West Coast Friends - Again

The West Coast is rich with remarkable vistas – mountain tops from below and above. Ever changing ocean views. So rich with flowers, vegetable gardens – Mary Louise was right, I didn’t really want to know that they were still picking carrots fresh from the garden at Christmas time!

Years ago friends Joyce and Herb retired to this Eden – setting down roots on Vancouver Island. She said that, after struggling with prairie gardens all her life, she was in gardening heaven! Grapes hanging over her doorway!

Friends have left the prairies for Salt Spring Island, the Sunshine Coast and even Vancouver itself! Bill’s Uncle and Aunt have a backyard verdant with blossoms – rhodendrons and clematis to knock your eyes out - and I know that his tomato plants in the slit between the house and the wall will over-produce again this year.

Gordon Lightfoot sang of his friends leaving for California - well, some do come back but there is something to be said for places where "the living is easy".

While here on the prairies, the fields are either black or still beige with the death of last years’ crops. The trees are just starting to leaf, the chokecherries and saskatoons beginning to bloom and the morel mushrooms didn’t even come this year.

The mosquitoes started – and seemed to have had a slump in population – but the ticks are out in full force! I found seven on my body yesterday and two more in the bathwater! Fortunately, the type of woodticks in the Touchwood Hills carry no weird diseases. Yet.

So, what do we have? Open skies – and lots of space. Mercury beside the waning moon out the morning window. Finches, hummingbirds and robins – and one silly song sparrow trying to feed at the finch feeder. Chickens in the pen, eggs in the nests. A dog at my side – or racing around the field, or barking his territory late at night to keep the coyotes away! Cats – four working animals in this mouse-infested place. A garden in the planting phase – crabapples and plum trees in bloom.

Machines that don’t work – need more expertise than we have. A house that needs work. The never-ending mending basket.

A room of my own. Friends and neighbours – four kids and one man on a raft in the pond. Bill. And home. Home is really where the heart is.

And then there are other issues - Fukushima pollution will reach the Coast first, rising sea levels will affect the coast while changing weather patterns will affect us too. What does the future hold?