July 21 Yesterday there was a haze over the Estrie: there was a smog warning for the area – smoke was blowing from forest fires in northern Ontario. The air was still, and I remembered how there is often a dead stillness before a storm. We almost never get such calm; always a breeze is…

 July 19 Deer visited! They grazed by the wise witch for a short while, a fawn and his mother, still nursing, then two young bucks with beautiful little antlers followed. They were such a delicate caramel colour, dainty and fragile-looking, with small narrow faces, and skittish as can be, looking about more than grazing. They…

 July 15 Nature imitating art: it’s like a Turner painting. ***** This morning clouds were sleeping in the Missisquoi Valley. They spend every night in the valley these days. Lazy, they usually get up long after the sun, still sleepy. This morning they were being sentient, and purposeful, crawling up the mountain, as if searching…

 July 8 We have cows again. Last week the children finished the school year. Indre is going into grade four, and Robin is attending grade one, in September. They attend the school my own children went to for their junior years. That is a wheel turning, a season: picking up one’s grandchildren from the very…

 June 20 Summer solstice: revel of senses, revel of nature, revel of the physical. A day to go out into the sun, smell the air, see the flowers and trees, awake, vigorous, alive. Feast on strawberries and wine, walk barefoot on the earth, be roots, be tall as a tree. Today is a day for…

 June 16 Fox-and-cubs, a most charming name for this flower, which is also called orange hawksbeard, the devil’s paintbrush. orange hawk bit and mysteriously, Grim-the-collier (a collier being a coal miner or charcoal maker). How is it already June 16? The days are long and full, though I spend many minutes a day simply watching…

 June 14 Drizzly rain today most of the day, we have had only 4 or 5 mm.; it’s cooler and very windy, blowing from the south-east, unusual.  I have a bird app, called BirdNET, which records and analyses bird song for identification. It kept telling me that the whistling I was hearing was a scarlet…

 June 10 Solar Eclipse: Rahu, who was beheaded for drinking the nectar of the gods, tried to get revenge by consuming the sun, but without a body, the sun came out the other side!  We purchased this painting in Bali, Indonesia, in 1983. The references I find on-line blur the myth we learned in Indonesia…

June 8  “Where have you BEEN?!”, asked 12 year old Rain the moment I came in the door. Even now, my oldest and my grandchildren are at the door as I come in, with questions and calls for attention. I should consider it a compliment! I am needed and loved. Snake spit on the plants….

May 31 In just a few weeks this has happened. Lush. The beautiful jack-in-the-pulpit: before this spring I had only ever seen one or two of these, in the woods of Ontario. The flower grows beneath the leaves, which look like large trillium leaves, three to a stem. ***** Mumma: “Doesn’t it seem to you…