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Robins eat earthworms and migrate south at the first nip of autumn, right! So what’s with the flock I found roughing it in minus twenty degree cold and blizzard level winds?  Could they not find Florida?  Or are they birdie tough guys crazily laughing in the face of a wild Canadian winter?

That they were alive in January amazed me.  There hadn’t been a worm available under the ice and snow for months, yet the robins flew about  merrily.  Their single luxury was a leak in the beaver dam which trickled the only unfrozen water for miles.  So off to consult the bird gurus to explain.

I found out robins migrate for food, not warmth. While most head south where the bugs and earthworms stay on the menu, other robins just switch to frozen fruit and stick around.  Mostly near the Great Lakes, New England and all across the icy middle of the continent.   Even Winnipeg, famous as the coldest city on earth, has its hardy tribe of wintering robins.  They really must love those saskatoon berries.

So don’t hit the alarm when you spot a fluffed up robin in the snow.  Toss out a few raisins, some cut up fruit or strawberries.  For the right inducement, the bird that disdained the feeder all summer might condescend to a personal visit while the mercury plunges.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

What a surprise to encounter one of my ancient novels at the local second hand store.
To Catch the Wind, a Harlequin Superromance, was published decades ago when I wrote for the publishing giant. These fat romances are supposed to have a shelf life of about a month before they are replaced by the next month’s offering.  Yet here is the book, its cover creased and ripped, its pages dog-eared and worn, its spine cracked in three places, still going an age after publication.

No bad for a genre book, one among myriads.  It carries one of my pen names from back when I was trying to remain mysterious – a laughable idea for marketing frenzied authors today.   I wonder now about all the people who read not just this particular copy but all the copies distributed worldwide.  Harlequin had 200 million readers at the time and, no doubt, many more now.

The book took months to write and a ton of fascinating research into boats and high-end retailing, knowledge that still hangs on in patches.  I hope the spine was broken by someone on a sunny beach, gripping the book against a rogue tropic breeze.   The pages have been dog-eared by much turning, the cover rumpled and torn by travel in handbags, the edges frayed by being pulled in and out of pockets.  Most of all, I am pleased at the enjoyment that has flowed from its pages. Enjoyment is the only thing that could have kept keep this book alive.

Perhaps this old friend dropped in to give me a high five and encouragement. Thanks.  So good to catch up. Now I’ll return the book to the second hand store to continue on its journey.  Good luck to it through its next many years.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

The December ice storm struck hard, making sure the ice stayed via a sharp temperature drop. Shrubs flattened under coatings of glass, small trees bent into glittering arches, the red cedar forests were frosted with ice, their whitened heads bent like crowds of refugees marching toward the horizon.  The Chinese elm behind the house lost several large branches and will need extensive chain saw surgery.  Hungry birds swarmed the feeders.  Predators were hungry too, judging by the scatter of blood and dove feathers beside the deck.

Frozen snow, topped with just enough new snow for footing, provided the novelty of hiking for miles atop a perfectly smooth surface to inspect the beaver pond, the maple swamp, the buried pastures, the prickly ash thickets and coyote trails.  The horned owl which came to a bad end on the barbed wire fence weeks ago had been stripped to the bone. Scarlet sumach heads and cattail reeds were preserved in crystal. Glazed stalks of grass and thistle broke off and skidded like transparent pucks away across the snow.  Very Doctor Zhivago.

Of course the power went out.  No matter to me.  I have a trusty wood stove and a big pile of firewood.  And I can always take my bucket down to the ever running spring below the hill as people have done here for the past 200 years. If the sun peeps out, my passive solar panel, made of pop cans and plexiglass, pumps heat into the house for free.  The outdoors can double as an immense refrigerator/freezer.

My sympathies to urbanites shivering and trying to keep their pipes from freezing while hydro crews battled the chaos.   A bit of self sufficiency, just kept in reserve, goes a long way when nature gets cranky

Gail Hamilton’s books.

