Author: marianlthorpe

Not content with two careers as a research scientist and an educator, Marian L Thorpe decided to go back to what she’d always wanted to do and be a writer. Author of the alternative world medieval series Empire’s Legacy, Marian also has published short stories and poetry. Her life-long interest in Roman and post-Roman European history informs her novels, while her avocations of landscape archaeology and birding provide background to her settings. As well as writing and editing professionally, Marian oversees Arboretum Press, a small publishing imprint run as a collective. Marian is currently writing Empire's Heir, the sixth title in the Empire's Legacy series.

Today There Was Birdsong and Wind

June 30, 2024

My head was full of voices. The voices of the complex characters of the book I’ve been editing for the last month. The voices of the characters of my own work-in-progress, the four protagonists jostling to be heard. Real life voices from my volunteer work; voices from the books I’m reading or listening to, voices from the tv shows I’m watching. Family voices. Friends. I needed silence.

Today dawned windy and cool, a day stolen from fall. The foot pain that’s been plaguing me for the past two weeks has gone, rest, exercises and new orthotics doing their job. A day for walking, then. (Not too far, so I don’t aggravate the foot again.) It wasn’t until early afternoon I actually escaped my desk for the Arboretum, hoping the cool, occasionally showery day meant it would be fairly empty.

It was. I walked the internal trails, rather than the perimeter, which is always busier. A house wren chattered at me; indigo buntings and redstarts sang from cover. From the canopy, a red-eyed vireo repeated ‘see me see me see me please’ over and over. There were no voices, human or imagined or electronic.

I saw a couple of people, exchanged quick ‘hellos’. The only other mammals were squirrels. I took pictures of wildflowers: in this regenerating old-field ecosystem, they’re the immigrant flowers of southern Ontario: Queen Anne’s lace, birds’ foot trefoil, vetch, clover, ox-eye daisies.

When I reached my favourite bench, with its view over grassland and bushes, I sat. An eastern kingbird hunted insects in graceful swoops. Butterflies flitted from flower to flower. A crow called. Bees buzzed; a chipping sparrow echoed them with its tree-top trill. No one disturbed me.

I didn’t sit long, maybe fifteen minutes. My mind stayed quiet. Has stayed quiet, so far. Tomorrow there are characters to listen to again, and friends, and the ambient hum of the cafe where on Mondays we meet to write and then have lunch and talk. It’ll be fine. Because today, there was birdsong and wind.

Season’s Change

June 19, 2024

Two flotillas, one of canoes, one of Canada geese. The geese and the canoeists and kayakers on this stretch of river where the Speed and the Eramosa meet are forgiving of each other, tolerant. The geese are used to getting their way on land: walkers and cyclists circle wide around them, and cars routinely stop for the parade of adults and goslings crossing the road. But in the water, there’s a greater equality.

Astronomical summer starts tomorrow. (Meteorological summer is nineteen days old.) I haven’t been birding in some time, not properly, except for a walk in a riverine woods southwest of Cleveland last week. Carolinian forest mixed with some areas of succession from pond to marsh, and alive with birdsong that evening. Veery, blue-gray gnatcatcher, catbird, song sparrow. A redtail circled above us, and a red-winged blackbird carried a fat grub into the cattails for its nestlings. There were no mosquitoes.

Nor are there here, which worries me, especially in a wet spring. And not just mosquitoes: my car windshield, on a 1000 km round trip, had minimal bug splatter, not even enough to wash it. What else I notice, over river and pond, is a dearth of swallows. There are a few, tree and barn and rough-winged, but only a few. No insects, no swallows. I’ll be downtown tonight in the evening for a writing event. Will the swifts be hunting overhead, their high chatter announcing their presence, or will they too be missing?

My job this week, when June temperatures are reaching the high 30s (that’s Celsius) and with a humidex (aka ‘realfeel’) up into the 40s, is to keep the birdbath full. Even on a day of normal summer warmth the squirrels – red and grey – and the chipmunks, and the doves and goldfinches, robins and grackles – can empty it by midafternoon. I expect nocturnal visitors too – raccoons, perhaps possums – searching for water, although they, like the fox that trots by in the early morning most days will access the ponds.

