Making trails

I went for my first run in a week today (pleading sick last week with a measly strep). A part of the trail was closed off because they were replacing a major storm drain. Not on the trail, you understand, but beside it. I figure they were worried walkers and bikers would suddenly lose their balance, tumble down the bank, and end up head first in a pipe. Unlike the case with cars, no alternative routes were suggested or provided, just a big yellow sign and a big barricade. This despite the fact that this trail is thicker with commuters at that time of day than the major arterial thoroughfare (or so the city calls it) that runs along in parallel. Unlike the case with cars, we all ignored the sign and hopped the barricade. Pedestrianarchy.

My new life

Apparently, includes much less sleep. I've heard people compare the birth of a book to the birth of a baby. Now I know one more reason why: both wake you up in the middle of the night, demanding immediate attention. So here I sit, at 449 AM, trying to remember what woke me up thinking about the links between Platonic idealism and big suburban backyards. I dreamed of my father last night. I wish he were here to help me laugh at all of this.

The coherence of nature

Yesterday, I fled from grey-streaked office windows into the deeps of Schneider's woods. There's a marvellous tract of forest and field, not very far from the university. You have to know it's there to find it. It's at the end of a long, dirt road. There are no signs, per se, other than the ones that warn off dirt bikes, joggers, dogs, and hunters. The land is privately owned and purposefully left unspoiled for the pleasure of walkers in the summer and cross-country skiiers in the winter. I've known about these woods for years, but only visited once before. When I leapt away from my computer yesterday, I knew that was where I wanted to go, but wasn't sure I would be able to find it. With nothing more than a rough compass direction in my head, I set off through winding country roads. I was there in less than ten minutes. You'd have to know what a hopeless navigator I am to appreciate how remarkable this is.

I ditched the car at the side of the road and staggered into the woods through grass higher than my head. You could make out the remnants of a trail running beside a small pond, but it's pretty clear that these woods are not visited often in the summer. I was surprised and delighted by how quickly the sounds and sights of civilization melted away, leaving me in the company of an orchestra of natural sounds -- the wind in the trees, the calls of a dozen different birds, a cacophony of insects buzzing around my head. It didn't take long for me to fall back into that wonderful state of unfocused attention in which my awareness went from one stimulus to another with an unmeasured ease. It does seem to be true. Like mindfulness meditation, once experienced, these reflective states are a little easier to find on the next voyage. What struck me this time was how well everything that was happening fit together. With minimal intercession from human beings (the main one here being a continued effort to keep the developers at bay), nature builds perfectly interlocking systems and cycles. But this isn't really the surprising part. What surprised me was that when you stop thinking and just watch, listen, feel and smell, it becomes obvious that this is what is going on. You don't need to read a textbook on ecology to feel it in your bones. A sound draws your attention to a branch of a tree, which points to a contour in a field full of wildflowers, from which your awareness is lifted by a pair of dueling butterflies. Everything fits together, building to a powerful resonance that, for now at least, staves off the worst effects of the encroachment of human development. It encouraged me that, with a little bit of help from us, nature has the power to seize hold of even tiny specks of wilderness like this and make them work as they should.

As I left the woods, I could make out the distant roar of bulldozers. The city fears that our steady influx of knowledge workers will slow unless we find places to put new McMansions into which they can pour their earnings. So the weak zoning laws that have protected this region are being softened, blow by blow, like a thousand tiny kidney punches rained down on a flabby opponent by a skilled boxer. The Schneiders have said that if too many suburbs come to dwell here, they will close access to their woods. They're not willing to watch this beautiful buzzing ecosystem degenerate into yet one more suburban dog poo park.

