the sunshine to watch them savour their own Thanksgiving feast. 

It is a simple thing, but this year it will be enough. 

It would seem that a new life can come at a person from any direction, even from an old one. With the gentle rain falling outside my window, I am looking forward to an indulgent day of reading, curled up on one of my pretty new love seats, with an old cat purring on my lap.

When I moved away from the farm last fall, it was only partly because the addictions experts advised me to do so. The theory was that by leaving my husband with the house and the wealth of responsibility that went with it, I could help him appreciate the consequences of his alcoholism and addictions and encourage him to get help. With my love and support, they told me, he was more likely to come to grips with his multiple problems and be able to lead a clean, sober, happier life. In the end, by his own choice, what has transpired with him had almost nothing to do with me. 

My own private reason for moving out was that I’d seen it all before and didn’t want to become a statistic. When a marriage ends or is in trouble, it is somehow always the wife who gets left with the detritus, seemingly destined  to rattle around in the matrimonial home, with the kids (in our case many animals), the old furniture, the wedding gifts and all those memories of things past. It is almost a given that the husband will move on pretty effortlessly to a brand new and uncomplicated life with someone else.

So it was that I wanted to break the mould; and I was fortunate enough to have friends who made it possible for that new and uncomplicated life to belong to me. Although there was no someone else on the scene, everything was different from the existence I'd had here on the farm.

With my ex in residence on the homestead, I lived nearer town, on a river, in a modern cottage with all the amenities. I sipped wine with friends in the evenings on a deck and I slept in a beautiful loft. Although I missed them terribly, I had no farm animals to feed, almost no lawns to mow, no cares whatsoever except to heal and try somehow to find a path of my own. I indulged myself in long bubble baths in the whirlpool tub, with a book and a glass of chilled white wine in my hand. For the first time in years I had soft, uncallused feet. I lunched, did volunteer work, walked by the water, took up my camera again. I spent most weekends entertaining house guests, dining out, or visiting friends in lovely parts of the province I hadn’t seen in years. Slowly, with time,  I felt my single spirit coming back to life.

So it’s funny now to be back here in the country, especially on my own. True to every one of the cliches, my ex husband lost no time in establishing that proverbial new life anyway. Blithely, without a backward glance, he eschewed the important first year of solo recovery to replace me with a woman younger than I am and nowhere near as well educated or as bright. Because she is living near Chester, that’s the only place on earth he wants to be. By the late spring, like our marriage, the farm and everything on it had faded easily into his "then" while, in the ensuing chain of events, inching its way gradually back into my "now." I am so grateful that it did.

In the end I have come to be the one in residence here, returning at first temporarily to care for my critters, and then of my own volition, to the place I once so fervently intended to leave behind - to the unkempt acreage and the aging animals and the dear, decrepit old farmhouse whose charm I fell in love with all those many years ago.

Thanks to the long months I spent on my own elsewhere, I have learned that our happiness lies not in our geography but in our selves; and that just because the standard scenario usually plays out, doesn’t mean it is always a bad one or that it won't be fulfilling for me.

I am sitting in my bedroom back at the farm, a place I’d resolved never again to be. It is really only from this place that I can write this blog, because it’s hard to seek a life of the mind while living a practical life on the farm if you aren’t actually living on a farm.

Until last month, when to my great surprise I returned here for good, I lived on the LaHave River in an exquisite small cottage owned by two of my dearest friends. How and why I came back here is a story for another time. 

My marriage is completely over and has been for a long time. This time, no attempt was even made to save it. Although my ex husband and I are cordial, we have not really managed to remain friends. He has no idea how to do so, and I am far less invested in this notion than I was when we separated all those months ago. It was the romantic in me, I suppose.

Sadly, right after his return from a residential treatment programme in the Valley, he began a sexual relationship with a woman in his recovery group, thereby foreclosing on his chances of becoming self-sufficient and creating an immediate new set of co-dependencies with her. He is now deeply enmeshed. Although he appears to be clean and sober, his complicated interior problems have obviously not been resolved and this makes the chances of relapse far greater in the long run. As unfortunate as this may be, it is the path he has chosen to follow. With all the challenges that lie before him, I wish him nothing but the best.

In the year that has passed, I’ve had a great deal of growing to do on my own behalf. I’ve worked with a good therapist, had the help of an incredible support group, and benefitted greatly from the emotional and practical generosity of my friends. Slowly I have found my way back to reconnecting with the woman I once was and the woman I want still to be - free spirit, idealist, adventuress, dreamer and warrior in the cause of creating a better world.

Without the constraints of the film business to circumscribe my leisure, the enormous beauty of the Nova Scotia summer has made itself once again wonderfully apparent to me. And then there is the companionship of my girlfriends - kindred spirits encountered anew and woven, this time forever, into the fabric of my life. I am a lucky woman and I know it.

So from this place that was once our home and where I’ve begun to make a life on my own, I plan to live in nature, care for the animals, work, love, dream and, in countless other ways, live out my story. To make this my own sanctuary, a cocoon of serenity and comfort, a haven for friends, I began by painting the kitchen and living room pink. May the warm glow cast by these pretty walls envelop all who come here and invest this lovely old house with renewed life.

Having an active fantasy life is a pretty amazing thing. Now that I’m doing so much armchair travelling, it seems that the weight of the world is getting lighter by the day. That said, I haven’t managed to escape reality entirely, as happened recently upon the death of one of our old sheep. 

Melpomene, or Mel as she soon came to be known, left us quietly a couple of weeks ago having lived a long and happy life. When Sasha returned from the barn chores all too early that day, I read on his face the expression that over time I’ve come to know so well - another of the old animals had died. 

He found Mel kushed in front of the little sheep house where she had fallen quietly into an eternal sleep. Still warm to the touch, a light dusting of snow on her back, she had what we’ve come to think of here as a very good death. Other than a slowing of her gait in recent months, there had been no sign whatsoever that she would be leaving us anytime soon.

I write about this now because it is snowing and Sasha is away getting better so I’m the one who’s just come in from doing the barn chores, handing out pats and peanuts to our motley crew of aging animals along the way. My new Italian fantasy life is definitely a psychic godsend during these dark days of winter and I really am committed to the project I’ve begun. 

Even so, no matter how you slice it, there are still shining moments here on this old farm when there’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be.

When I made the decision to learn Italian this year by pairing audio lessons with some enjoyable armchair travelling, I obviously had no idea what I'd be getting myself into. Suffice it to say that things haven’t been heading in the direction I had planned. 