I’m talking about a tough, scrappy, impudent species that pops up whenever you take your eyes off a patch of grass or turn your back on an unplowed acre.  The eastern red cedar, gangster of the open fields, bandit of fence rows, invader of every road allowance with an ounce of dirt to colonize.  Oh, not to be confused with the majestic real cedars of the West.  The eastern red cedar is really a juniper with even its common name rejected by the lofty American Joint Committee on Horticultural Nomenclature.  The juniperus virginianna doesn’t care about the Joint Committee.  If it wants to call itself a cedar, it will.

Any drive about the county reveals the outlaw vigor of the red cedar.  Mile after mile of once open farmland is now crammed with dark cedars hardly leaving space for a goat to graze.  Though native, the red cedar is a determinedly invasive species.  Any territory, even slightly uncultivated, will start sprouting the bushy green beggars.  Old farmers laugh at attempts to control them.  They’ll tell of being sent out to these same fields as kids to snip off the junior invaders before they got big enough to need an axe.  Fat lot of good it did.

Cattle do their inadequate best to trample them. Mainly, they use the cedars as fly brushes.  When tormented in the summer, cattle will plunge into dense cedar thickets to scrape the flies from their faces and backs.  You can always tell where cattle have grazed by cedars denuded of branches to cow height and sculpted in strange shapes by bovine bodies.

The red cedar is too scraggly for Christmas trees, too skinny and full of knots for lumber, homely in gardens and besides, it drops dead in good soil.  My city relatives were always hauling home baby cedars only to watch them perish in the rich, alien earth of the suburbs.   In the limestone shale of the county, they not only thrive but slyly  reduce the nutrients in the soil beneath them, discouraging competitors from trying to horn in.

To boot, the red cedar harbours cedar-apple rust disease, which does bad things to  apple orchards.  The advice is to remove all cedars within one mile of any orchard.  Ha!  As if that could happen. Red cedars, once upon a time, were controlled by wildfire, something not too practical when they are next to my barn as well as other people’s barns, houses, schools and villages.  Ironically, cedar make lousy firewood, except for kindling.  It’s oils make it burn like gasoline, threatening to set the chimney afire.  And then it’s gone.

Cleverly, it has recruited a hungry partner to help it spread.  Cedar waxwings love the “berries”.  So much so that it only takes 12 minutes for these seeds to pass through the bird’s digestive system. This hyper speed trip via the avian gut actually triples germination power as the seed plops down in a brand new place to grow.

So is the red cedar useful at all?  Besides feeding assorted other birds and mammals who do their own share of seed spreading?

Well, when lining cedar chests or closets, it drives away moths.  It is one of the few woods suitable for manufacturing pencils.  Its ornery qualities, as the pioneers soon discovered, make it one rugged fence material. Hundred year old cedar rails are still in use today.

Oh, and properly worked, it makes a fine English longbow.

Native Americans used cedar posts to mark their hunting territories.  Baton Rouge (meaning “red stick”), Louisiana, was named by French traders from the red cedar poles.  During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, farmers on the Great Plains were encouraged to plant red cedar shelterbelts against the relentless, soil stripping winds.  What else could withstand both drought and cold while managing to root in rocks, sand or hard clay underfoot?

And if I expect that scrawny cedar over the fence to race through its scrawny life span and die soon of old age, I’ll be a long time waiting. That uninvited encroacher has to potential to live over 800 years.  Providing I stay away from it with my axe.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

What little I gather about vampires comes from movies and blurbs on those unending vampire novels.  Three things I do know.  Vampires need human blood to nourish themselves.  Vampires have eternal life.  If they bite you, you become a vampire too.

Okay, if they can’t die why do they need nourishment?  And if everyone they bite becomes another vampire, wouldn’t the law of exponential expansion or whatever eventually turn the entire population of the Earth into vampires?  (If a vampire bites ten friends and they bite ten friends and they bite ten friends and so on….)  Then what would the vampires feed on?

And eternal life – a flawed gift at best.