Crashing to earth

I've been sitting here for the last half-hour, feeling an obligation to post some kind of news or reflection, and finding my mental self strangely quiet and bankrupt of ideas worth spending bandwidth on. I've spent the morning on worldly pursuits -- crafting a reply to the agent who contacted me yesterday that strikes the right balance between gush and crust, reading about how the retina works, and how it is designed to extract maximum information from the world with minimal cost, dealing with small and tawdry administrative events. It occurred to me that I have nothing to say today. Then I remembered the day, not so long ago, when I was so burned up with an idea while on a walk along the ocean's edge that I had to stop, fish an old bit of paper out of my pocket and, resting it on a stump, write it down before it went away. Fast forward to today. I drove to work (again) in part because I'm still waiting for delivery of the expensive piece of engineering that will allow me to securely fasten Chinese Wonder Girl to the small of my back as we bike to her daycare centre. I'm trying to remember one single thing that I saw on the way. And I can't. I have what passes for a decent view from my office window. I'm on the 4th floor of a concrete bunker of a building. I look out on some manicured grass, an artificial creek, some new growth forest, many apartment buildings and a great deal of lovely sky. I'm reciting all of this from memory. I haven't looked out that window all morning. Now I'm going to get up from this chair and look for one single, solitary moment of something real that has not been manufactured by the glowing pixel fireplace that resides on my desk, nor channeled into my brain by the incessant chirping of a PDA telling me what, where, and when. Here I go....

....my window blinds have not been raised for some time. They make a godawful skritching noise as I raise them. A bad sign. The window itself is streaked with lines of grey dirt. There was a time when window washers, banging against the walls, would frighten me from my workaday trance on a regular basis. It looks as though they haven't been here for quite some time. Perhaps the window cleaning line item in the university budget has dropped a notch or two, as we continue to try to do more for less. Or perhaps the air is dirtier than ever. Through the grey lens, I see a row of three immensely tall blue spruce trees whose crowns are bent downward by a heavy mantle of cones. I remember once, years ago, somebody telling me that top-heavy cone laden spruce trees forecast a severe winter ahead. It was such a lovely idea that I believed it without any reflection at all, even though it made no sense. Believing things that don't make sense just for fun seems a luxury that we can no longer afford, if ever there was a time we could. Our local library is offering a course entitled "Astrology for Teens." No sense.

Outside my window, down on ground level, I can see people walking about. Their gait seems slow, ponderous and heavy. I wonder if it is very hot. I've been inside this building for hours now. I have no idea what the weather is like out there. If it isn't hot, then these people must be very sad about something, I think. They pass one another, heads bent, not a word exchanged between them. This reminds me of my toddlers, who have not made the transition to an urban setting with higher population density. When we are out walking, they pause to say 'hello' to everyone they meet, and they are stunned when, occasionally, they receive no reply. They stop, turn around, plant themselves on the sidewalk and watch the back of the person who snubbed them, calling hello, hello, hello in louder and more insistent tones until eventually they give up, look at me with a bewildered expression as though this person who has just passed them, though looking like a real person, could not have been a real person because they were incapable of friendly greeting. Bless them.

Enough of this. The physiology of the retina can wait. I'm going outside to use mine.

Holy crap!

I have an offer from an agent. Now I can't think straight.

Boiling frogs

My friend, Richard, sends along an interesting collection of snippets describing an ominous trend for loss of power in large parts of the United States. It seems that St. Louis, Queens NY, San Diego, Orange, have all recently experienced long power outages caused in part by record demand and in part by weather (unusually violent storms.....hmmm). It's funny how we can fail to make the most obvious of connections among such events. I had the same reaction to this as to my still slowly dawning recognition of how many premature deaths are caused annually by dirty air -- about 3.6 million people per year, according to the WHO. The rape and destruction of the planet isn't just some delusion of left-wing pansies. We're living it. And dying of it. Still, the main response seems to be an urge that "they" (whoever...) roll up "their" sleeves and find solutions, air cleaners, new sources of power. Margaret Wente, a columnist for the Globe and Mail (Canada's "National" newspaper) who seems to me to have been put on the planet mostly to irritate me to death, wrote a column on the weekend that plumbed such new depths of idiocy that I found myself cutting it out and taping it to the fridge as a weight loss strategy (bulimia journalistica, it's called). She argued that since most of us prefer whizzing around in cars to any of the more sustainable alternatives (public transit in particular), efforts to encourage people to use alternatives were misguided. Instead, we should be using all that money and ingenuity to make better cars and more efficient highways. You have to pay to read the entire article, but take my word for it....don't.