What will this summer bring? The meteorologists are uncertain (of course) but the best guess is for hot and humid, weather that will bring severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. The summers of my childhood in the most southerly tip of Ontario, magnified and extended. The fox will hunt from dusk to dawn, and retreat to its den or a hollow under tree roots during the day. Squirrels will lie along branches deep in the canopy, flat and panting; the chipmunk will take refuge underground. Birds will fall quiet; in the deep summer silence, only insects (are there any?) will be buzzing, stridulating, whirring. This is what I remember. This is not what should be, here north and east of Carolinian Canada. This is what we have done.

What I’m reading:

Little Toller, which, I believe, began life as a bookshop and is now a publisher of nature writing, also has on on-line journal called The Clearing, focused on writing about place and landscape. They published an anthology this year. I’m part of the way through it, taking my time with each piece. Thoughtful, lyrical, saddening, clear-eyed, these are essays to consider and reflect on.

In my other life as a writer of fiction, I often suggest to developing writers with whom I work to read about place and landscape, to understand how it shapes a person; that what looks bleak to one person is a place of calm to another; to see the histories and the stories underlying the land. This anthology would be a rich source of reading for that purpose too.

What I’m listening to:

Drawn from the words and illustrations of Robert Macfarlane’s and Jackie Morris’s books The Lost Spells and The Lost Words, Spell Songs is purely wonderful.

Read more about its creation – and order it – here.

I found the album when my latest book, Empire’s Passing, was in the proof stage. One song – The Last Blessing – changed the final scene in that book, made it richer; another song, Curlew, has an oblique reference in the new book-in-progress. But even without that inspiration, I would love this album for the beauty of its lyrics and music.

Spring, Rewound

April 21, 2024

When we left the UK on April 11^th spring, at least in Norfolk, was well underway. Birds were claiming territories, wrens and chiffchaffs singing and singing. Jackdaws carried nesting material; med gulls clustered in pairs at Snettisham, and the black-tailed godwits had turned their rich chestnut. Buff-tailed bumblebees foraged among blackthorn and Malus flowers, and the yellow flowers of early spring brightened the ground, coltsfoot and dandelions, primroses and cowslips, and in the wetlands, kingscup.

Eight hours on a plane, London to Toronto, and someone’s hit rewind. Not by a lot, this year: spring is early here. On the 21^st, as I write this, the first of the ornamental cherries that line our streets are in flower. But the kingscup – or marsh marigold, as it’s called here – in Wild Goose Woods is still in bud, although I expect it to flower this week.

Ornamental cherries, Guelph, April 20. My photo.

I heard my first pine warbler this past week, and saw my first myrtle (yellow-rumped) warbler, watched tree and barn swallows dancing over the Grand River and phoebes flycatching from low branches in the maple swamp. Canada geese are hatching goslings, male goldfinches are moulting into summer plumage, and red admiral butterflies – maybe emerging from hibernation, maybe migratory – fluttered along the path we walked Friday, high above the Eramosa River. Bloodroot now stars the forest floor in Victoria Woods.

Red Admiral (*Vanessa atalanta*); my photo

Twenty years ago, or perhaps thirty, I used to get impatient for spring here; growing up in Essex County, by mid-April spring was much more advanced. Now, looking at e-Bird checklists for Point Pelee, I’m not seeing the same differences. With a couple of exceptions – blue grey gnatcatcher, common yellowthroat – the returning bird species look pretty much the same. But a snapshot is misleading: a quick look back through e-Bird records finds a yellow-rumped warbler reported on the 7^th of April.

Myrtle (Yellow-rumped) Warbler
(*Dendroica coronata coronata*), by Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The 7^th of April. A yellow-rumped warbler. Some forty years ago or so, we had an Ontario record-early pine warbler – always the first to return – at Long Point on the 6^th of April.

I won’t belabour the reasons; we all know them. But I wish I’d never been impatient for spring; I wish my first sight of a yellow-rumped warbler could be one of pure delight, not shadowed by ‘but it’s too early’.

I wish a rewind was possible.

