Diary entry

The sun filled every room in my house this past Sunday morning. A reprieve from grey-cast skies. After making coffee, the light encouraged me to go out and enjoy it on the porch. Grey woollen tuque pulled down over my ears, covering a mad dog first-waking bad hair look, I wrapped myself in a poncho that came from the woollen mills of Prince Edward Island. Wearing fingerless mitts, coffee mug in hand I headed to a favoured outdoor bench tucked under my son’s tree house that has few visitors these days. He’s sixteen now and the tree house remains mostly as a house of memories.

Tree houses are places removed where imaginations are freed to make them whatever we want them to be at any given moment: A magi’s flying carpet; Jack or Jill climbing a beanstalk; a navigator through the starscape; a wooden sailing vessel on the high seas bound for some warm island and peace, or simply a refuge for those of all ages where the weight of the world is eased.

The tourist guides recommend that if you do travel up the ladder, bring food. Supplies like a sandwich or an apple or a thermos of whatever simply because you will not want hunger to call you back down to earth and interrupt the spell that tree houses offer. When formerly in full use by my son and his friends, the proximity of the tree abode to my kitchen made it easy enough for them to make special requests by simply lowering a basket tied to a rope that made for easy snacks supply if an adult was handy enough to stock it.

From under the tree house I note how a fidgety wind from the northwest has held clouds at bay, leaving an open, porcelain and translucent page of sky. A turkey vulture veers through the stiff breeze as it sails the heavy wind, over swells here, then down into wind valleys there as it circles toward a cadaver that its nostrils have honed in on. Through the air is the scent of deadened earth, pungent in its decay as it revives from the tomb of winter cover; a resurrection of the land of sorts, as fallen grasses slowly rise in the spirit of seasons past.

Songbirds tell of their arrival to our northland, answering from barren branches of apple and fruit trees, of berry bushes still and yet to be awakened to a new season. As I sit, the squirrels, black then red circle back along a trail of high branches stopping to nibble on new buds or to savour the now ascending sap of spring. I‘m reminded that in a few weeks the sheep will be shorn of their dense cover of wool that will then be cleaned and spun and knit into the same textures that shields me from this frigid spring day of early renewal.

Yet, here the sun has called me in order that I am reminded of how our senses of touch, of smell, sight and hearing prompt an inner wakening to a bounty of life that has travelled the seasons since life itself on the planet first began.