In my own little life, things continue apace. I have some kind of upper respiratory affliction that has rendered me almost completely mute. I've responded by toiling away in my little garden like a monk on silent retreat, planning little squares of vegetable plants that we'll be eating through the fall. We don't have much acreage here (about the size of one of the larger commemorative postage stamps), but I'm resolved that everybody should grow some of the food they eat. I'm amazed by the interest my children have shown in the enterprise. I suppose that's in part because they're not used to seeing me plunging my arms up to their elbows in rich, black compost -- rather than staring into a computer screen or in repose with a book. But I also think that they have a natural kind of interest in growing things that I should do more to nurture.

The update on Gilbert. He's responding nicely to the palliative steroids. His life won't be any longer for it, but he'll live out his remaining days like a bouncy puppy.

Waiting

I'm trying to work but distracted by the feeling that I'm waiting for something. I'm waiting for some word on my manuscript. I'm waiting for some word on a query about a grant proposal that, if it went ahead, could help shift me into a different orbit. I'm waiting until it's a decent enough hour to eat my lunch without fear that I will starve to death mid-afternoon. I'm waiting for the tune of The Devlins' "Waiting" to stop playing endlessly in the back of my mind. It might be a long wait for all of these things. Longer than I've got. The air is getting worse.

On my run this morning, I was trash talked by an old woman in an electric wheelchair because I took a walk break. She punched me. Really. Right in the arm. The idling oxygen truck was still at its post. I can judge the quality of the air here by how loudly I wheeze during my run. There's a father and daughter team in town who go bike riding wearing gas masks. What is now a statement of protest may soon be an essential sports accessory. I'm sure the Swatch people will be all over it, designing decorative cover plates for ventilators. Nike commercials may look a bit different.

deja vu all over again

Funny, after the pictures I posted yesterday, that this picture should be featured as the image of the day on Wikipedia. In Gormley's version, the figures are submerged and revealed as the tide ebbs and flows. I like that idea.

I'm too bone tired to put together much of a post tonight, just a few random reflections. The fatigue comes mostly from my slow but steady re-entry into the world of ultra-inclusive fitness (and I mean this in the Darwinian rather than the cardiovascular sense). As my two teens re-enter my life after spending the past year with their mother here in Ontario, I find that my early mornings are filled with the frightening energy of two toddlers and my last few semi-cogent thoughts before collapsing in bed are filled with complicated discussions of the logistics and economics of getting my oldest child into and then through university. The middle hours (as in at this very moment) are filled with the more commonplace wrangling with "middle children" (what a hateful term that is) over such matters as whether one should be allowed to have cake and ice cream after 9 pm on a night before an early morning daycamp.

We met with our lawyer today to put together an updated version of our will. In preparation, I printed off a summary of my employment benefits that began with a list of my dependents. As the long list of offspring whirred out of my printer, I clutched my stomach. Can it really be possible that I have this many dependents? I'm not even a grownup myself! In the office, we had to walk ourselves through every conceivable grisly scenario. Both of us die at once. One dies, but the other is left in a terminal coma. Both die and so do some but not all of our children. It reminded me of the ghoulish wonder of those school accident insurance forms I used to bring home from school as a kid, with the schedule of benefits tallied according to which parts of your body were lost. My friends and I would try to calculate what combination of lost fingers, toes and eyes might be used to cobble together enough money to make a one way escape to a South Sea island. In the end, we concluded that if we all chipped in some body parts, one of us could make a getaway.

Looking backwards

I know I'm supposed to be looking forward, but....