Learning to Listen

April 16, 2024

Thoughts of an Aging Birder

I’m standing on a boardwalk through a wet woodland: deciduous trees, damp soil, emerging plants, ephemeral ponds. Superficially, it’s not so different from the boardwalk through wet woodland I was standing on less than two weeks ago. One on the eastern side of the Atlantic, a kilometer from the North Sea; one on the western side, 1500 km inland. Different ecosystems, certainly, but what I notice today is the difference in the soundscapes.

Boardwalk, Wild Goose Woods, University of Guelph Arboretum.
My photo.

Recognizing all but the most common bird songs is a skill that has eluded me for fifty and more years. But at sixty-six, my vision a little compromised both by vitreous detachment and its resultant floaters, and by incipient cataracts, I’ve been trying harder to sort out the songs, to identify by sound. (My aging and arthritic spine also appreciates not having to hold up even my light Swarovski 10 x 32s as much, too.)

My hearing remains good, thankfully. In On the Marsh, Simon Barnes writes of friends who can no longer hear the high contact calls of goldcrest; the screams of swifts overhead, he tells us, are inaudible now to Sir David Attenborough. That day will no doubt come for me, but it’s not here yet. I can still pick out goldcrest in England, and its almost-doppleganger cousin the golden-crowned kinglet, here in Canada.

In the first week of April, the soundscape at RSPB Titchwell was dominated by onomatopoeic chiff-chaff calls. European robins sang from low bushes; a blackcap added its melody from a higher perch. Wood pigeons, endlessly cooing, added a bass line, punctuated by the equally endless screaming of black-headed gulls and the occasional explosive chatter of a Cetti’s warbler.

Red-winged Blackbird male, Point Pelee National Park, Ontario, Canada. Photo by Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Here in Guelph, on the boardwalk through Wild Goose Woods a few hours after dawn, the dominant sound is the chirr of red-winged blackbirds, the screeching laughter of northern flickers a close second. Another bird calls its own name: fee-bee, fee-bee. American robins sing cheerily from mid-level branches, and from the nest on the light standard over the playing fields I hear an osprey’s plaintive cry.

I’d know where I was—roughly—from either soundscape. While I’m focusing more on what I’m hearing through necessity and a wish to understand more of the landscape I’m moving through, looking at all the parts of the whole and not just on birds (I can identify a phoebe by song at the same time I’m looking at a bloodroot flower unfurling, for example), I’m also thinking about it in terms of my other life, that of the writer. Of the seminar on worldbuilding I’ve offered to give here in Guelph in the autumn, and all the things that are part of a convincing fictional world or will evoke a real one. Soundscapes are one of them: part of the whole which both characters and the reader, one hopes, inhabit.

Whether any writer can separate entirely the slice(s) of the world in which they live from their created worlds, I don’t know. I can’t. In this, I can only write what I know. There’s a circularity to this: writing has made me pay attention to aspects of the world I might have not noticed; a lifetime spent outdoors whenever I could informs what I write. The Titchwell soundscape? It has a place in the story that’s beginning to unfold, and perhaps that book will be just a little richer because my aging eyes have made me listen more and look less. I’m fairly sure my life is richer, too.

The Last of Norfolk: March 30 – April 3

April 4, 2024

The last of Norfolk birding for the spring of 2024, at least! We plan, as always, to return.

March 30: A nuthatch yelps from high in a bare oak; coal tits call, ‘it’s me, it’s me,’ from low branches. In the meadow a jay forages among shelduck & Egyptian geese. A silver squirrel climbs a stump. The larches are bright green with new growth; new leaves unfurl on the brambles. We’re walking footpaths and lanes at Houghton, a sheltered walk on this windy day. In the sheep field a new statue stands: the figure of a man, or a cyberman, almost human. “Disconcerting, at dusk,” a woman walking her dog tells us. Later we learn it’s part of a new art installation by Anthony Gormley.

Photo by: Mmparedes, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

March 31: Drove to visit friends, through countryside and villages. Gulls, common and black-headed, followed ploughs. Pheasant and red-legged partridge, shoot survivors, scurried or flew across hedged lanes. The sound of tires and the barrier of glass & steel couldn’t block out the skylarks, singing, singing. A little owl lives in the barn down the road, our friends tell us; it’s driven out the barn owl.

