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. 

My retreat into solitude deepened yesterday with a storm unlike anything I recall in a very long time. Torrential rains and howling winds came late on Thursday night and continued almost until this morning, disrupting routine and shaking our old post and beam to its foundations. Sometimes I could  even feel small gusts of wind blowing through the house. Accustomed to solitude and unafraid of being here alone, I still had my resources tested by the darkness and drama that a spate of heavy weather brings.

Somehow in the morning the wind disrupted the radio reception in the barn, creating a whole new soundtrack to my labours, in the process making me significantly more aware  of the auditory universe  the animals no doubt prefer to the CBC.

Most dramatic were the loudest sounds - competitive crowing from three roosters backed by the clucking of their hens, the braying of a hungry donkey, wind-driven branches tapping on the windows, and the pounding of heavy rain on the corrugated tin up on the roof. Occasionally the old ram would add his deep throated baa-ing to the mix. More softly came the susurrus of hay being pulled through the slats in the mangers, then contented chomping sounds and the occasional satisfied “hum.”

Unable to allow the animals outdoors, I took advantage of my reprieve from heavy mucking out to do the abbreviated version of the chores while handing out peanut treats, touching velvety noses with my own and enjoying the comfort and safety of this second of my homes.

In the house, later in the afternoon, the power went out entirely and as the day wore on without restoration, I made myself embark on the precautionary manoeuvres that would see me safely through to another day. I assembled candles and flashlights and hauled buckets of water from the well. Luckily we have a propane fireplace as an alternate heating source and a propane stove that makes it possible to be quite comfortable even without electricity. It was the deepening darkness that I minded most and, truth be told, the absence of theoretical contact with the outside world. Like it or not, the dependance on technology runs deep.

Having done all I could, in the candlelight of early evening, I  finally curled up with my iPod touch under a warm throw in front of the fire. The wind still howled and the rain continued to beat mercilessly on the windowpanes. Just as I was warming to the romance of the moment and looking forward to my talking book, Nova Scotia Power ruined the spell and thrust me back into ordinary life.

As the lights first flickered then came back on, my first sheepish move was to make a beeline for my Mac.

Last Friday was Sasha’s birthday although when he arrived back here that night from his work in the city, he was far too exhausted to celebrate anything. The film business, whenever there is any, is hell on domestic life.  Snowbound since the previous Tuesday, I couldn’t even make my way into town for so much as a bottle of wine so the birthday boy himself brought home Chinese take-out that we ate in our bathrobes in front of the fire.  It was cozy and utterly fine.

With the loss of a beloved llama and the sudden craziness of the new work routine, I am adjusting to being a film widow somewhat more slowly than I have in the past. It has been awhile and I’d grown accustomed, after so many years, to having another person here all the time. Now things are topsy turvy  again and the realities of country life belong, as before, all to me. After imagining myself in an existence drenched with abstract cerebral activity and contemplations of high art, I now begin each day as the sole caretaker of a mixed menagerie. 

In the course of a conversation I once had with a friend on the subject of equilibrium, we told one another of the particular things in life that were keeping us on an even keel. She had been going through a particularly stressful period in her professional life and found music to be a great leveller whenever her reality sped out of control. I remember telling her then that my own sanity could be defined by that hour or so every morning that I spent in the barn shovelling manure.

As I think about this now, with new callouses forming on my hands, I find myself back again in that simpler, quieter world where the CBC and the other media are the background to my living and not the voices that shape what I perceive and feel. In the world I share with these animals, there are basic requirements for well being and there is Nature, the ineluctable centre of everything else I do.

These are the facts of life. This morning Ceiara’s body lies wrapped in a black plastic tarp in an outdoor paddock just outside the barn. Since Sasha is away until the weekend and it will take both of us to bury her, the bitterly frozen air will keep her from decay. I can’t bring myself to look in her direction.

Every human knows by adulthood these certain truths about mourning - that with death there will be emotional pain, that big hot tears will come often and unexpectedly, and that much time must pass before the memories so newly piercing to the heart will be able to evoke (and be transformed into) smiles and even laughter. One day a lovely warm feeling somewhere deep inside will assure us how lucky we were to have loved in the first place the one for whom today we grieve so much. 

That day will not come soon for me but I have responsibilities here and life has to go on. The other animals still need me.