Can anyone spot the Walden stone?


Can Chinese wondergirl find it?


Wandering into the ocean one last time. For a while.


The fog never gave up. And we loved it for clinging.


Just one last walk down the beach....


Hmmm...still seems to be foggy


Preteen saying goodbye to the ocean. Apparently, she no longer hates it here.

Bad news for Gilbert (and all the rest of us)

Our dog, Gilbert, has advanced malignant lymphoma. No telling how long he has left, but probably weeks rather than months. I think we're going to pass on all the heroic options and just let him wind down gracefully, spending as much time as possible in the arms of my young son, who absolutely adores him. Pardon me if I don't say anything clever today. Perhaps some pictures later tonight.

Reflections on urban parks

This morning, I went for my first run since moving to our new digs. One thinks of every excuse in the book for avoiding physical activity when the thermometer is topping 30 degrees and the humidex is nudging 40 degrees, but today, after carefully revising the phone # on my toe tag so that if I stroked out in the park they'd know where to dump the body, I hit the pavement.

I ran over to a shared use trail that passes near my house. Once I've got the wonder contraption that attaches more toddlers to my bike (I think for an expenditure of just another coupla hundred bucks I'm there), I can use this trail to get partway to daycare and all the way to work. Today, I tried not to think too much about the fact that this trail, called the Iron Horse Trail, exists because of railroad tracks that were ripped out a few years ago, before it occurred to the bright sparks in power here that an LRT (light rapid transit), following precisely the same route as the Iron Horse, would be just the thing to revitalize the core. Never mind, we'll probably never see an LRT here until the population doubles, by which time I hope to be long gone from these parts.

In my book (still no word from that agent...this longer than average delay could be either good or bad news), one of the things I talk about is the importance of finding ways for urban dwellers to make contact with natural settings by introducing wild spaces into the city. Of course, this is not a new idea -- planners everywhere understand the importance of greenspace for quality of life, though the way that this space is instantiated is often close to useless (I'm thinking of the narrow strips of barren grass that run behind the backyards of suburban McMansions and the flat, lifeless bits of field that serve for not much more than convenient repositories of dogshit and, after dark, good places for teenagers to enjoy those first few illicit beers). What I'm talking about is the kind of greenspace in which you can become disoriented and lost in natural growth, yet never really be out of the city. All the better if you can work the daily exploration of such spaces into your regular routines of movement -- a jaunt to the store, bank, office and so on. Central Park is a good approximation to this, though a bit too 'built'. High Park in Toronto, last time I was there, was actually better, but less central than Central, so not likely to be visited serendipitously. Few urban parks that I've visited come close to the ideal, but good approximations can be found in unexpected places. I found it easy to become lost in a tiny speck of woods near my former home in suburban Kitchener. My wife grew up in a smallish Maritime city that had a large and very wild space that could easily be incorporated into the daily walkshed. As I jiggled down the trail in Kitchener, I noticed that I could force a few moments of disorientation and blissful unfocused attention out of myself, but the main obstacle to this was not the constant visual evidence of car culture (the truck parking lots that back onto much of the trail, for instance), but the uninterrupted sounds of engines. It's very hard to go anywhere at all in the city without being within auditory range of an internal combustion engine. I suspect that one could dramatically enhance the feeling of wildness in the city if there were some way to control the auditory landscape with the same precision used to control the visual landscape. I wonder if the same principle that is used in noise cancelling headphones could be employed on a grand scale to make parks for the ears.

The funniest thing I saw on my run was the big medical gas truck, so busy on this day of multiple air advisories that it had an extra trailer of oxygen tanks hitched to it, sitting in a parking lot, engine idling, no driver in sight (he'd presumably gone to the nearby coffeeshop for a break). If I were not in such a good mood, I would have made this idling truck the subject of my post for the day. But I am. Running, even in air heavy with particulate matter from the Ohio valley, releases endorphins.

