The Night Clerk at L. L. Bean
   (for Huey Crisp)

His phone rings almost all night,
as measured and intense
as somebody smoking a cigarette.
Taking an order for a monogrammed dog bed,
he remembers the time
a fox watched him, motionless,
from the edge of a field.

This is sometimes how grace comes to us,
sharp and fleeting as a paper cut.


Why I Get Up Each Day

Tomorrow, maybe, or today
sunlight will discover one red leaf.
The sound will shatter crystal. 

 -Jo McDougall, 2001

Pitch

Lay it down, the shimmering glass.
The hooded flickering of the flat is for you, the
--------------------------hooded flame of the hole.
Way out there, don't tell.
You can see winter's limp and unshavedness
----------------moving on the hills; it doesn't
-------------------------know where to put its body.
Dark shifts of cranes in the valley.
Be quiet. Move up along the coyote edge, come up
-------------------along the left-hand bank to the best geese place
----------------------------------near the Métis winter camp graves.
Experienced light cruises the clay banks.
You must be this without knowing you are.
The river is gleaming with falling down,
-----------------------gold scar of current on its back.
Sandhill cranes on the dock scruffed islands.
A bigger dark comes in from a further place.

-Tim Lilburn, 2007

Last summer I made a post about making apple butter; it was my first foray into canning, and I would go on to make and can another batch of apple butter, huckleberry jam, blackberry jam, cranberry sauce and tomato sauce (that was before I was warned about the dangers of botulism when canning tomato sauce; I didn't have a problem, but I probably won't be doing that in the future). I lugged the jars with me cross-country and doled them out as gifts; as my stockpile slowly dwindled away I didn't quite forget about canning, but I didn't feel compelled to can anything--mom made dilly beans and strawberry jam, and I wished we had picked enough wild blueberries for jam, but that was about it.

Then summer started winding down. Then I found a recipe for peach butter, which I made (peaches were on sale for a dollar a pound), which reminded me how good apple butter had been in oatmeal and on bread. And I finished the jar of dilly beans I brought from home and got  the idea of zucchini dill pickles stuck in my head, so it was like if-you-give-a-moose-a-muffin on several levels. The short version, here, is that I've been canning: two quarts of pickles, three pints of apple butter, about the same of peach butter. I'm wondering about adding bread-and-butter pickles and pickled beets to the store as well; it's hard to explain how satisfying it is to have things in jars, to know that I can keep this indefinitely. Those apples that were spilling out of my backpack when I got home from the farmers' market yesterday will now stay with me over winter, no worries. I have strawberry jam from home as well, made from berries mom and I picked in the Berkshire hills, and it tastes like summer. I'm glad I'll be able to keep summer around for the long Saskatchewan winter, which maybe explains why I'm suddenly stockpiling like a squirrel. I think Greg Brown has a song about this. (And The Gourds have a song about pickles.)

Harvest

A six-cylinder car and two Fords in the middle of
------the fields
In every direction as far as the horizon the slightly
------slanting swaths crisscross in a wavering
------diamond-shaped checkerboard pattern
Not a tree
From the North comes down the rumble and rattle of the
------automotive thrasher and forage wagon
And from the south come twelve empty trains to
------pick up the wheat

-Blaise Cendrars

Childhood Stories

They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium
and we all rose into the air,
the same room where they demonstrated
pow-wows and prestidigitation.

But not everyone believed it.
That was the most important lesson
I learned—that a truck driven by a dog
could roll down a hill at dusk
and roll right off a dock into a lake
and sink, and if no one believes you
then what is the point
of telling them wonderful things?

I walked home from the pow-wow
on an early winter night in amazement:
they let me buy the toy tomahawk!
As soon as I got home I was going
to hit my sister with it, but I didn’t know this.

-Matthew Rohrer, 2001

Well, I made it. Here are some pictures from the journey, which can be loosely sketched as running from Massachusetts to Chicago, Chicago to North Dakota, and North Dakota to, finally, Saskatoon.

More to come as I gather my bearings and settle in for the long haul, two years of actually living here.