damned dog

These two stood, half in and half out of the water, for three hours today while the neighbours Shepherd menaced them from the top of the dike. They were afraid to move out of the water and the dog was smart enough to listen to their growls and hisses and not take them on. In the end I locked the mutt in the barn for an hour so these raccoons could be on their way. Another small drama on a cranberry farm.

We should start harvesting somewhere around the twentieth of October. Everything is ready and now it is just a matter of waiting. Of course I fret about how things will go. Just my nature, I suppose.

I am now three weeks into mentoring our EfM group at St. George's. Melody provides a good strong lead and the group is forgiving of my early short-comings. The great thing is that I am enjoying the lessons as much now as I did when I took them. Pretty neat. I think so much hinges on experiencing what another sees in the program and then examining that in contrast to what I see.

dunging out

For ten years, give or take, I've been drawn along a faith journey.

For ten years I've struggled to make meaning of my life as I lived it during those years between the day in my seventeenth year when I turned my face away from my faith and the day in 1999 when I stepped onto the pathway of faith again.

Today I spent two hours dunging out Grandma Knight's battered old hope chest.

For the past thirty plus years this wooden box has served as repository for stuff that I couldn't throw out. Today it is empty and two garbage bags await a run to the tip.

What a collection!

Expired drivers licences and hunting licenses and car insurances papers and bills of sale for a dozen or more vehicles, owned, used and gone.

Three marriage certificates.

Copies of three sets of divorce papers and the bills for securing those divorces.

Hundreds of, not quite good enough for the album, photos spanning three marriages and a dozen work sites.

Negatives of photos kept and photos long lost. Never to be re-developed.

Clippings from newspapers. Whole newspapers. Yellowed and brittle in some cases.

The account of my only arrest (Public Mischief: I was 19 and the price was 3 months in the can or a five hundred dollar fine. Back then the courts believed in big sticks!)

The account of my son's first arrest. (It was a shock to open the paper that day and see the he was a known heroin addict and drug dealer. (3 months, 1 year of probation.)

The whole Victoria Times Colonist from the first moon landing.

The same paper from Pierre Trudeau's funereal date.

The Vancouver Sun with a front page photo of a group of us from Local 40 rallying outside the offices of some desperately evil employer.

Memberships in shooting clubs, hunting clubs, camp grounds, canoe clubs, book clubs, music clubs... these must be who I thought I was.

Scads of paper from UVic documenting my short foray into university life before a good job in the bush called me away.

Journals from a dozen different points in my life. Pages where I read back and shudder at my immaturity and where the pattern of failed relationships can be seen, book to book, to repeat over and over.

Letters ranging over twenty-five years from, and in some cases copies of letters to, girlfriends, wives and lovers. Ah, to be able to steal a scene from a movie and go out and say, I'm sorry.

Stuff from when I cooked for a living, from when I worked building log homes, from when I gardened, from when I worked for a union, from when I fancied myself a budding poet.

Credentials and invitations. To the Older Boys Parliament in Victoria, to Synod in Toronto as a guest ( not quite old enough to be a youth delegate, if they had such back then), to the Lieutenant Governor's New Years Tea, to Diocese of New Westminster Synod, to the Union's International Convention, to Mt. View's 20 year reunion, to attend court to deal with this or that motor vehicle infraction...

What would all of this mean to my girls if I dropped dead and they had to rummage through it? I doubt that much of it would change how they see me. I suppose they would laugh a bit and perhaps cry a bit and then do what I have done...two garbage bags.

All the while that I spent emptying the box I kept thinking of Zoe Fetherstonhaugh, a parishioner at St. George who died in January of this year. It was her wish that the following poem be read out at her funereal:

Dust If You Must

Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be better

To take a picture or write a letter,

Go to whist or plant a seed.

Ponder the difference between want and need.

Dust if you must, but there's not much time,

With rivers to swim and mountains to climb.

Music to hear and books to read,

Friends to cherish and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the worlds out there

With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair,

A flutter of snow, a shower of rain.

This day will not come round again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind,

Old age will come and it's not kind.

And when you go and go you must,

You, yourself will return to dust.

Today I dusted. Thanking God that it was time to stop dragging this stuff along. Thanking Zoe for the poem and wondering at the beauty of the love that informs relationships n our Christian family. Now there are all of those other things to do. Life...

Now here is a beauty! We get a good number of bears coming down from the hills to partake of the bounty of the neighbour's blueberry fields. The farm next over has strung electric fencing for the past two years to deter the critters, but the neighbour, lacking common sense has set the line at the innermost edge of the municipal ditch. The bears work up a fair speed going down into the ditch from the roadside and go through the fence at the field side at top speed, hardly feeling the charge in the wire as their passage breaks it.

I suppose the blueberry grower will figure it out sooner or later...or maybe not. Though I have read reports of bears in the eastern US eating cranberries we've never seen them do this at our farm.

Rumours had the largest farm in our area shooting half a dozen bears last year. It is indicative of how screwed up our environmental protection laws are that such is allowed to happen. There are relatively inexpensive ways to discourage bears from getting in amongst the crops, none of which require killing the critter. I have always figured that by the simple expedient of requiring farmers to report publicly when they shoot bears or coyotes in the fields the carnage would cease. The citizenry should be appalled that for the simple presence of a bear in a blueberry field the response has to be, bang, bang.