The end of food

Near the end of a busy work day yesterday, my wife and I struck a deal. She would round up all of the children from their camps and daycare settings, and I would forage for dinner. Sweet deal for me, I thought. I was being rewarded for having done ALL of the taxiing the previous day, I thought (so much, so far, for my resolution to walk or bike to work. Until I find some way to strap more kids to my body, I'm stuck in the big-ass big-gas minivan). The time was short, so I decided to take a short cut, visit a big city grocery store at the end of a wide, fast four lane roadway. It was somewhat in the wrong direction, but I estimated I'd make up the time by speeding home, just like everyone else seems to do in this city. I forgave myself the slip in values with barely an om mane padme hum. I had hungry children at home. Huge mistake. From the moment the automatic doors sprang open, admitting me into the cool, wide aisles filled with gaudy rectangles of edible products, I felt a cloud forming above my head. The thing is, large grocery store chains have little to do with food and much more to do with speed, lifestyle, survival, and marketing. The spectacle I saw before me consisted of a sea of anxious, harried and hungry parents, rushing in from work to grab something edible that they could get home and get on the table within ten minutes. The products I saw on the shelves had little to do with food and much more to do with organic chemistry. I tried to take respite in the produce section among food I'd be able to recognize, but though the shapes seemed right, the colours were off and the textures were wrong. Tomatoes were too hard to be that red. "Organic" broccoli was tightly shrink-wrapped in about fifty layers of plastic, so it was hard to see what it really looked like. I fled to the natural foods section, buried near the back of the store among lawn chairs and massive shrines to the backyard barbecue consisting of flatbed trucks full of weiners and avalanches of frightening yellow mustard. In natural foods, I found a small bottle of expeller pressed oil, some decent looking tofu and, surprise, a good substantial soy sauce reduced to clear at 99 cents. Combined with my cellulose vegetable products, I had the makings of a decent little stirfry. I cashed out. The soy sauce didn't scan on the laser beam checkout thingie, so a young fellow with multiple facial piercings was sent off to find the price. Nobody bothered to ask me until the cashier and I had been standing and waiting for his return for about five minutes, a long lineup of angry looking young mothers tapping their toes behind me. "It's ninety-nine cents," I said. The cashier nodded. When the others in line realized they were being held up by a one dollar bottle of sauce, the frequency of toe clicking increased menacingly. He finally returned, flicked the bottle along the conveyer belt and muttered "buck ninety-nine." I shook my head. My bet was that he never found the shelf and so made up something plausible. My bet was that he didn't even know there was a natural foods section. You really have to push to squeeze past all that mustard. "Ninety-nine cents," I said, "reduced to clear." He shrugged his shoulders. "Ninety-nine cents, then." He didn't know. He didn't care. Neither did any of the people behind me in line, waiting to pay for their overpriced boxes of microwaveable food. They didn't know what they were buying. They didn't know what they were eating. They didn't care. They just wanted to get back behind the wheels of their large automobiles and drive back to their air-conditioned great rooms. I wasn't hungry anymore.

There's a huge obesity problem in North America. Some people say it's because we like food too much. I think it's because we don't like food enough.

I'm dialed in

After a long dry spell, I've got a nice thick DSL cable plugged into the back of my machine. My workspace is somewhat less than ergonomically sound. I've got a pair of boxes stacked up to make a desk and a kitchen stool for a chair. I'm hiding out in a back corner of the basement. But I'm online from home, which means pictures soon.

I rushed my woofer off to the vet for a biopsy this morning. I'm expecting bad news. We've had our ups and downs but he has been a wonderful dog for us. We adopted Gilbert about 7 years ago. He was a ten-month old puppy who had been a control animal in an experiment at the local vet school. The experiment had involved a trial of a new chemotherapy drug. Gilbert had not received the drug, just a painful series of hip bone biopsies to retrieve marrow. When he came to us, he had lived all of his life in an enclosure with a concrete floor, along with his sister Gillian. Gilbert was well cared for at the school, walked daily by volunteers, and showered with affection by the animal health technicians who cared for him. But he had no family, and he went to sleep every night on that hard floor wondering whether he'd be facing a procedure the next day. He's a hero for what he did. The experiment that he was involved in will ease many other lives, both human and animal.

