Wettest on Record

I write on Saturday morning from the dry interior of the Bigador cabin where heavy rains beat a loud tattoo on the cabin`s metal roof (a million-dollar roof on a ten-cent shack, someone once quipped).

CBC meteorologist Ryan Snoddon gives us a dispatch headlined `Summer of 2023 was the wettest on record for much of the Maritimes`. Neither Bigador resident has the least inclination to debate the headline. Jan and I leave it to others to defend Cape Breton against charges that in 2023 the Island has morphed into a sodden, mosquito-plagued swamp. And no wonder: many Maritimers have seen more than double the average rainfall in June, July, and August. Our current run of weather best loved by ducks is into day 6, with Hurricane Lee about to grace us with a further deluge that will last two or three days. We only vaguely remember blue skies and sunshine.

We express frequent gratitude for that metal roof and something else. Good books. What would I do without the services of the North Sydney and Sydney Mines libraries? How would I cope without the opportunity to binge on Dennis Lehane, Daniel Silva, Michael Connelly? Kelly’s Mountain is often draped in cloud, fog and rain-squalls but as long as I have a worthy book in hand and another waiting in the wings, I can cope. In the presence of soggy air and absence of sunshine we rely on the woodstove and the woodshed’s stock of apple, birch, and maple—stored sunshine I call it—to get us through.

We will depart on Monday—if hurricanes permit—with mixed feelings about leaving. Ordinarily I quit Boularderie Island feeling unhappy to go. This year will be somewhat different. As Boularderie Islanders have enjoyed the joy of relentless rains, residents of Victoria and south Vancouver Island have had to put up with drought conditions and watched their lawns and much of the landscape turn brown. I will not gripe should we get a spell of dry weather in Victoria before the Pineapple Express returns in November.

On a single day in July an historic dump dropped as much rain in parts of Nova Scotia as normally falls in three months. That astonishing event washed out sections of our 600-metre road, leaving it inundated by as much as a foot of water. We had the road extensively repaired, and then another deluge flooded it again. Our road restorer returned; on Monday he installed a culvert and several additional loads of gravel. As we wait to see the hurricane’s response to the latest remedies I also wait to see the invoice for road repairs to date.

There is broad consensus among people having a functioning brain that climate change is real, and what we have witnessed this summer and last is just the tip of the iceberg—or should I say flood? I have no doubt the consensus is sound. If I live long enough to return for another Boularderie Island summer in my 78th year, what will Jan and I find? Will the road be washed away for good? Will heat domes and floods be worse than ever? Will wildfire smoke make Bigador’s clean air unbreathable?

Fortuitously, by relying on something other than weather to supply good times at the margin of the Great Bras d’Or, there is some happy news. Good friends Judith (sometimes known as Sakamoto, for reasons I can share some other time) and Marc did us the honour of paying us a four-day visit. It was a note-perfect time. For many years Judith has shown her affection for the old place, and Marc, well, he fell in love with it at first sight. Judith is a fan of my pesto so—what else?—we savoured pesto pasta twice, introduced them to the abundant delights of the card game Euchre, rambled to Dalem Lake twice and shared a hike that was a ‘lifer’ for all of us, Red Island a little north of the Barrachois River.

We also shared in the celebration of a milestone birthday in the life of my bride. I won’t disclose particulars of the milestone but I can provide a hint: in Mars years my Jan is a mere 37. When I disclosed that factoid early on her birthday morning you might have thought I’d just brought news of a big lottery win. The gambit wouldn’t have worked for me but Jan is still dining out on her Martian age days after the birthday. Whatever works.

I shall endeavour to post this somewhere en route to Victoria; in the meantime share my joy over the roof metal and the cabin’s well-stocked library. There are still blessings to count.

Not for Everyone

It is well established that your occasional correspondent is strongly convinced that ‘Bigador’ is the best, most beautiful place the world has to offer. Consider its frequent sublime quietude, its natural bounty of flora and fauna, its night time vistas of the Milky Way and naked-eye view of the rather more distant Andromeda galaxy, whose light has traveled 2.3 million years by the time it reaches the rods and cones of human eyes. Just for starters.

Most of the friends who visit from the west coast and see Bigador for the first time typically rhapsodize at the cabin’s view of the Great Bras d’Or and Kelly’s Mountain and demand to know, “Why would you ever leave this?’ My standard answer comprises a single word, winter.

For me part of its ineffable charm is that Bigador affords a small facsimile of a pioneer experience; it lacks almost all the amenities that make life bearable for most of my fellow North Americans. Yes, we have a good kitchen stovetop and propane-powered fridge but the facilities include no running water, no flush toilet, no reliable Internet connection, no electricity apart from the meagre allotment supplied by a single solar panel and pair of batteries.