The truth is that all this language learning and dreaming about things Italian was really intended to be a motivational exercise, a practical scheme whereby I could both beat the winter doldrums and propel myself toward a lifelong dream - a real, in the flesh, trip to Italy to soak up the great art treasures of the Italian Renaissance while partaking of some beautiful scenery along the way. Rome, Florence and Venice, I imagined, were the three places I absolutely had to see before my time on earth ran out. With the clock ticking away, this seemed like a good time to get the job done.

However, as I’ve been flipping through the guide books and watching travel videos on You Tube, I’ve noticed how often words like “crowded” and “expensive” abound. “Expensive” pleasures can somehow always be downscaled, but “crowded” is another matter entirely. I was horrified to discover that there’s even a special word in Italian to connote bumping into someone while taking one’s passagiata or ritual evening walk. 

In Florence, we are told, there are knock-offs of Michelangelo's David on street corners everywhere you turn, yet it costs money to see the real one. I discover to my genuine horror that nowadays, due to crowding, you have to make an appointment if you have any hope at all of getting into the Uffizi. One pays extra for a reservation to avoid long hours in line and there’s no such thing as an untimed visit either, all of which makes me wonder whether the splendours of classical Italian art might not more pleasurably be experienced through an expensive coffee table book in the leisurely comfort of home. 

Any dream I might have nurtured about Rome, or the Vatican or the Sistine chapel ceiling, died on the spot when two of my dearest friends recounted their nightmare visits there. The words “crowded” and “expensive” figured so heavily in those anecdotes that, Michelangelo forgive me, I'm beginning to think I can do without. My urbane and witty friends hated Florence for the same reasons and couldn’t wait to get into the countryside. They were tired of being crushed by the tourists, and if I’m not mistaken, even found that city to have an offensive smell.

As for Venice, what can be said? Described in virtually all the travel guides as "a must see" that is both “crowded" and "expensive,” La Serenissima, we are told, is best visited off season. However, anyone who has seen the Nicholas Roeg film, Don’t Look Now, won’t be at all seduced by the dark, dank vision of the city that fall and winter seem to provide. Pair that with the news that gondola rides are only for the very foolhardy (or at least for those touristy types with serious money to burn) and a bit more of the bloom falls off the rose. Do I really want to be laughed at by the locals? Suffer pigeons dive- bombing me in Piazza San Marco? Drink cappuccino that goes for eight dollars a cup? And just how deep is my long cherished desire to sip a Bellini while perched on a stool in Harry’s Bar? The price I’d have to pay for that one, even if I could find a seat, seems pretty “expensive” too. White peaches notwithstanding, would I be missing all that much if I stayed away?

The other part of my plan, the language learning component, has also encountered some mild difficulty. It took me a few days to opt for Pimmsleur over Michel Thomas when, despite good reviews, the phlegmy intonations of the latter began to drive me insane. Who needs water on the ear? It became absolutely unbearble!

I also passed on anything whose title mentioned learning while driving a car, partly because my vehicle has no facility for docking an i-Pod and partly because I’m stuffy enough to believe that, while driving a car, people ought to be concentrating on driving a car, not daydreaming in the foreign language they're immersed in while behind the wheel.

As discouraging as some of this might sound, I'm certainly not giving up on my Italian fantasy life or on my New Year's resolution to add a new language to my skill set. As my vocabulary is expanding by the day, I am merely moving my dreams a little further off the beaten track to those places in Italy where a curious and adventurous woman might find delight in less famous things.

If that means that, thanks to Frances Mayes and her ilk, most of crowded Tuscany has to fall off the roster too, so be it. There are lots of other places left to see. The only thing that's certain right now is that the journey I’ve begun in my head has already done wonders to take me away from the dreaded winter blahs. That in itself is magnifico!

Even without a calendar I can always recognize the turning of the year by my sudden craving for salt. By New Year’s Day every year, the chocolate overdose that accompanies the Christmas holidays just somehow seems to catapult me into a totally savoury world. Lindt, of course, has tried to have it both ways with their amazing dark chocolate bars seasoned with fleur de sel, but right now I’m having none of it. From today on, when snack time rolls around, I’m back to pretzels, hummus and pita, bruschetta, crackers and cheese. Anything that doesn’t involve chocolate.

Right now I’m sitting in front of the fire on this first day of a brand new year trying to resolve what to do about resolutions. Looking backward at the mostly failed ones I put forward last year, it seems prudent this time either to forgo the ritual entirely or somehow to decrease the possibility of failure so that something truly encouraging might actually come to pass.

This year, I’ve decided, I’m only going to make one resolution. I’m going to pass on all the stuff about exercise and healthy eating and go straight out into left field with something entirely new. I have resolved in 2011 to learn to speak Italian. 

For anyone who is cringing right now, trying to push away the nascent apprehension that I’m embarking on a cloned Eat, Pray, Love kind of experience, please have no fear. I’m not working through my marital angst by planning a year of travel to Italy, India and Bali. I’m actually just staving off the inevitable winter blahs with a fantasy life that includes the language of another climate, and mental images of another place and time.

Some weeks ago, while rooting around in some of the boxes that Sasha has packed up for give-away, sale or disposal, I came upon a CD set of Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun. Since this is not something we’d ever have bought, neither of us has any idea where it came from, but it did fit nicely into the CD player of the little Ford Focus I purchased this past fall. I listened to it all.

Despite the cloying southern drawl of the narrator and the total massacre of the Italian language (why do they let authors record their own works?) I fell totally in love with the descriptions of the landscape, the culture and food of Tuscany, the idea of an escape to someplace else.

So I have downloaded a good set of audio Italian language lessons to my iPod, found in my own library a number of wonderful books involving things Italian, bought a small English/Italian dictionary and a Fodors.

Now, over steaming bowls of ribollita or minestrone, I’ll be all set to fantasize at will. This winter, as I swan around in my fat pants intoning phrases like “Mi piace la pasta” or “Dove il bagno” I’ll be getting two things done really well. I’ll be dreaming the edge off reality and I’ll be learning something new. What could possibly be better than that?

There are times when it is appropriate to describe life and other times when it is better just to live it. It is now the last day of what, for me anyway, was an incredibly difficult year. In my own experience 2010 marked many months of living alone as a “film widow,” the passing of several much loved animals, the implosion of a lengthy marriage, and the beginning of another life in a lovely borrowed cottage on the banks of the La Have River.

In the four months that have ensued since my last post, the “sturm und drang” that heralded my leaving home have morphed into something else as my husband and I have both had time to process the events of the late summer.  Over time the iciness between us has melted and by now we have grown close again, sometimes even able to really talk.