We chose Gilbert from a large number of dogs because he was about the oldest one who was available for adoption. We reasoned that the adorable little puppies would have no problems finding homes, but an older dog might be cast aside. We didn't like to think of where that might lead. We've always rooted for the underdog, so to speak. Also, I could tell that there was something special about "Gillie Boy" as our kids call him. He's a very gentle soul who is completely happy provided that he has one eye cast in my direction. It used to drive me crazy. Wherever I went in the house, Gilbert would follow, positioning himself in such a way that he could watch my every move. When I worked on the computer in the basement, there was a game we used to play. Gilbert hated being in the basement by himself. When I logged off, and the computer emitted a short tone, Gilbert learned that this was usually followed by my going up the stairs. He learned to listen for the tone, leaping up the stairs as soon as he heard it. We often raced. He always won, knocking me sideways if necessary, tongue waggling all the way.

We went through some hard times, Gilbert and I. I spent a few months cleaning up daily floods of diarrhea while we slowly diagnosed his food allergies. We braved a frightening period of adolescent aggression in which he bit two people hard enough to draw blood. Our vet predicted it would worsen and urged us to euthanize him. We spent the necessary months shielding him carefully from our children and coaching him in gentleness.

Last year, Gilbert had the best year of his life. He went from being a house dog who spent at least 8 hours a day by himself in the house to a beach dog who spent virtually every waking moment within striking distance of his unlikely god, me. With every long wander along the beach, the years fell away from Gilbert. He was as spry and silly as a puppy, grabbing sticks of driftwood, daring me to chase him down to steal them from him, meeting up with a regular assortment of other beach dogs. When he wasn't at the beach, he was usually stretched out on the back porch, watching the river water flow past and listening to the birds.

A few weeks ago, Gilbert left food untouched for the first time in his life. He has lost almost half of his body weight over the course of a year, and all of his lymph nodes are swollen and hard as rocks. He still manages a gentle tail wag and an occasional silly dart around our small yard, but he's become an old man before my eyes. We think we know what's wrong, and if we're right he's going to go very quickly. Perhaps, like us, he didn't want to leave Nova Scotia. We'll go back there someday, but he won't get that chance.

I watched my kids standing in the doorway this morning as I took him to the vet. Their little brows were furrowed with worry, but they all looked fiercely brave. Gilbert's coming home tonight to what I expect will be a tumultuous greeting. And then, after the kids are all in bed, he and I are going to take a walk through that beautiful cemetery and have a talk about old times.

Reasons we deserve extinction, Part 3

I'm both new and old around here. I've lived in this town for 14 of the last 15 years and, remarkably, have only recently discovered that I lived most of those years in the wrong part of town. This city, like so many other North American urban centres of its kind, was built during times when both land and energy were ridiculously cheap, and when, surrounded by lush farmland, it seemed impossible that we would ever be able to outstrip our resources. Our response to that seems to have been, for the most part, to spread our big behinds out over as much land as possible, paving it as we went, and then populating it with agonizingly ugly grey squares of concrete with bright coloured signs outside advertising wares that we don't really need at all. I tell you. There are parts of this city that are so ugly that, when I drive through them (and driving through them is really the only option), I just want to slam down the accelerator and close my eyes (thank goodness for those side-impact airbags).

Now, in some small parts of this city -- such as the one that we've just moved to -- there are some small signs of sanity. Some of the powers that be have realized that the future of this region rests on its ability to attract skilled knowledge workers and that such rare types will only remain in cities that are not boring or deplorably ugly. In response to this progressive bit of thinking, there's a resurgence in the downtown core -- restaurants, cafes, small independent retailers, conversions of old industrial buildings into trendy loft apartments -- good mixed use areas.