There is no mall across the road, no recreation centre, no swimming pool. We do have a fine swimmin’ hole down at the shore, but one has to scramble down a steep bank to get there and swimmers must sometimes share the water with a jellyfish or two, or the crabs that have made the bottom their home long before we ever showed up. Apart from a refreshing dip, the shore provides other attractions. Numerous Carboniferous fossils for an observer who needn’t work hard to see them. Kingfishers, the occasional sandpiper, gannet, and all the gulls and cormorants one could ever want to see.

To get groceries we must rely on the truck to take us to the Sobey’s in North Sydney, but there are opportunities in the woods and fields for foragers such as ourselves—chanterelle and bolete mushrooms, rhubarb, blueberries, blackberries, all in their season. There was once a thriving apple orchard on the old place. Their feral descendants abound, some are good eating as-is, others provide the base ingredients for apple sauce, apple jelly, apple whatever-you-like.

Most folks who come to see us during the summer seem to like what is on offer—or not—over the course of a several-day visit. A good number are repeat visitors. They have come after time, charmed by the same features that have lured me for half a century. But of course a stay of a few days is not the same as one of three months.

Recent events remind me that some folks are entirely unimpressed by my shangri-la—not for a week, or a day, or even an hour. No, I have to concede on inquiry, the cabin has not a single bedroom with a closable door affording privacy to someone ardent to have it. Instead, there is an array of ‘Murphy’ beds that can provide a restful, restorative night as long as one is not overly troubled by the occasional snore or the passage of a fellow guest headed for either of the two important out-buildings, one of which features the same composting toilet as graces the summer place of our highly regarded former governor-general, Adrienne Clarkson. If it is good enough for Adrienne shouldn’t it be fine for all the rest of us too?

Several years ago I built a workshop that has afforded me many hours of woodworking delight. In recent years the workshop has taken on a second duty. It is now serves also as the ‘Tom Sawyer Bunkhouse’. In its bunkhouse role the building’s centrepiece is a queen-sized inflatable mattress no one has ever grumbled about. And yes, it has a closing door that provides all the privacy a person could want, as long as one discounts the squirrels that run about on roof or deck, and walls festooned not with restful photos but a wide array of tools—clamps, saws, jars filled with screws and nails, et al.

Yes, there are spiders outside—and sometimes in—as well as snakes, toads, sow bugs, and other creatures not everyone embraces. Visitors who live their lives in cities are sometimes horrified to discover that they have to share the place with mosquitoes, black flies, no-see-um, deer flies, horse flies, and other biting delights that are, as Bob Nagel liked to observe, simply doing what they’re supposed to.

I admit to some regret that a few—just a few—of my fellow travelers see none of the charms that have seduced me all these years, but I still insist that Bigador is the best, most beautiful place I have ever experienced. Don’t bother trying to change my mind.

Nobody Does Anything About It

It was the late American weather forecaster Willard Scott who famously observed that “Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever seems to do anything about it.” Mr Scott’s observation seems more apt than ever—nobody does anything about it. UN chief Antonio Guterres now informs us all that we have progressed from mere ‘global warming” to something the UN labels “global boiling”. The announcement gathers headlines for a day or two, then much of humanity shrugs and carries on with the important things in their lives.

Once upon a time the planet Venus had liquid water oceans, like Earth’s. Today the Venus surface temperature averages about 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead. Humans cannot be blamed for the fate of Venus, but all serious scientists agree that humanity is to blame for what is happening here on Earth: record temperatures, relentless heat waves, catastrophic wildfires, unprecedented floods et al. We focus on the vital business of arranging our affairs to suit immediate, short-term interests, like firing up the barbie, buying a shiny new toy, or flying across the continent for a Cape Breton vacation. Are we collectively hell-bent on turning Earth into a Venus lookalike?

More than half way through our 2023 Boularderie Island summer we see plenty of anecdotal evidence that Mr Guterres and his scientists know what they are talking about. Jan and I have been here seven weeks already. We enjoyed a few fine, tolerable days at the outset and another few just lately. Between the two interludes we had forty days of weather that fell into just two categories—extreme rain, or extreme heat and humidity. Take your pick. Temperatures on our shaded, screened porch routinely reached 90 Fahrenheit (32-plus Celsius). Activity as unstressful as reading a book became burdensome. The enduring heat is not unprecedented: last summer a long-lasting “heat dome” left life in the cabin similarly sticky and sweaty. Now in 2023 I begin to conclude that this is the new normal.