As I write this, he has been sober for three months, is undergoing counselling, and has become a faithful attendee of AA, an organization for which he has nothing but gratitude and respect. A week from now, by his own choice,  he will enter a residential rehabilitation programme to continue his brave attempts to explore and conquer the underlying problems that have tormented him for years. I will live here at the farm to care for the animals, but only while he is away. 

After a slow year, the legal research through which I make my living experienced a sudden resurgence in the fall and I have been far too busy to spend too much time looking backward. I love the tranquility and beauty of the cottage and the ability to control my own existence. At the same time, I can’t stop myself from missing my home.  

I have come back for the Christmas holidays, partly to allow my kind and generous friends to inhabit their own space and partly, truth be told, to see what is left of the life and love I left behind. This has been incredibly bitter-sweet. Especially here, with the animals and the rituals of Christmas still in place, there is a real battle waging between what I “know” in my head and what I feel in my heart.

This fall I joined the wonderful group of people who run the Lunenburg County Film Series and have volunteered to Habitat for Humanity, who are gearing up to start a new built in the new year.  I have read countless books, taken advantage of the free month subscription to Netflix and joined the occasional ranks of the ladies who lunch. Although I’ve been clear headed and perfectly functional, the emotional pain, anger and frustration that derive from years in an alcohol marriage linger inside me and still get in my way. I too have much internal work to do.

Tonight, in this place, with the man who is still my husband beside me, I will observe again the ritual to which we have held for two decades ; we will dine on cheese fondue and Caesar salad, sit by the fire and watch Casablanca, and toast the incoming year, this time with sparkling de-alcoholized wine.

With the next chapter far from written and the words just beginning to flow, there are only two things I know for sure.  The first is that, even if we can’t rescue the marriage, we will never stop loving one another. The second is that, whatever is to come, that future can only define itself  slowly. 

It will happen  “one day at a time.”

It is early Sunday morning of the last weekend I will spend as a permanent resident of this old house. He is upstairs in the second bedroom, asleep under the same roof for the first time in six weeks, and I am here in the room we made into an office, reminding myself that a week from today I will be drinking my morning coffee somewhere else. It is hard.

When he arrives, we talk as much as raw emotion permits us, in the silences clinging tearfully to one another. He is exhausted from the long workdays in the city and bloated from the booze. For him, the consequences of his behavior have barely begun to set in. I, who have lived with the pain of it for weeks now, am heartsick, weary of the emotional suffering, steeling myself to move on.

We drive into town to buy food for an easy dinner, touching each other gently in a sad, non-sexual way. We eat pasta carbonara, one of his favourites, and spend a very quiet evening in front of the TV.  He has purchased a bottle of wine and it is just like old times, or so he is pretending. For me it is the last supper, the last evening of (almost) normalcy. The last of our days as a couple.

There are no words to describe the anguish of loving someone with all your heart and yet understanding beyond any doubt that you have to leave them behind you. It is hard when the thing that has ripped your life apart is not another woman, or a falling out of love, or a growing in other directions, or the dreaming of different dreams. When the thing is alcohol addiction and when it takes the other person, the other half of your soul, into that country of despair and self loathing over which he has no control, you are always collateral damage to the disease. Being hurt and sometimes forgotten in the miasma of his private descents into hell has been my fate once too often. I know when I have had enough. Now there is no choice but to move away, take refuge in a different life, begin anew.

Even as I hear my own heart breaking, this task will face me all too soon. In a matter of days, I will be gone. As daunting as it seems and as much as it may pain me,  this is not the time to waver. 

For both of us, it is the best and the only thing I can do.  

There’s no way around the fact that the death of a relationship is a painful thing. Although this time I seem  to be all right on my own, the last time my heart got broken, one of the ways I coped was by seeing a therapist whose first question every session was invariably about whether or not I had cried. 

Shell-shocked as I was by the suddenness of the events that had taken place, somehow no tears would ever come. That time, I was too emotionally traumatized to do much more than stare vacantly at the walls. Although I found this line of therapeutic inquiry to be odd, almost invasive, I understand now that crying (or psychogenic lachrymation as it is technically called) is beneficial for the release of emotional distress, and can even bring comfort to a wounded soul.

Today,  in this period of time immediately following the final breakdown of my marriage, life has been just what one would expect it to be - a proverbial roller coaster ride of  pent-up emotion written large. I cannot even bring myself to think of finding new homes for my beloved animals. That particular deep and searing pain,  I must leave for a future time.

As the days have rolled themselves one into another, I have passed many times in and out of the inertia of shock, enduring the betrayal of my body, the sleeplessness, the loss of appetite, the painful flow of memory through the mind. And always I am dry eyed. With my eyes closed in the pre-dawn hours, I listen through my iPod to the calming voice of Jon Kabat-Zinn as he reminds me that there is peace in the simple awareness of the breath. Breathing mindfully at all hours of the day and night, I walk, sometimes for miles. 

These days, I wake up every morning and tell myself to put one foot in front of the other. I compel myself to stick to a routine. I keep occupied and I accept every social invitation that comes my way. I make lists and put things in boxes, force myself to listen to the soundtrack he lovingly compiled for our wedding, lay my head on his crumpled pillow to inhale the fading scent of his skin. I gaze with newly saddened eyes at the home we created together - my Colette novels, his espresso maker, the folk art animals we purchased before we had any of our own. It is the home where our hearts once beat in unison, the home I will be leaving very soon. 

This afternoon, when it begins to rain torrentially, I am reminded anew of the therapist’s  persistent question and the metaphor of the heavens is not to be lost on me.

In the daylight, in my sorrow, I curl myself into a ball and lay on the soft green ground beneath the bursting clouds, allowing them to flood me with their tears. Soaked to the skin when I finally rise again, I have managed to produce a torrent of my own. 

It turns out that the Internet is full of practical (and not so practical) suggestions for how to mend a broken heart. I know this because today I went looking for some of them for myself. 

Today would have been our wedding anniversary if the marriage hadn’t suddenly imploded last Saturday, leaving me with an unfortunate reservation for next weekend at a lovely B and B, a detached and distant spouse, an old house full of memories, and the aforesaid malfunctioning piece of the anatomy. In the age of technology, what else does one do but Google up some sensible advice?

The truth is that I myself am not without credentials in this particular field, and that I probably could have written some of the articles I have just read. That is because my very own heart was already badly broken nine years ago, just after the mid-point of my long journey with this same sweet, brilliant, funny man. It was broken so unexpectedly and so completely that it all but lay before me in shards, a pitiful thing so badly damaged that it seemed as though it could never be repaired. I remember telling my therapist at the time that I felt like a wounded animal, like a dog that had violently been  kicked.