There are also some large parking lots fronting on the main downtown thoroughfare. Some of these are fairly new, such as the massive one built by a large insurance company so that its employees could presumably take advantage of their life insurance benefits by driving right up to the front door of their building, shortening their lives by at least a minute for every minute of time saved by not walking. Another parking lot, near my house, is a vestigial lot from what used to be a large-ish downtown shopping mall which, predictably, was a complete disaster from the time that it was built. Now, the city would like to turn this parking lot into a town square to attract markets, buskers, meeters and greeters and perhaps include a fountain or two and a skating rink in the winter. The new plan would see the parking areas reconfigured so that parking would be near the back and sides of the area fronting the main street. At a recent council meeting, a group of downtown retailers raised sufficient ruckus over this to postpone a decision on the square for at least six months. Their argument? That patrons who had to walk an extra few dozen metres to their store would stop coming, choosing to drive out to the big box store malls where parking is more plentiful. Net loss of downtown parking spaces anticipated to be lost as a result of the town square development? 3. One. Two. Three.

The beer run

We ate take-out again last night. Fish and chips (fish from the Pacific Ocean -- good little swimmers, not at all local) scattered all over the kitchen floor. The dog had a field day. I think he may be dying. I didn't have the heart to stop him. After dinner, we set out on two expeditions. One contingent, led by fearless mom, set off for the grocery store to unleash a little Asian ball of energy among the carefully stacked rows of canned peas. The other, led by hippie prof, set out for the beer store for the more essential supplies. Pre-teen in training, seeing me reach for the car keys, protested. "I thought we'd walk!" Pleased, but knowing that we had about 3 miles of hiking ahead of us, I stowed the keys and pulled out the stroller for boy wonder. We walked past crazy little antique stores, broken down auto shops, a factory or two, some vacant industrial land soon to be filled with trendy loft apartments that will hopefully attract all of the wonderful things that young urban professionals like to fill their time with. On the homeward run, we meandered through tiny little backstreets of war houses that seemed like a kind of North American hutong, filled with the smells of dinner and the sounds of shouting children. We completed the homeward leg with a long walk through the cemetery. I'd never thought of cemeteries as greenspace before, but this one, with its beautiful old benches, massive hardwoods, birds, squirrels, and cooling breezes, is a magnet for dogwalkers, skateboarders, and beershoppers. When I saw it for the first time, it seemed incongruous, if not even a little inappropriate. Now it just seems right. I'd want my body buried in a place like this I think (but lose the big stone and just stick me in a bag to decompose quickly so kids can run on the grass I'd help grow).

As we settle in, we are finding that we're not quite as close to some things (the beerstore) as it seemed at first. But the walks are filled with such interesting sights and sounds, that even long ones seem pleasant and refreshing and the time passes quickly. An 8 year old pre-teen apprentice, who wasn't even going to get a look at the beer (well, ok, just one little sip), was disappointed when the walk was over. Life attracts life, as Jane Jacobs used to say.

Sounds

One of my most vivid recollections of the past year has to do with my heightened sensitivity to sounds. A bird call, even a simple little sparrow tune, would stop me in my tracks. He's talking to me, in a way. How rude to not listen. Though the aural landscape is vastly different, my sensitivity continues. Sitting in my office, I'm so maddened by the buzzing and humming sounds that emanate from my computer that I find myself shutting it off so that I can make contact with the sounds outside. I turn it off between uses. I know this will infuriate the keepers of the network, who like to have continuous access to my keystrokes to ensure that all is working properly. I don't much care. For as long as I can remember, there has been a curious little gonging sound over to my left, rear field. I'd registered some mild annoyance over it once or twice over the past fifteen years. Yes. Fifteen years. I had always inferred that it was some sort of clanging outdoor toy in the daycare playground that sits three floors down from me. Today I stopped inferring. I looked. It turns out that it is the movement of my blinds against a steel windowframe, caused by the air currents of the building ventilation. I just stopped it by raising the blind by about two inches. It seems like utter insanity to have tolerated this sound for decades without exploring its source, but such is the way that attention has been focused in here onto a tiny 17" screen, my portal to the outside world. These are miniscule events, barely enough to register, hardly worth talking about, you'd think. And yet, they remind me of so much that has changed. It's a good feeling.