Astronomers predict that, in about seven and a half billion years, the likely fate of the planet is to be absorbed into the sun after the sun enters its red giant phase.   Seven billion years is an awful long time to entertain oneself on a planet getting hotter and hotter as the sun gets bigger.  After the oceans evaporate, the atmosphere burns off and all life is long extinct, an excruciatingly  boring, not to mention nasty place. There won’t even be stakes left to plunge  into each others’ hearts.

When the sun finally goes red giant and gobbles up the planet, that puts all those vampires either directly into the inferno of the sun or flung into outer space flailing their arms, legs and bat wings as they hurtle through the void.  The interesting question is whether their physical structure can withstand the vacuum of space or will explode into a zillion bits of vampire matter headed for galaxies millions of light years away from former Earth.

With no end in sight.  Ever.

Vampire superpowers: hyper strength, flight, ability to morph into bats or noxious mist, no need for sleep, hypnotic attraction for the opposite sex, eternal life.

Nah, I think I’ll pass.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

She’s just a young thing in a short dress standing barefoot through the coldest winter storms, clutching a marble blossom to her marble breast.  A child angel in a far corner of the Glenwood cemetery, looking puzzled but dutiful atop her large black stone base.  Her snowy whiteness is grayed with age.  One of her wingtips is broken away.  Her tombstone, without date or verse, has only a single word: “Guest”, A family name?  Or that she is but a guest here until a better time?

The angel might be long forgotten except for the tale her brother brought himself to tell over half a century later. Six year old Ruth and her brother, Azel, lived near the cemetery and often played there.  One day, in the nearby monument maker’s yard, Ruth spotted the dazzling angel perched on her polished black block.  She was so carried away with wonder she insisted she must have it.  When her brother informed her it was only for dead people, she was not deterred.  Azel told their mother who paled with shock and immediately prayed her daughter would be spared.

Months later, the family planned an outing to Napanee in their brand new motor car.  The children were so excited they could hardly sleep.  Their disappointment could not be described when, in the morning, their mother abruptly announced the trip was cancelled.  She had dreamed of six black horses drawing a hearse into the cemetery.  Little Ruth lay inside.

Mother’s resolve, however, could not hold out against the pleas of her tearful brood.  In high spirits, they set out.  At Desoronto, they shouted for a stop at an ice cream stand. While running across the road to get her cone, Ruth was struck by a car and tossed into the air before the eyes of her horrified family.  She died shortly after in the hospital.

Ruth got the child angel she admired so much.  Decades later, Azel revealed the story of the broken wingtip.  So angry was he about his little sister’s death and his own inability to save her that day that he slipped into the cemetery and hurled a rock as hard as he could at the monument.  The rock bounced off the angel’s forehead and cracked a  chunk from her wing.  The wounded wing remains today, attesting through time to the love and grief and powerful omens of Ruth’s family.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

High winds finally took down a friend of my childhood.  The double-trunked oak on the lane to my former house was already massive when I was a toddler, matching the mighty elm just across the way.  I thought of them as husband and wife.  I loved the elm too.  It had an oriole’s nest magically swinging in the breeze every year.  And a great slash down its trunk from the searing lightning bolt that bounced  off the cab of our  pickup as my dad rushed me back from foolishly swimming  in the face of a storm. The pair had privilege as the only two trees  early farmers left standing along the fence row.  I climbed the oak in fits of daring, fetched cows from it’s shade, rested beneath it from picking strawberries and tomatoes, pressed its leaves for school projects, listened raptly to the conversations it carried on with the air.  Most of all, I  looked forward to catching a first sight it of to tell me I was nearly home.

The oak was widowed when the elm succumbed to Dutch elm disease.  When the wind took down one of the twin oak trunks years ago, my dad and his friend laboured to cut it up and split it for firewood, only to find it deftly stolen when they returned to pick it up.  Were they furious!