Alpsdake, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

April 1: Footpath birding today, along the old railway line, now part of the Jubilee Trail. In Life Woods, the first mallard ducklings of the spring; on Snettisham common, a green woodpecker yaffles from a utility pole. We walk up into Ken Hill’s pine woodlands. A tree creeper circles the high branches of a still-bare oak. From the western height of land, we look out on the distant marsh and the Wash: it’s too wet still to walk out, without wellies. Shelduck are scattered across the wetland, gleaming white. I think about the torcs of the Snettisham hoard, found by a farmhand ploughing the field below us. I went to look at them (again) at the British Museum last week.

Dr W E Lee / Avenue of Beeches, Edge of Ken Hill Woods. CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

April 2: Walked out between farm fields to the mudflats of the Wash. Wrens sang from bramble or reeds every 50 paces; goldfinches twittered from greening willows. In the sunshine, both stonechats and reed buntings announced themselves, males proclaiming ‘this is my territory’.

rkl, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Where Boathouse Creek joins the Wash avocets and ruddy turnstones fed on the mud; linnets flitted and fed along the shingle foreshore. On the gravel pits, among the black-headed gulls, pairs of Med gulls stood out, tall and proud. Sunshine, water, breeze.

Later, reading this in Simon Barnes’s On the Marsh, I recognized its inherent truth. I delighted today in red kites and marsh harriers, in singing skylarks and wrens, but mourned for the dead or dying oystercatchers on the mudflats, the lack of lapwings wheeling, the paucity of finches, all the losses.

April 3: Last visit to Titchwell today, under showery skies. Rain or no, the day gave us a bearded reedling in a rare fully open view. In the woods, a blackcap sang its bubbling, lilting song; a Cetti’s warbler exploded both into song and into view, briefly. Out on the freshmarsh, among black-tailed godwits turning chestnut and avocets up to their bellies in the water, a lone ruff, its back mottled chestnut & black, probed the mud.

Ken Billington, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But the surprise of the day was a polecat, never before seen, feeding on roadkill at the side of the A149. We circled back at the next roundabout, took a second look. While our brains said ‘pine marten’; sensibility said ‘not a chance’. A little research revealed the identification. Norfolk, it seems, still holds secrets.

Nicolas Weghaupt, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ten Days of Spring

March 30, 2024

March 20: First day of spring, and two magpies in the field beside the track. Two for joy, the verse says. Blackthorn flowering, the hedgerows as white as the gulls following the ploughs. Plant barley when blackthorn flowers, but prepare too for a cold spell, blackthorn winter. There’s no hint of it in the forecast.

March 21: Today brings primroses, pale yellow against the leaf litter of the woodland, and cowslips in a greening meadow. A fox redder than terra cotta emerges from the hedge, sees us, leaps away, its brush full and the white tip gleaming. Chiff-chaffs see-saw in the bushes every twenty paces or so; dunnocks and robins and wrens sing in the spaces between. Willows are greening; the verges are verdant with alexanders, and the fields ring with pheasant calls, survivors of the winter’s shoots.

Primroses on a forest floor.
Alexandra Kaganova, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

March 22 : Greenfinches buzzing all along the footpath this morning; queen bumblebees out foraging; a wood pigeon on its nest. In the next village, magnolia petals litter the pavement, bruised pink and white.

Buff tailed bumblebee on pink ornamental currant flowers; my picture.

March 23: The world is wind-whipped today, clouds moving southwest in towers of grey; blue sky winking in and out. A jackdaw sails by with nesting material in its beak. Petals from the ornamental prunus in the garden blizzard down.

March 25: Marsh harriers drift over the marsh; a blackcap sings in the woods. Brent geese in their evening dress graze the short grass; in the reeds, a Cetti’s warbler staccato song explodes.

Reedbeds under a blue sky half-covered by puffy clouds. (Titchwell RSPB reserve, my photo).

March 26: A continuous chorus today: skylark from the heights; lower, wren & dunnock, robin & chaffinch, blue tit & chiffchaff, late redwings. Bee-loud hedges bright with blossom, hung with butterflies – brimstone, comma, peacock. Buzzards drift in the blue sky.