Feeding time in our barn is an extremely hectic experience, every movement carefully choreographed to minimize the chaos of large hungry animals in lively competition for the food. There is a hierarchy in the herd that needs to be respected, there are special diets for the older animals and for anyone who is thin. There are chickens to feed and eggs to be collected. There are buckets of water to haul. All this must happen in the midst of a sort of free-for-all complete with warning sounds and occasional gobs of spit. Be efficient, keep your eyes open, move quickly and be prepared to duck.

Today when I entered the barn at chore time, I discovered there a silence so pervasive that it took my breath away. As I worked my way, strangely unmolested, through the usual routine - small buckets of grain for the oldest or the thinnest animals, fresh water for everyone, and then mangers filled with hay - I saw the entirety of the female llama herd standing absolutely still, oblivious to my presence and utterly disaffected by their food. To a one, they were huddled together, clustered in the doorway, each facing outward to the black tarpaulin lying before them in the snow. Once again, I couldn't stop my tears.

In stillness they remained there until I finally went away. They will eat when they are ready. Humans, it would seem, have no monopoly on the rituals of loss.

Sasha is in the city today working on a film and I am writing through a veil of tears that somehow will not stop. 

This morning our veterinarian arrived at our barn to administer that painless but fatal cocktail that will terminate an animal’s life. The diagnosis for Ceiara was so dire and the rate of her decline so rapid that it became intolerable to endure. 

By yesterday we were unable to keep her sternal, which means that every time I checked on her she had flopped over onto one side, her lovely long neck no longer upright but flat to the ground. The veterinary examination determined that Ceiara’s spinal cord had been, by whatever means, so badly damaged that she could feel no deep pain in any of her limbs. She would never walk again, never graze in the fields with her companions, never be able to leave the confines of the barn. By this morning she had ceased to eat or drink, her neck curled awkwardly behind her, her big beautiful eyes empty and very far away. 

Over time and over buckets of tears, we have come to see this stage of the journey, replete with all the heartache, as an integral part of the responsibility that accompanies our stewardship of all the living creatures in our care. We are family, after all, and our hearts have beaten in unison for more than a decade. To end her time with us was an anguishing choice and not one taken lightly, but we are long past the metaphysics and the guilt some would have us feel for “playing God.”  It never gets any easier.

Before daybreak this morning as we positioned her listless body in the barn, agreement came without any words. We have loved Ceiara far too long and far too much to let her suffer any further. Although my partner needed to be elsewhere, I was there to cradle her neck, her companion until the moment when she crossed the rainbow bridge. I owed her that much. 

In pacem requiescat, my beautiful girl.

Sometimes the life of the mind has to take a back seat to the life of the heart. As I write this, one of our beautiful female llamas is very ill and the odds in favour of recovery are unclear. 

There is an old saying that “a down llama is a dead llama," but we know that this isn’t necessarily so. However, Ceiara has just gone down and seems to have little if any sensation in both her front and hind legs. We found her this morning at feeding time, lying on her side with her limbs spayed out around her.

Ataxia of this nature is the usual result of trauma to the spinal cord caused by parasitic infection. Since all the animals received the appropriate wormers at the appropriate time, we are mystified as to the cause. We are following a treatment protocol developed at Ohio State University and working with our vet to give the necessary care. Just as with human patients, sores can be the uncomfortable byproduct of lengthy periods of recumbency just as limbs tend to atrophy when they are not exercised. So for the next many days we have our work cut out for us. Food, medications and injections, physiotherapy and lots and lots of love.

One thing we owe to Michael Pollan and his insightful writings on food and the North American diet, is an awakening to the notion that foods are best and most delicious in those times of the year in which they naturally come into season. Although this is on one hand stupefyingly obvious, when the knowledge is focused, as Pollan and others have enjoined us to do, the results can be quite incredible.

Here,  in the full bloom of citrus season, with not much freelance work on the table, we embarked upon the project of making marmalade from the Seville oranges now abundant in the stores. These, we are told, are the very best oranges to use for marmalade. Our results, using brown sugar held to the tart end of the taste spectrum, were dark and bitterly beautiful, leaving us with an unfulfilled desire to make more.

Blood oranges came next. The rose pink product so produced involved less trimming and shredding since whole slices of the unpeeled fruit went directly into the pot, but not before we held a few of them up to window light where their richly mottled colour put us in mind of stained glass. 

From oranges we moved to lemons and limes, producing small precious  batches of both marmalade and curd. My husband, who is the baker at our house, is mastering cream scones, so with tea by the fire in the late afternoons, our madness for marmalade will help take the edge off the long days of winter on the farm. 