Of all the many things going on back in those days, of the many separate threads that were woven into the tapestry of those events, the worst of it for me was to have had my world upended completely by the sudden (temporary, as it turned out) appearance of a cold, cruel stranger where my good and gentle husband used to be. Who was this man? Where did he come from? What had he done with my spouse?

No matter how hard I tried at the time,  no matter how much I read or how many questions I asked, that phenomenon was something I could not understand. What could have caused a person's character to alter so suddenly?  How could he, with such apparent indifference, inflict hard emotional pain on someone he was supposed to have loved so much?  Because I thought our crisis had been caused only by an infidelity, my own diagnosis at the time ran along the lines of guilt. The only thing I knew for certain was that I could never in life allow anything to hurt me that way again.

That time, very gradually, we glued my heart (and everything else in our world) back together. The cruel and distant stranger morphed back soon enough into the sweet and caring person I adored. With tender remorse, my husband would cradle those parts of me that were broken, and we suffered hand in hand through the anguished talks, the tearful recriminations, the confessions and accusations and the months of expensive therapy that evolved into the slow and steady rebuilding of a life. Gently and patiently we both worked hard to get past the raw emotion, and to built a new trust that we believed would endure forever. The willingness to walk together through the flames of that fire, we told one another, was the very definition of our deep, transcendent love.

No matter what has happened since, to this very moment I can’t regret our decision to make that choice.  In the end, what I learned about love during that most painful period of our existence is what has made it possible for my glued-back-together, aching, breaking heart to beat without shattering today.

Last weekend, while I was happily making anniversary plans and anticipating the arrival from the city of my sweetheart, that cold cruel stranger reappeared at the end of the telephone. This time, even though I recognized his voice (and could label the thing that called him back here) I recognized too that anything I might do or say would be to no avail. When the stranger comes, I am forgotten. I have been in this movie once before. A few hours later, with his final promise broken, the love of my life was lost to me for good.

Whether the kind and gentle man who used to be my soulmate can find the will to escape the power of his demons is not for me to say. As devoutly as I might wish it, I cannot make it so.

For me, there is nothing else but to fix my unfaltering gaze toward an alternate future and, with my love for him still beating in this full and fragile heart, somehow, somehow to survive.  

I am definitely more of a “broad” than anybody's notion of a “girlie girl.” An old boyfriend once disparagingly compared my walk to that of a football player and, despite a certain verbal grace, everybody knows that I can have the mouth of a stevedore as well. I laugh loudly and am highly opinionated, I shovel manure, I am not particularly domestic and I definitely take a back seat to my husband when it comes to the baking of cakes and fussy pies. There is nothing about me on the outside that explains the stuff most people never see - the love of candles and firelight, of French milled soaps, pearls,  “green” perfumes, handmade lace, silk ribbons and the novels of Colette.  Somehow, underneath it all, I'm an incurable romantic at heart.

I am also the daughter of a seamstress, a woman who once apprenticed herself to a tailor in order to learn some of the finer points of making beautiful clothes. Growing up, I had the good fortune to benefit from her abilities in a number of different ways, from exquisitely tailored jackets to beautiful lingerie; and although I live now almost entirely in blue jeans and sweat pants, I have never lost the love of running my fingers over fabric that is still on the bolt, or the knowledge that in capable hands, lovely textiles can be wonderfully transformed into almost anything a  person could desire.

At some point in the last decade, prompted by an impulse I now can’t even recall, I made the somewhat peculiar decision to spend the rest of my life sleeping only on pure white sheets. To be precise, only on pure white cotton sheets, and pillow cases trimmed with hand made white lace. Although Sasha no doubt considered this to be a rather extreme eccentricity on my part, he must have found something charming in it too, because that was when my white “revolution” began.

In a world that has online shopping and especially eBay, it was relatively easy to replace the existing household prints and colours with a beautiful collection of vintage bed linens, all in pristine condition, for relatively little cost. Not only were such things terribly out of fashion and not at all politically correct, but by most modern women they were also regarded to be dull, labour intensive and totally unhip. To me, they were the very embodiment of romance, calling forth from the imagination the promise of cool breezes blowing gently through gauze curtains on starlit summer nights. Even now, these long years later, my crisp white sheets, lightly sprayed with lavender linen water, make crawling into bed at the end of every day an almost indescribable delight.

The second thing I decided, flowing naturally from the thing about the sheets, was that I would also only wear white nighties. No PJs for me. Pretty white nighties made of natural fibres are a commodity not easily to be found, particularly if one lives on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, so it has always been a challenge finding something decent to suffice. My favourite Eileen West nightdress, a treasure purchased years ago in Boston, recently became tattered beyond redemption and turned out to be hideously expensive to replace. Not sold in Canada, and available only through the smallest handful of online sources in the US, gowns like my beautiful Eileen West are costly in the first place and absolutely prohibitive to import, especially when exorbitant shipping tariffs are applied.

No longer having anything special to sleep in and recalling the days when I had the luxury of custom made clothing right at home, it dawned on me finally that the best and surest way to solve my white sleepwear dilemma was simply to choose  the fabrics and notions myself and have everything made to order, so this is exactly what I have done. 

This afternoon I returned happily from the seamstress with no fewer than three gorgeous white cotton nightgowns to sleep in and enjoy all summer long. Prettily pin tucked and trimmed with white silk ribbons and beautiful bits of vintage lace, they are the stuff of any girlie girl’s dreams. Given what I went through to acquire them, obviously they are the stuff of my dreams too and I thank Susan Richards with all my heart for every perfect stitch.

It seems that all I think about nowadays is either blue food for Sasha’s film gig or his pending appearance in Small Claims Court where he is being frivolously sued by the photographer, Sherman Hines. Both played a part in our weekend because it was the only time that Sasha could be here at home and that we’d have any chance at all to get caught up on anything. So, while dipping cold cuts and cheese slices in blue food dye, we reviewed the legal situation while toasting our nephew’s twenty seventh birthday with pink champagne. I guess you could say that we got a lot of bang out of the weekend buck.

In my own small world, my maiden effort at blogging, Sherman’s Behind,  apparently got itself noticed by another blogger last week, someone who writes about marketing and communication, who has suggested he’d like to include it in an article about “how the internet makes the David and Goliath story obsolete.” His readership, he tells me, is about five thousand people, but so far nothing further has happened on that front. 