March 27: The train took me to London and back again. In King’s Cross station, pigeons cooed from atop a sign. From the train, swans grazed in the Cambridgeshire fields; rooks carried nesting material; red kites circled. Willows were greener on the afternoon journey than in the morning.

March 28: A nuthatch yelps from high in a bare oak; coal tits tell the world ‘it’s me, it’s me’ from low branches. In the meadow, a jay forages among shelduck and Egyptian geese. A silver squirrel climbs a stump. The larches are bright green with new growth; new leaves unfurl on the brambles.

March 29: Yellowhammers sing from the hedgerows, still white with blackthorn blossom in places. Hares streak across flinty fields or gather in groups in the young wheat. A pair of lapwings circle and cry: will they nest? (Will the nest survive, if they do?) Oystercatchers patrol the furrows; a line of fallow deer crosses the skyline.

Photo by caroline legg, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

What are the odds? ONE resolution for 2024.

December 30, 2023

As 2024 approaches, my ‘finish by the end of the year’ list is just about manageable. My ‘to do in January’ list is—umm—a little packed. More so than it should be, but it’s so I can take February off completely and go birding in Spain and Portugal.

Except…I have a book coming out in February: Empire’s Passing, the eighth and last of my Empire’s Legacy series. But it isn’t a standalone, and if people who’ve read the others don’t find out it’s out for a few weeks, frankly, so what? Books don’t go bad. My nine-year-old first book, Empire’s Daughter, still sells steadily. There would have been I time I would have worried about not being present online for Passing’s release. That time is past.

I’m making one New Year’s resolution this year: to stop overachieving. This past year is a blur. I spent three months nearly 6000K away from home, dealing with the funeral and settling the estate of a cousin, learning to navigate a new legal and tax system, clearing the house, selling the house. And writing a book, because I had promised it would be out, and I was going to honour that promise.

I also wrote five short stories, four for an on-line magazine (of which I am also the webmaster) and one for an anthology. And edited three other books. And chaired and edited our community newsletter, co-coordinated a writing group, read and reviewed a number of books for a book tour company, drove a van with my niece’s furniture to Nova Scotia, took a cousin on a ten-day driving holiday, developed and ran two full day planning sessions for a community group, gave a guest lecture in Philadelphia, kept up (well, sort of) with my two blogs and my newsletter, and tried to maintain some sort of social media presence. While attempting to learn Spanish, volunteering for another community writer’s group, and doing in-person book sales and open mic nights. Are you tired yet? I am. And not just from this year.

2014 – a decade ago, nearly– was a watershed year for me: a year in which I was diagnosed with Stage 3, high-grade cancer. It was also the year in which my publisher went out of business, the rights to Empire’s Daughter reverting back to me. In that year of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I got Daughter ready for self-publication (I wasn’t going to spend another two years querying again – I didn’t know if I HAD another two years). While renovating the house, driving myself back and forth to radiation (an 80 k round trip, five days a week, for five weeks), and doing almost all the grocery shopping and cooking. Are you rolling your eyes yet? But I was determined. Life went on as close to normal as it could, I learned to create an epub, and then format a paperback, and navigate KDP.

Two weeks after my chemo ended, we flew to Texas to go birding. Then I went back to work for a short time, and took official retirement, as did my husband, on the 15^th of May. The next day, we flew to England for a month. Then we came home, bought a new house in town, and put the country one up for sale. My father had died (at almost 99) that winter of my treatments, and I helped (a bit) with clearing that house, as well as packing up our own,

We moved. I started volunteering with the community newsletter, and with a local writing group. I started the next book, and a blog, and then another one. I walked a lot, biked, and birded. I started editing and formatting books for others, and began a small imprint that has now published my own eight books and five for other people. We went to England in the winter to walk and bird. I took a lot of on-line university courses, on Roman and medieval history, and on landscape archaeology. I read a lot of books, and wrote a few more. They were short-listed for and/or won a bunch of awards, which was nice.

We travelled, a lot: Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia. The Caribbean – ten islands in ten days, or close to it, for birds. Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, for the snow leopard I thought I’d never see. Rome, for me, for research. And always England, for ten weeks or so each January to March.