Yesterday, which dawned and remained crisply cold and sunny, we drove into Halifax to participate in the anti-prorogation rally organized on Facebook and critically examined of late on almost every news broadcast in the country. I don't think I've pounded the streets politically since the first Iraq war in the early nineties, so it was heartening to see a great turn out and invigorating to be part of a grass roots movement once again.


Given the same response at the other rallies staged around the country, I really hope this government will take heed of all the divergent voices but I really doubt it. Stephen Harper doesn't appear to give a damn about the Canadians who don't vote for him and has little interest in modifying his agenda. Anyway you cut it, he's a "my way or the highway" kind of guy.


In seeking creative ways to be heard, some among us have gone in a slightly new direction, creating a website called Haikus Against Harper, on which people are invited to submit their opinion in haiku form to be added to the site. Here is my own contribution:-

Afghan detainees

Innocent people tortured
Stop the lying now!


While nursing a sore back this past week, I also took advantage of the opportunity to watch Francois Truffaut's wonderful 1973 film, La Nuit Americaine (Day for Night), touted by many to be best movie about making movies around. It was delightful. Married as I am to a property master in the film business, the film made visible for me many of the rhythms and processes that I'd lived with vicariously for many years. It also sparked a renewed interest in French cinema. 


I've already read some historical background and have decided to begin with Truffaut and make a point of watching as many of his films as can be accessed from my real life. Since Truffaut was part of the New Wave of French filmmakers, and a critic before that,  I'd also like to get my hands on the essays he published in Les Cahiers du Cinema. From a farm this isn't going to be easy.

The numbers who have joined the Facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, is growing at an amazing rate and I am, however cynically, riveted to the debate that surrounds the issue on all fronts. If I can’t concentrate any better on my work, I’m going to turn the radio off for awhile and glue my nose to the grindstone. I have deadlines that won’t wait.

Here things are otherwise very quiet. On Tuesday evening, with our friend Peter in tow, we went to see the Coen brothers newest film, A Serious Man, courtesy of the Lunenburg County Film Series. It seems that their work is always good for a spirited debate  which is exactly what broke out as soon as we got out of the theatre. Peter and I were generally very positive and even enjoyed the film for the most part, but my better half absolutely hated it on the grounds that, as film makers, the Coens are inordinately obsessed with violence. I don’t think he’s ever recovered from No Country for Old Men which I also disliked intensely. But then again, I don’t think I’ve ever met a single soul who didn’t love The Big Lebowski and that was done by the Coen brothers too.

Despite the likelihood that they will probably not be kept, New Years Resolutions, at least a few of them, get made around here too. I will watch what I eat, stick with a regular gym schedule,  take a yoga class, join a book club, plant a garden. He will write every day, spend more time in contemplation, keep up with the fencing, do some careful exercise for his bad knee. As a unit, we will entertain more often, see more movies, drive into Halifax more regularly, and get back into the habit of making our own wine. And so on.

In a joint effort to spend less time consuming mindless re-runs and other forms of junk television, we have recently committed to at least an hour each evening of quiet reading in front of the fire. For me this comes complete with a lap throw and at least one cat sitting like a tea cozy on the arm of the couch, near enough that I can just make out the sound of her purr. It’s a Norman Rockwell picture that may or may not last until spring.

My large holiday novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by the late Steig Larsson, is drawing to a close and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. A posthumous international sensation, according to the reviews, it was the first in a trilogy of thrillers written by the Swedish novelist before his sudden death at the age of 50 in 2004. I chose it after reading about Larsson’s career as a journalist, his lifelong fight against racism and right wing extremism, and his creation of a female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander (the girl with the tattoo) who cut very much across the usual grain. She’s a very angry, very punk computer hacker, for one thing.

The book is intellectually complex, tightly plotted and violent in the extreme. The investigative partnership that eventually forms between the male protagonist, Mikael Blomquist, a journalist, and Lisbeth Salander is like none other in the genre. The glimpses into Swedish life and Swedish law are fascinating, but there are so many gruesome crimes perpetrated against women and sometimes animals that the reader literally gets a chill, despite the correct political agenda.

Will I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire? Probably. But not until I’ve put something else in between. This might be a good time to return to the Picasso biographies or the Susan Sontag journals, where any ‘violences’ are not nearly so overt and the subject matter is somewhat closer to home. Sometimes a thriller can get too "thrilling" even for me.