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.