One year I flew back from England for four days for my brother’s funeral, a too-quick, too-young death from cancer. Then I went back, and kept writing, and walking, and birding, because that’s what I do, and came home and kept on doing what it is I do here, too. You don’t waste second chances, and I got one. My brother didn’t.

And then came COVID, and the world changed. I wrote more books, of course. Social media became more important, just to talk to people and make connections. Zoom became part of my life: the community newsletter meetings, the writing group meetings, even family. Until this year.

Maybe a younger person, or a better organized one, could have juggled things better. Maybe I should have just admitted I’m 65 years old and I don’t have the physical or mental energy I once had. And it did all get done – the newsletter and writing group meetings done across time zones 5 hours apart; the newsletter layouts done and PDFs made and emailed for printing; the social media posts scheduled, the Amazon ads planned and monitored. Books were read and reviewed. Short stories were written. The English estate was settled, the house sold, the legacies distributed. Empire’s Passing was finished, and beta read, and edited (and edited and edited) and formatted. Maps got drawn. I even went birding, and wrote some blog posts, and did all the other things I listed in the fourth paragraph.

But I’m tired, as I said. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. I’ve proven, mostly to myself, that I could do what I always wanted to, and write good books, and the series is done. I’m not planning to stop, but I am going to slow down. (My husband is laughing, by the way. He doesn’t believe me.) More reading. More photography, maybe a return to some artwork and some poetry. Things I’ve neglected. Less productivity. Fewer social media posts, probably fewer blog posts. Some new learning, and some ‘getting to know you’ stories about new characters. Longer walks. A slower life.

Think I can do it?

_{Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay}

December Diary II: At the Turning of the Year.

December 27, 2023

Six days past the solstice, and the daylight lasts a minute longer than it did on that shortest day. We’re still in the period when the change is barely perceptible. It won’t be until early January that the gain will rise to over a minute a day. It feels almost as if the world has paused.

Maybe it’s this sense of stopped time, at the darkest time of the year, that drives so many people to be frantically social, an atavistic response. Safety in numbers, safety in the lights inside and out, presents given and feasts offered to strengthen social bonds.

In nature, it’s a time to be wrapped up tight, if possible. It’s not been cold enough this year for mammals to be curled up asleep in dens or dreys; squirrels are still out foraging, the beavers are still cutting down trees. But most insects are dormant, and seeds wait for spring, on or under the soil, or wrapped in a protective layer of cells soft or hard: berries, cones, shells.

The last few days have been either raining or foggy. Red squirrels seemed annoyed by the weather, scolding at me with more vigour than usual. Smaller birds fed almost constantly: juncos among the grasses; starlings on the berry bushes; pine siskins at the cones. In Wild Goose Woods the drum of a pileated woodpecker searching for insects echoed against bare trunks. Only the crows were apparently unperturbed by the damp.

When I first saw the crows, I thought there were two, huddled together in the fog on the top of a glasshouse frame. Two became three, and three became four. They hopped around a bit, made a few conversational caws. And then they took off, all four of them, with purpose and wild, angry calls, to intercept a raven flying by.

They twisted. It dived. They followed. It ascended. They spiraled upward, still shouting. The spinning, sinusoidal dance repeated three times, until the raven had had enough. It arrowed away, the crows following for a few meters. Then they turned almost as one, and flew leisurely back to perch again, a gang of ruffians causing havoc just for fun.

The raven flew east. As I will be, in just over a week, east and 9 degrees of latitude further north. Where the daylight is an hour less than it is here…but for the three paradoxical months where, here, the hours of sun are longer but the air is colder and the world swathed beneath snow, it will be warmer. There are already snowdrops out, and on fields and in woodland and on mudflats and beaches, the northern birds that have come south to Norfolk from Scandinavia are feeding. Pink footed geese and redwings, shore larks and snow buntings. Godwits and redshanks, and, in numbers beyond counting, golden plover and red knots and oystercatchers on the bare mud of the Wash.