In the particular situation detailed in my blog, David has yet to score a victory and Goliath keeps coming on strong, so I’m not sure I can agree with the premise anyway just yet. In the meanwhile Sasha has started a  new Facebook group called People Supporting Sasha in his Claim against Sherman Hines, so the saga continues in that universe as well. As fascinated as I am by social networking and the power of the internet to disseminate information rapidly, I am beginning to find the entire thing quite fatiguing intellectually and would far rather focus my own attentions elsewhere. If I didn’t believe so strongly in this particular struggle, I’d have packed it in a long time ago. 

When I’m not reflecting on the vagaries of the legal system. I am still enjoying myself quite a lot these days. One bit of happy news is that yet another broody hen in another habitat entirely, seems to be sitting on another clutch of eggs. This time I had the wit to turn to my friend and mentor, Ron Rogerson, of Oaklawn Farm Zoo, for some advice on how to achieve a happier outcome this time around. According to Ron, it is likely that the previous hen had, at some point in the past, eaten an egg or two and that the behaviour just resurfaced again in the barn. Cannibalism can apparently lie dormant sometimes .

With a new opportunity before us, this time we are planning to take Ron’s suggestions and handle the situation a bit differently. We will, by night, remove the broody hen and her eggs  to an apple box or bushel basket which we will then cover with a small blanket or a towel. This we will remove again to a secure and private habitat in which no other birds will be present and the hen and eggs will be left in peace. Apparently, once uncovered, the hen will hop in and out of the box (or basket) for food and water and the eggs should be quite secure until they hatch. Unless she’s another cannibal, that is. 

If that happens, we are definitely giving up.

I realized today that I haven’t posted anything here in quite awhile. Time has been flying past and my efforts at writing have been confined almost exclusively to my first blog, Sherman’s Behind, which (somewhat satirically) follows the tedious tale of Sasha’s thus far futile attempts to collect some money owed to him by the photographer, Sherman Hines. With Sasha’s claim for back salary soon coming before the Labour Standards Tribunal because of a frivolous appeal by Mr. Hines, and a forthcoming lawsuit against him in the Small Claims Court maliciously filed by Mr. Hines, we’ve been busy. Not to mention the fact that Sasha is away again working on another film. 

In the meanwhile, here in my real life, nothing worthy of a blog post has been going on although the rhythm of my days has been pleasant enough. The arrival of the dreaded black flies has also been accompanied by a number of real delights. Last week-end, using a recipe posted by a friend (and avid Martha Stewart fan) on Facebook, we enjoyed an incredibly delicious pie made from the rhubarb growing in abundance in our garden. Just outside the door we have fresh fragrant herbs to cook with, the magnolia is in bloom, the barn swallows have returned to make their nest in our hayloft, and the animals are all happy to be grazing in fields that are actually green.

In the barn for the past few weeks a broody hen sat faithfully atop a clutch of eggs, a sign to us that there would soon be fledgling chicks to wonder at and care for. But the day after I returned excitedly from the Farmers Coop with a bag of chick starter and the shallow little waterer needed to keep the little birds from drowning, we discovered the mother hen smashing and eating the eggs on which she once so patiently sat. While we know that cannibalism is not uncommon among chickens, we still have no idea why this happened when it did. In any case, there will be no little chicks born here and that is sad.

There have been other poignant notes too as I watch some of our geriatric animals sinking very slowly into their ultimate decline. Especially when I’m alone here, it’s hard not to think about these things constantly and I do. Scully, one of the four old cats, has become incontinent, howling madly in the middle of the night for reasons only she can discern. Thalia, one of our original sheep, is now so arthritic that she spends most of her time lying down. Kacha, at twenty-one the oldest of the llamas, is terribly thin despite a ravenous appetite and spends her days apart from the others in a strange quiet world of her own. It is only a matter of time.

On the personal front, I’ve renewed (encore une fois) my resolution to become a regular at our local gym and for the last several weeks have made frequent appearances there. Usually I go with a friend, which by definition, suggests kinship of spirit and often likeness of thought. This morning, however, while the two of us were torturing ourselves on the treadmill, we were joined by three ladies from the small community in which the gym resides and I recognized all over again how very different I am from the indigenous inhabitants of this place. Slightly smug in demeanour, more comfortable in their tanned and toned skins than we are, much farther to the right politically, and entirely too interested in the business of others, they scared the pair of us half to death. 

Disinclined to speculate on the sex lives of our neighbours and disagreeing (as we both do) that all the people incarcerated in Canadian prisons should be deployed to die in Afghanistan so that “decent” people don’t have to, my friend and I resolved to try for a different time slot next time. There’ll be iPods and ear buds involved too -  just in case.

Isn’t there an expression somewhere about screaming “blue murder?” Because I had occasion to scream those two words a few times myself this past weekend although not in the same sentence and not in the way anyone might think.

I should have seen something coming last week when my absent spouse posted to his Facebook a photograph of his right hand on which he sported several fingers that were partially stained blue. I was aware, of course, that the movie he is working on involves that colour in a big way and that virtually all the food consumed by the actors has to be coloured blue. Although I certainly recognized that film food comes under the purview of the property master, I also know that it is often contracted out to caterers, which is probably why I made a little joke of his photograph and didn’t give it any further thought. I thought he was just messing around.

Like a lot of other parts of our domestic existence, Sasha’s return every week-end is usually planned to be relaxing and low key. At whatever time he might arrive, I try to prepare something quick and simple for us to eat (this week it was a lemon pasta/green salad combo), and after sharing a bottle of wine and some of the week’s biggest news, we turn in and make it an early night. With the animals, there is always a busy workday lying ahead.

This past Friday, however, when he arrived from the city carrying the usual duffel bag full of laundry, his book bag and computer case, my husband also handed me a large shopping bag from the Bulk Barn, asking me to take it with me into the house. Thinking it was a gift, I opened the bag eagerly and realized right away that I was in for it. The contents could have no possible relevance to me. 

What was I ever going to do with a supply of blue ‘chocolate’ baking chips, blue jelly beans, blue cake sprinkles, a bag of blue cake “sparkles” (which looked like the same thing to me), a tiny vial of blue food paste, three small bottles of blue food colouring, two tubes of royal blue ‘decorating’ icing,  four tubes of something blue called “sparkle gel” and two aerosol cans of another blue product called food colour spray? In another bag, from a restaurant supply house, arrived an additional litre of blue food colouring and a vat of blueberry puree. There were also some disposable storage containers, a Granny Smith apple and a small jar of mayonnaise. A frisson of anxiety gripped me then because, having lived through similar circumstances, I could see the Food Experiments coming on.