So now the last of the oak has also come down, blocking the lane, dying spectacularly into a  mass of brown leaves and twisted branches.  I found a enterprising young woodsman and his brother willing tackle the job of cutting it up the largest tree they had ever worked on.  The job of sawing and splitting and hauling took two and a half days.  But now the oak, with its rich, butter yellow wood, is heating my home for the winter.  One last play between us.  I’ll return the ashes to the earth where they may nourish another tree.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

A constant puzzle are the cars along my country road, which suddenly screech to a halt, back into the driveway, and roar back the way they came.  All along the road, the shoulder also yields evidence of vehicles that have done a complete U turn to speed off in the opposite direction.

So who are these fickle folk?  Morning bumblers who finally clue in that it’s Saturday and they don’t have to rush to work?  Absent minded cooks who left the stew simmering on the burner. Couples breaking up on the fly, making their dinner date a joke?  Some whip around so fast you’re convinced they must have left the baby on the porch.

And another thing.  No one stops in to ask directions any more.  They only pause to consult devices.  Sometimes, I see the same car pass up the road, back down, and then up again after one of those sharp turns outside.   Going faster each time.  And getting more lost.

Perhaps its time more people invested in a paper map, some yoga and irons that turn themselves off when abandoned in the morning melee.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

Periodically, the road grader rumbles up one side of my country road and down the other, scraping the hard, rain battered shoulders into pristine swathes of sand and gravel.  If I can keep my bike wheels out of this treacherous softness, I can read all the brand new news on my ride.

The wildlife wastes no time.  Three deer have crossed the road, one set of hoof prints quite small.  A coyote has trotted along the edge before veering off again into the trees, preferring not to be spotted by humans.  This year’s abundance of bunnies have also hurried to make their mark, boding well for the coyote.  An intrepid runner, still an amusing sight to farm folk, has passed. A town person has parked their car to treat their dog to a country dog walk, a mile in each direction, shoe and paw print in companionable unison.  I can just imagine the doggy grin.

Recent tire tracks from a hidden lane reassure me that the elderly recluse in there is alive and driving out to shop.  A pack of touring cyclists have pulled off briefly to check their maps.  That’s more much appreciated tourist dollars into the local economy.  Sharp arcs off and back onto the road tell of conscientious cell phone users keeping us safe.  A farm tractor, pulling double wagons loaded with hay for winter fodder, has churned the shoulder with massive treads, trying to keep as far out of traffic as possible. The hayfield on the back road had probably been cleared. Closer to home, I can tell that the farmer with the cattle in my fields has stopped to drop off a new block of salt. That means he’s also counted them and checked the weak spot in the fence, to my relief.  And a birder has walked across the road to see what herons, ducks, swans or egrets the beaver pond is offering up.  I might make it again to the top of the local bird list.  Bike tracks out of my own drive tell the world I have virtuously done my eight miles today.

In a few days, the telltale notices will be so crisscrossed and written over that I will completely lose the thread.  But when I hear that great yellow grader roar, I know it’s news time again,

Gail Hamilton’s books.

Who can forget Oliver Twist holding out his bowl and asking for some more.  More gruel.  The staple diet of Victorian orphans.  So, have you ever wondered what exactly constitutes gruel?  Probably not, but I looked into it anyway.  Gruel, as I suspected, is a porridge made of a cereal such as wheat, oat, rye flour or rice or millet boiled up in water or milk..  Oliver Twist was fed on three meals of thin oatmeal gruel daily with the bonus of half a roll on Sundays.
While a properly made gruel can be thick and delicious, the watery version ingested by Oliver hardly constituted an adequate diet.  No wonder the growing orphans were famished, scrawny and subject to every ill including raging infections, killing fevers, typhus and TB.  On the other hand, they were lucky not to be sleeping under bridges and trying to catch rats for sustenance. Charitable institutions of the time, dependent on donations, struggled to provide any kind of regular meals.  So gruel has its honoured place as an alternative to certain starvation.  Please, can we have some more!

Workhouse Gruel Recipe – Serves One

Mix three small spoonfuls of oatmeal with a little cold water in a pan.
Add a pint of water to the pan.
Toss in a precious pinch of salt.
Boil for 10 minutes.
Serve in a battered tin bowl.
Truthfully declare there is no more.

 

Gail Hamilton’s books.