The Shepherd

December 24, 2023

Lost Aviator Coffee was started a few years ago by two pandemic-grounded pilots. They occupy a small repurposed space in the Ward, an originally working-class, primarily Italian-immigrant, section of Guelph. I used to live in the Ward, in a tiny post WWI bungalow. It was the first place we looked for houses when we returned to Guelph. It’s not where we ended up, but I still bike through it almost every day of biking weather, and Lost Aviator is where I buy my ground coffee. Their holiday blend – ‘The Shepherd’ – is what took me there originally.

The seasonal blend isn’t named for the story of the shepherds who saw a star, but for a much newer story: Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd, a story that’s been part of my midwinter celebrations for most of my adult life. In the Victorian tradition, it’s a Christmas ghost story: a post WWII tale of a young pilot flying at night in fog across the North Sea, his fuel down to fumes, his instruments useless – and the impossible rescue that ensues.

It’s a classic story, its writing spare, perfectly paced, understated. Every Christmas Eve – its setting – we light the fire, turn off the lights, and listen to the audio version produced many years ago by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, read by the man who was, for many years, the co-host of As it Happens, the CBC’s national evening current affairs program: Alan Maitland. He was also my godfather.

Not that I really knew him; he’d been a friend of my parents, but had moved away to do greater things at CBC-Toronto than he could accomplish in the little CBC station in Windsor, I suppose. Nor did he do the ‘godfathery’ things some people in that role do. But I do remember meeting him at least once, and so that tenuous connection was there. But ‘Fireside Al’ read a lot of stories on the CBC over the years, and The Shepherd is the only one I listen to, for another, much less tenuous (now) connection. The Shepherd is set over the flat fields of Norfolk – and Norfolk is my second home, a place I know and love. (It was also home to more WWII airfields than any other county of the UK, due to both its proximity to Europe and its flatness.)

There’s not a central point to this little essay, really, except that it’s about connections. Were we playing the ‘six degrees of separation’ game, the folks at Lost Aviator could claim a three-point connection to Alan Maitland — and perhaps a four-point to Frederick Forsyth, if my godfather ever met him. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he had.) In naming their holiday blend after Forstyth’s story, they gained a regular customer. Little things that bring people together, make connections across time and space, from the power of words and imagination: from the power of stories. Which, as the 11th Doctor said, is all any of are, in the end. So make it a good one.

December Diary 1

December 11, 2023

University of Guelph Arboretum: first week of December.

Fifty-four years ago, this place where I walk and bird was officially designated as the University’s arboretum. The land, home first to the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Attawandaron peoples, and later part of the three million acres ceded to the crown by the Mississauga of the New Credit’s Between the Lakes Purchase Treaty, No. 3, had been farmed since the 1850s by the Hamilton family. In 1910, they sold the farm to the Ontario Agricultural College as a research farm.

Traces of this use still remain: a collapsed stone wall – likely dating from the Hamiltons’ years, the old post-and-wire fence lines: these are the most obvious. But other relics are being claimed by the wild, hidden among the trees and shrubs: the gate on the path that used to be a farm road; a cart, left at the side of a field and forgotten; a roller. The metal rusting into the soil, the rubber breaking down, aided by sunlight and bacteria, slowly, slowly.

In these shortening days of December, the fecundity of summer gone and the world laid bare, the processes of decay—a word loaded with negative meanings—are on display. Saprophytes are working their necessary transformation on wood both fallen and standing; unlike the brief fruiting bodies of mushrooms that appear in the autumn, these fungi aren’t ephemeral. They spread along trunks and across fallen logs, lines and layers of living tesserae, rippled and curved.

Hidden behind bark—until it loosens and falls—bark beetles create mazes of intertwining paths on the phloem, a traced, random, undecipherable writing, telling a tale of slow death for the tree, life for the beetle. The Janus-faced interdependence of life and death.

The next ten days will have less and less daylight, until the world turns again and midwinter’s darkness begins to oh-so-gradually give way. But longer days won’t ease the cold and snow for many weeks. Will the young red-tailed hawk who has learned to catch squirrels survive when they’re sleeping deep in their dreys? Blood will stain the snow; scattered feathers tell their tales; trees will be stripped of berries. Curled together in their lodge, surrounded by the ice of Wild Goose pond, the beavers will sleep.

Random Ramblings

thoughts on life, landscape, history, and whisky