By mid Saturday morning I was taking the mumbling non-sequiturs in stride as my partner had begun to think aloud about the making of what he was now describing as “a ton” of blue food. My feeble inquiry about using a caterer received the slightly testy reply that it was still his responsibility to “work out the logistics” before the actual food production could be consigned to someone else. 

Early that afternoon, after his "emergency" run for yeast and flour, I could hear him cranking up the bread machine which soon began to conjure large amounts of wretched looking smurf blue dough. Pools of dark blue water sat in a number of bowls and pots in our white apron sink. Worried about staining the porcelain, I reached in at once to dump the offending liquid, emerging from that fiasco with a pair of hands that were smurf blue right up to the wrists. They probably heard my screaming several kilometres away. That’s when the word “murder” came up. 

Luckily for him, Sasha is pretty proficient at removing stains, having needed this skill on his own flesh many times over the years. However, the tension between us continued to escalate when the isopropyl alcohol he first recommended failed to do the trick. After I had scrubbed hard with the heavy industrial hand cleaner that he keeps in our mudroom, my mitts paled to the soft robin’s egg blue with which I will apparently have to live until the colour fades on its own. 

Less surly on Sunday morning, and attracted by a large, expensive bag of frozen crab legs and claws, I assisted voluntarily in the enterprise of removing all the crab meat from the shells (most of which were long, multi-jointed legs) without cracking them at all. Snapping at the joints was a no-no because the resultant tube-like receptacles were later going to be dyed blue and filled with marzipan. Blue marzipan, of course.

My participation in this effort was motivated purely by self interest, I confess, possessed as I was of a hankering for crab cakes made with the Old Bay seasoning a friend had brought me from the Carolinas. Since the meat was a superfluous by-product of the blue food experiment, I saw my chance and took it.

While I fried up the crab cakes for brunch, my happy husband stood beside me mushing up two big tubes of marzipan and dyeing them, once again, the now very offensive bright smurf blue. We ate our meal as the unbroken crab shells boiled on the stove in a huge pot of vibrant blue water.  Suffice it so say that things remained blue here for the remainder of the day.

When he left this morning with his bags full of colourful food props and supplies, I think Sasha felt the weekend had been a big success. I couldn't relive it if you paid me.

Much later today, when all the evening chores have been done and I can sit down in peace with a book and a drink in my hand, it sure isn't going to be blue Curacao. I can definitely promise you that.

At my age I generally don’t spend a lot of time thinking about raging hormones, so the last couple of days have hit me like so much ice water in the face. It turns out that sometimes wildly raging hormones are a fact of life at our place whether I want to be dealing with them or not. 

Normally, when I do the barn chores, everything transpires according to a well orchestrated plan. Morning is the part of my day that I normally consider quite contemplative, reflecting what I hold to be a silent and mindful relationship between a human being and the denizens of several other nations who somehow interdepend. Each bird and animal is aware of the order of business, and I usually arrive to find them all patiently waiting for their part in our shared routine.

Chicken and turkey habitats are checked first for food and fresh water, then eggs are collected and put in a plastic bucket to be taken afterward to the house. If there’s a broody hen in the process of laying, I come back a little later in the day.

In the barn, our “odd couple,” John and Poncho, are dealt with right away. A ram and a male llama respectively, they constitute, apart from Sasha, the only unaltered males on the premises and have somehow managed to live in harmony for years. John, who is a messy, almost toothless eater, needs to be given a small ration of mash made from pelleted hay soaked in water. Poncho, a large gentle creature when not in close proximity to the females, receives (in addition to his hay) a small handful of grain and a stroke on the silky fibre of his neck. The two of them sometimes jump and tussle while this happens, but are generally more interested in the food than in making trouble for me.

Our three geldings are fed next and constitute no difficulty. Large greedy animals, they normally get straight to the hay. The female herd and the donkey, always eager for a nosh,  jolt and jockey one another for position at the mangers but settle easily once their food has arrived. The three skinny llamas who get extra "groceries" step smartly out of their stalls and into the centre of the barn where bright yellow buckets of grain await. The donkey, the only one here of her species, stands eagerly at the gate assertively looking for the small handful of grain she receives as a special treat. After all these things have been done I can set about the daily task of shoveling manure.

Yesterday, however, did not go according to Hoyle. Of course, if I’d been thinking clearly I might have anticipated this, but sometimes I confess that my head is somewhere else. The Russian steppes, perhaps, or somewhere in Peru. At any rate, while daydreaming about the wonders of springtime, I totally lost sight of the rather serious practical implications this season can also hold for me.

Yesterday, I made my first big mistake of the season by letting both small flocks of our chickens out to range, as opposed to just the rooster and three hens who live in the barn without access to a run. I knew better, of course, but  I fell victim (and not for the first time) to the sort of magical thinking that throws reason and experience to the wind.

For Sasha and me as stewards, there has always been an intellectual conflict between the notion of confinement for purposes of protection and the argument that quality of life is at its utmost only when creatures are allowed to be free.  Yesterday, in my head, these concerns were nowhere to be found as I thought only of the green grass and the dirt baths that the chickens could enjoy along with the brightness of the sunlight and the freshness of the air. The matter of spring hormones never crossed my mind and when they surfaced, my once easy routine spun rapidly out of control.

Almost from the second the two roosters encountered one another in the sunlight, they poised themselves for battle, and they continued to battle unremittingly  for the largest part of the morning. Neck feathers fanned out, they flew at one another ferociously, easily eluding all my clumsy attempts to restrain them. So vicious and lengthy was the combat that I actually came to understand why people bet on cock fights, although had I been the one making the bets, I’d certainly have lost. The large, handsome barred rock, by far the heavier of the birds, took a sorry beating before I could round him up and return him to the safety of captivity. It was awful and I hated myself for being so dumb.

To add insult to injury, when I entered the barn, John and Poncho were nowhere to be seen. Bad sign. A normal day would have found the ram standing upright against the stall gate, eagerly awaiting his food with Poncho framed patiently in the doorway behind him. Yesterday I found the pair of them outdoors in the adjacent paddock, where they had breached the fencing to graze happily on the fresh green grass growing there. 

Although this behaviour might strike others as "cute" and while the image may seem bucolic and benign, for me it is as loaded as hell. Sasha and I are almost fanatical about never allowing Poncho into any paddock on a contiguous fence line with that of the female herd. The reason? Hormones, of course.