We're on the march

We're walking. From our house, here's where we walked this weekend:

1. an outdoor jazz festival
2. a new little coffee place with decent espresso and nice gelato for the kids
3. an organic produce store for fruit
4. a small, independent grocer for juice, soymilk, a few other essentials
5. a microbrewery for a box of beer
6. a playground
7. our kids school to check it out
8. a beautiful cemetery, just to have a look. What a wonderful setting to talk to our kids about life and death. We have wonderful kids.
9. an independent bookseller
10. a fair trade craft shop
11. a bank
12. a coffee shop (4 times. coffeemaker still on truck)

A friend of mine asked me whether the last year was beginning to feel like a huge hallucination. It is. It will be important to take the time to think all of this through, do the work that I need to do to seal in the lessons of my sabbatical. I think that once we've established a proper beachhead, gotten our kids into some routines, begun the enormous job of restarting careers (one of my first unwelcomes from the office was the news that my research rating had been dropped a bit. Not disastrous or unexpected news, given that my sabbatical has not and will not produce any pointless research papers, but a little pinprick of annoyance nevertheless. Over the next 3 years, this will cost me a few thousand dollars in salary. If I had stayed home, slaved in my lab, pumped out papers that nobody will ever read, I would be more highly valued here), it will be slightly easier to focus on the sea and sand that we left behind, how it is connected to what we have here, and how we can cling tightly to the slender thread that binds us to it and to each other. I know we can do it.

rumours of my demise

Happily, they've been exaggerated wildly. (Thanks for the messages of concern.) We've arrived. Just barely. We have keys to a house that we love and last night, for the first time, we all slept in it. Some of us slept on floors, some on air mattresses, and some on mouldy old bits of foam. But we're here. So far, its not so bad. Our neighbours are lovely, the street is as beautiful in summer as we'd hoped it would be. Big old trees with gracefully arching green branches bowing over the road. The area teems with children. Most who can (i.e. those without roaming dogs to worry about) have popped out sections of fence so that all yards can be shared like one big park. Last night, one of our kids played hide and seek among the yards until well after dark with about a dozen other kids ranging in age from 5 to 12. Everyone got along.

We have a hot tub. When we bought the house, we thought this might be a cool thing to try. Now, the reality is sinking in about the contrast between the tub and our values. The thing is wonderful to soak away aches and cares, but it eats chemicals and it sucks electricity. Two of our neighbours have already said, with that certain tone, "so...you have a hot tub?" We love that our neighbours hate the tub (for what it says about their values) but we aren't quite ready to give it up without playing with it first. We wonder, can there be an environmentally friendly tub? Can you heat with solar and keep clean with regular salt? We'll see.

We suspect there may be other reasons for the neighbourhood angst about the tub. We've heard sad stories of deep, dark sexual secrets involving our house, the neighbourhood and, not impossibly, we think, the tub.

As far as bringing Nova Scotia back home with us, I think it is too soon (far too soon) to know how that will go. I'm tired, disoriented, and reaching out greedily for old habits that make life easy. But I tell myself that once things settle down a bit, I can think seriously about how to make a more mindful and ethical existence here. But if its this hard to monitor the footprint of a family of 8, how hard for a street, a city, a country, a planet? Back among hundreds of thousands of other people, the problem seems impossibly large and makes me feel like giving up. But I won't.

Still no internet at the house, so fewer posts here and less time to respond to emails when I'm at work, but in another week life should be on a firmer footing. My coffee maker arrives in another 2-3 days. That will help. A lot.