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. 

The world outside my windows is a winter wonderland, the kind of landscape that cries out for boots, warm hats, scarves and mittens and the exhilaration of a long walk in the snow. Now past is my favourite part of every year,  when all the  Christmas hubbub and heavy eating are over and there are still a few precious days  that can be devoted to doing exactly what one pleases before the routine of normal life begins anew. 

Today reality sets in. For me this entails some domestic paperwork and the resumption of the legal research that earns me my living. Now that the Land Registry System in the province exists to a large extent online, I am fortunate to be able to work at home,  from a jumbled desk in proximity to my own coffeepot. Unless I have to concentrate deeply, the CBC provides the soundtrack to my work. 

This morning too we drove into Bridgewater to the annual book sale at Sagor’s Bookstore which is, believe it or not, one of the reasons we moved to this area in the first place. Run for over twenty years by Ron Topp and Susan Goodwin, it is one of the South Shore’s greatest treasures, a surviving independent  book shop of incredible variety and relevance in the era of the big chain store. 

The store was full of customers, browsing and chatting and careening cheerfully toward the cash. Since we missed the beginning of the sale, having chosen to remain cocooned here on the farm, the choicest selections had largely been scooped up already by others, but I did come home with  “Cezanne’s Quarry,”  described on its cover as “an elegant murder mystery” based on the premise that the painter, Paul Cezanne, might have committed a murder. Because my purchase was based on a fondness for art historical content and not on any reviews, this may or may not have been a wise choice.

To complete the return to reality was also a reappearance at the gym. Although we live in a small rural hamlet we are fortunate to hold memberships in a state-of- the-art fitness facility in a village some eleven kilometres down the road. Donated by the late lumber magnate whose family mill is the locus of employment in the area, it is well used yet somehow almost always empty when we appear to sweat and moan. This gives the experience a certain luxury unheard of at other facilities in the town.

Now exhausted, with a hot cup of Earl Gray, I plan on cracking the covers of my new book.

It was a perfect New Years day. The snow that began to fall in the early morning continued throughout the day and well into the night. We ate croissants and French scrambled eggs for breakfast, with mimosas and our own home made preserves. In the afternoon, following a ritual we have observed for almost twenty years, we watched Casablanca by the fireplace and sipped prosecco from the lovely stemmed glasses that are so impractical in our everyday life. We also followed Roger Ebert’s commentary on the film and it reminded me again that this should probably be the year that I find the discipline to study the history of cinema and not just think about doing it. I’d like to join a book club too and spend more time in the company of like minded others.

In the small rural community in which we reside, there are no like minded others. Two former urbanites who came to Nova Scotia from elsewhere, we are doomed to be eternally other, ‘come-from-aways,’ outsiders who are never quite going to fit in. As a couple. we are too eccentric, too well schooled, too left wing, too exotic in our tastes, too shy, and too closely bonded to find a comfortable  place in village life. Although I respect so many of the members and appreciate the good work they do, I am not the Women’s Institute type.

We enter this year quietly and with more political frustration than personal joy. The Canadian government, for the second time in recent history, has prorogued our parliament in a shameful attempt to forestall further inquiry into the situation of the Afghan detainees. It is difficult to contain the anger engendered by such blatant contempt for the electorate and more difficult still to think of productive ways in which to channel it.


As I write this, the snow is falling again in what is now predicted to be the "real" storm. I am going to spend the day reading fiction.