A large male llama in rut, while a stunning thing to behold, snorts and draws himself up like a monarch, commanding the attention of every female on the place. It is for a very good reason that the male of the camelid species is called a "macho" and only a matter of time before he, or one (or more) of the ladies, will draw near enough to jump the fence and embark on what comes naturally. Once in progress, this activity is too hard and sometimes too dangerous to stop. Although there is a drug we can administer should breeding actually occur, it is best to prevent the situation in the first place. We do not need any young.

Because I have seen this happen before, I was able to move quickly to sequester the aggressively flirty females and to shore up the fencing well enough to serve until Sasha returns on the weekend. Which is not to suggest that there weren't a few hairy moments along the way. In the presence of a potential mate, these snorting four hundred pound girls were really raring to go.

Now that the excitement is over and I can reflect on the events of the day, I realize that all of these situations will have to be managed in a better way, insuring that quality of life is not compromised too much. For the chickens I have just ordered some portable netting that will enable them to enjoy the pleasures of the land while keeping the adversarial roosters separate from one another. Whoever invented the stuff was a genius.

As for the glamorous Poncho and his potential harem, there might be no sex in the offing, but there are plenty of green non-contiguous paddocks over whose fence lines they can longingly gaze. It'll have to do.

This past weekend in Halifax marked the opening of the European movie made from Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book I thought to be both interesting and well written when I read it a couple of months ago. Although, largely because of the violence, I’d originally decided to defer succumbing to the two remaining volumes in the trilogy, the truth is that I went on to burn through them like wildfire and am now really keen to see how effectively the content translates into film. Since Sasha has just begun another job in the city, our time together will once again be fraught with outdoor practicalities so I imagine we’ll probably pass on our frequent weekend matinees and just rent the DVD at a later, more convenient time. I am no stranger to delayed gratification.

Here in the country, with proximity only to a smallish Blockbuster, anyone with tastes veering beyond the latest box office hit finds the local pickings very lean. We do have a wonderful film society, though and we maintain a membership with Zip.ca, both of which make a broader cinema culture more accessible.              

The other thing that ups the intellectual ante on rural life is the possession of an iPod Touch, a device I  don’t think I could live in the country without. Although for me useage began with music and the convenience of having something to listen to while waiting for car repairs or using the treadmill at the gym, I soon discovered the richness and diversity of podcasts, and after that, the amazing phenomenon known as iTunes U. With the ability to download courses from many universities, it’s possible for a person to think, learn and grow intellectually even down here on the farm. An excellent blog that helps sort through the various options can be viewed by clicking here.

The last component to my cerebral well-being is listening to audio books, a habit to which I often turn when battling insomnia or working out of doors. A lot of offerings are downloadable for free from sites such as LibriVox and Project Guttenburg, but for a great collection of contemporary works or for those still under copyright, I love audible.com, where my inexpensive subscription allows me to download one book every month.

In fact, I just listened to a chapter of War and Peace (the whole of which is sixty hours long in audio) while mucking out the barn. Depending on how well a person keeps up with all the names, you really can’t beat an experience like that, and since I am married to a Russian, it hasn't been too awfully hard for me. Think of all the work I'll be able to get done before it ends.

To my great delight, the spring peepers arrived two weeks early this year, just days after the croaking bullfrogs let their presence be heard in our pond. Although we can’t actually see them, falling asleep at night with their magical mating music streaming through the open window is one of my favourite manifestations of spring. 

In the waking hours, still recovering from a nasty cold, I’ve been making a little time each day to spend outdoors enjoying the effects of the warmer weather on our almost six acres of land. It is in this precious interval every year, between the arrival of the frogs and that of the dreaded black flies, that we begin without molestation the process of preparing the property for whatever kind of summer  lies ahead. 

Although it is not yet warm enough to uncover the tender green shoots that are still protected by their leafy mulch, already we’ve seen foxgloves and daylilies, oriental poppies, lady’s mantle, iris, columbine and catmint peering upward toward the sun. For the moment we can ignore the tedious hours of weeding that will also come with this territory as we turn to the many other tasks that really need to be tackled right away. 

Trees, grapevines and roses have to be pruned, and the branches stripped by raging winter winds from the ancient maples in front of the house need to be collected and removed. Although in the past we have burned this detritus in a series of carefully monitored bonfires, we’ve finally begun to think more creatively and to develop a plan much more resourceful in its conservation of materials, as well as more attractive and ecologically sound. I regret that it has taken us so long.

Late last summer, while we were trimming the alders and small birches  that encroach upon our driveway, we made a pair of decisions that are beginning to take shape as I write. The first was to plant a vegetable garden this spring and the second was to surround it with a Dutch fence. It is in the construction of such a fence that our surplus wood will find a  useful and permanent home.

Between the parallel posts that Sasha has already set in a thirty foot line, we’ve begun to layer the various prunings, cuttings and fallen branches that will eventually break down to form a solid wall. As soon as the ground is thawed, we will create the remaining three sides. Then, when we clear and weed the flower beds and remove last year’s dead stalks and woody growths, this material too will be stuffed into the interstices. 

With time, the posts themselves will weather and the entire production will begin a gradual decay that will leave us with a natural barrier to shield our garden from predation. It might also create a habitat for the small birds and other unseen creatures that no doubt live here as well. If all goes swimmingly, according to a friend who has done this before, “in a year’s time it’ll be so solid that you couldn’t drive a truck through it if you tried.” We’ll see.

In the meanwhile, it’s pretty gratifying to see the results of each day’s labour gradually transform the land into an increasingly useful space. Although the garden itself is still in the future, we have finally made a start.

The miserable cold with which I’ve been afflicted has lingered on and on, causing the last week to have become a total blur. Apart from crawling to the barn twice a day to feed the animals, I have spent most of that time in bed, coughing and wheezing and lapsing in and out of sleep. It’s a good thing my professional workload has been light. 

Without a voice with which to talk on the telephone and with a head too stuffed up to read with enjoyment or comprehension, I decided to make a companion of the small television set in the bedroom where I became transfixed by the new DIY channel that has recently hit the air. Watching women with power tools renovate old bathrooms was a particular favourite although my drowsiness never permitted me to catch a single episode in its entirety. 

Just as I would warm to an episode showing someone adapting an antique bureau to accommodate a sink, I’d doze off again and waken to a crew on the following programme that I’d never seen before, ripping the cabinets out of an out-dated kitchen. One show morphed into another and eventually into my dreams.

Still, when the time comes to tackle the bathroom in this old farmhouse, I hope I’ll have osmosed at least some appreciation of what the job requires. At the very least I’ll have a much more enlightened view of the possibilities.

