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.