In the meanwhile, having wrapped his film in the city, Sasha came home for the weekend and could mercifully tend to the household routine and to me. Although he still has three more days in which to complete his returns and all the attendant paperwork, the hours are much shorter and we can begin to ease back into normal life. 

Savouring a steaming bowl of his wonderful garlic soup,  I can scarcely contain my relief.

I’ve always believed that somebody ought to write a book about the film business. I don’t mean how it works, or what impact it has on the economy or what the various stages of production really are, and I don’t mean anything at all to do with Hollywood stars. We already have lots of those. 

I mean that somebody ought to put together a chatty little tell-all from the point of view of the beleaguered spouse - those of us men and women who keep the home fires burning while our partners abandon all domestic reality from time to time for the adrenaline, creativity and fairly substantial paycheques that the business can provide. I am talking about the flip side of the mad rush to camera, the undocumented back story, the numerous little sub-plots that nobody has time to notice except those of us who inhabit the roles.

At the moment, quite true to established pattern, this particular film spouse has a cold. It is not a country cold that snuck up on me during the week,  but the same vicious cold that has been making the rounds on the production that has taken Sasha to the city for the past month or so, the production that lends me back his exhausted carcass once in awhile for so-called “days off” during which he will either work, obsess about working, or pass out mid-sentence from sheer fatigue. Bringing home a cold is just part of the territory.

When he is here, of course he will do his best to give me an account of his adventures and ask me for the news of my week. He will also do his utmost not to nod off when all the words I’ve saved up for the occasion suddenly come spilling out of me in an almost deranged monologue because our daily phone calls have become so brief and perfunctory, revolving around call times and menu selections and whether he has been able to get any sleep. 

Even words like “I love you," when they get spoken at all, sound like memorized lines from a script. For both of us, loving the other person at all during the making of a film is hard work, sometimes seeming like just another job to be added to an already formidable list. He is simply too bushed at this point to reach out to anyone except in the line of duty and I am too seasoned a warrior to ask for more attention than he has the wherewithal to give. I resent this at times, it is true. Somehow, we both try our best to stay connected in a dance we have been practicing for years.

When he has settled in, I know I can count on him to ask about each of the animals, make time to take care of anything that might have broken in his absence, tweak my technology if required, and climb the steep ladder to the hayloft to throw down enough hay for the sheep and llamas to do for the coming week. The man stuff. 

He knows that I will cook and serve food and that I will do everything I can to keep the outside world at bay. There are no social engagements. If something doesn’t need his attention it won't get mentioned. I will keep it to myself. He doesn't need the pressure and I'm an old hand at coping on my own.

The name of the game is to maintain at any cost the equilibrium that holds us together as a couple yet enables him to make it through the shoot. Even when he is here, the truth is that I am alone and I will be alone until wrap. I learned long ago that each week until then, on those mythical "days off," less and less of him will come home to me intact. It is what it is and I have to accept it.

That said, while my partner in crime is immersed in the grueling demands of making make-believe, I have ringside seats to the arrival of Spring. What I am living here is both joyous and real.

Whatever extra work I might have to do doesn’t consume fourteen hours of the day. I get plenty of sleep in my own bed and have time that is all mine to spend (or even squander) as I please. I have total control over the budget, nobody gives me directions, and if my call sheet changes without notice and I suddenly have to "wing it," the possible consequences are minor because it's usually been my own choice.

Even with the dubious and inevitable "gift" of yet another miserable film business cold, I am still the one who has it easy.

And he will be home again soon.

Except perhaps for the The Dude and the fact that the Academy Award for Best Director finally went to a woman, the Oscars last night were just plain boring. We watched because it’s a ritual of long standing at our place, in recent years most probably because we both welcome any excuse to nibble on hors d’oeuvres and drink champagne. Despite a connection to the film industry and the fact that we love movies, we are not really into the Hollywood thing anymore.

Sasha, dead beat from a long cold week on set, crashed at eleven thirty but I made it through to the bitter end, finding myself wishing in the cold light of day that I hadn’t wasted my time. I have a very real life to contend with and need all the sleep I can get.

.Just before Christmas last year, our friend Jo-Anne asked us to adopt her chickens as she was planning to spend the winter months elsewhere. This addition to our menagerie consisted of a rooster with five hens, a second rooster with three hens, and a little bantam named Rufus who, in order to escape the aggression of the other males, needed to be housed on his own.

Since there’s simply nothing better than a farm fresh egg, we entered the adoption joyfully and proceeded to house the two groups in separate locations, giving little Rufus the run of the barn. Because the days of winter were then so short, the man of the house hooked up light bulbs on a timer to augment the limitations of nature and provide fourteen hours of light every day.

Suddenly, the single egg that Jo-Anne had collected every morning became two, then three, then four. As the hours of daylight continue to lengthen, the count has now risen to six large beautiful brown eggs every single day. Spelled out a bit differently, this means that while I’ve been living here on my own five days a week, no fewer than forty-two of these treasures laid by our happy hens have needed to be dealt with by me every seven days. 

The problem is obvious: a person can’t eat eggs at every meal. Since others in the area sell their overflow to passers-by, there isn’t much of a market out there either. I am up to my eyebrows in eggs.

Long ago having mastered the creamy scrambled eggs cooked over a double boiler as favoured by the French, we have by now added the perfect omelette, the quiche and the souffle to our household repertoire. We have used eggs to make pie shells and challah and their whites to make Pavlovas and lovely light meringues. We have shirred eggs, devilled eggs, coddled eggs, fried eggs and baked eggs but the hens just keep bringing them on.

Yesterday in a kind of crazy ovo-desperation, I turned to the Internet, where I discovered that eggs can indeed be frozen if they are removed from the shell and beaten slightly with a little bit of salt. I put the dozen most recently produced into the freezer with glee in little containers marked with the date and the number of eggs contained within. Four more were used to make 24 mini-quiches, some of which became Oscar fare and some of which were headed for the freezer too. One I had in a sandwich for lunch. But this morning there are already five more.

When city folks hurl themselves headlong into the romance of country life, there is no existing manual for the truths that lie behind the wonders they initially behold. Nobody tells you, for example, that the roosters who greet every day with the crowing sounds you absolutely love, will kill one another (or at the very least peck out each others eyes) if not managed carefully by you. It is a job like any other.

Chickens, fed well and left to range,  lay healthy eggs, reduce parasites and add wonderful fertilizer to the soil, it’s all true. With the lacy patterns on their feathers and their soothing clucking sounds, a few chickens really should be part of anybody’s rural dream.  

But alone or as a couple, being inundated by three and a half dozen eggs every week? Maybe "dream" isn't the right word.