Back in June, Nova Scotia took to emulating the dry British Columbia interior by hosting out-of- control wildfires that incinerated more than two hundred homes. A spate of catastrophic wildfires is not at all a NS norm. Not before now.

Then, two weeks ago, three months-worth of rain fell in some NS locations in a single day. Heavy rains the like of which I had never seen in my 52 years here become routine. In the wake of the rains much of our private road lay underwater, some of it as deep as our gumboots are tall. Some water persists even now and the road is so ransacked that we have to call upon our local road saviour to rebuild it for us. In the meantime we restrict vehicle traffic in the hope of not further wrecking the road.

When the heat and rain relent long enough, I slowly undo the damage perpetrated by another extreme weather event, Hurricane Fiona last September. Fiona toppled trees all over the land, choked trails, knocked down a tall red spruce that came close to striking the workshop deck. Clearing the East Trail was relatively straightforward; clearing the West Trail has been anything but. I can no longer operate a chainsaw all day, but I can manage a few hours, and hope that will be enough to complete the task at hand.

A leisurely walk to Dalem Lake is still a draw. In 2023, it is often too hot to contemplate a slog to the lake; this year, when opportunity arises, I take my time, pausing frequently to study damselflies, take pictures of flowers or butterflies, relish the debut of this year’s crop of blueberries. Either because I’m deafer than I used to be or because bird populations have actually declined—or both—I hear far fewer birds. But I rejoice at what I do hear—the strains of a singing hermit thrush, white-throated sparrow, or increasingly scarce common nighthawk.

Despite the heat and rain, I cherish what ‘Bigador’ reliably still offers: sublime silence, an inexhaustible supply of projects to keep me happily occupied, a night sky unpolluted by human-made light. The galaxy is as resplendent as ever on a cloud-free night.

Will August bring us cooler, dryer conditions? Perhaps. In the meantime we enjoy regular visits from twin cousins Lynn and Louise. Lynn never loses at Bananagrams; I typically finish dead last. Next time I will suggest we switch to the card game Euchre, which is far less vulnerable to domination by a single player. I wish me luck.

Three Hundred Million and Change

With Lynn and Louise we undertook a peregrination of 300 million years—give or take—to the gypsum bluffs of Big Harbour. That is how long ago the bluffs began taking shape in the departed Windsor Sea. Nova Scotia produces more gypsum for manufacturers of drywall and other products than the other provinces combined. Big Harbour’s gypsum formations are spectacular enough in their own right but our principal lure was one of gypsum’s living beneficiaries—Cypripedium parviflorum, better known by its common name, yellow ladyslipper. The latter half of June is prime blooming time for this gorgeous orchid. My old departed friend Dave Stirling liked to go on about spectacles of nature. He never got to see it but I have no doubt that Dave would agree that the June ladyslipper show at Big Harbour is just that—a spectacle of nature.

Our timing was fortuitous. We arrived in time to see not several blooms, not dozens, but many hundreds, perhaps a thousand or so all together on a finger of land we speculate is the remnant of a man-made jetty once used to ship gypsum from Big Harbour to whatever industrial plants were keen to have it. On a sunny morning, in a fresh breeze, we were spared the tribulation of blackflies and mosquitoes. Conditions were such that, had I ability to declare it on my own authority, the little land finger and its surroundings might be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But that of course would draw unwanted legions of people. As usual at Big Harbour we had the place entirely to ourselves over the six hours of our stay.

Ladyslippers were not the only attraction. En route to the orchids, the Old Big Harbour Road crosses a wetland, where we savoured a close encounter with leopard frog and a gang of “avid mud-puddlers” jostling for position in the same puddle, swallowtail butterflies—Canadian Tiger Swallowtails to be precise, Papilo canadensis, perhaps the best known of our butterflies due to its size and distinctive multi-coloured pattern.

Sharing the same ground as the ladyslippers, it was hard to resist contemplating the span of time that has elapsed since the gypsum cliffs were formed. Three hundred million years is enough to swallow four million human lifetimes, a fact that for someone of my bent leads to conclusions about the significance of a person’s lifespan in the great scheme of things. But let’s set that aside for now.

Whenever a fellow delivers himself into wildflower country, he is very likely to encounter birds too. I am now immersed in one of the vicissitudes of advancing senescence. Once upon a time Jan dubbed me the world’s laziest birder because I did most of my birding by ear. The libel no longer applies. My high-end hearing is much eroded. I no longer hear warblers, kinglets and other high-register species. Jan has a solution—Merlin, the magical ‘app’ that identifies bird vocalizations for me. Merlin works well enough as long as I hear enough of a snippet to know a bird is present. Birds are less accommodating than flowers: as the photographer readies his camera to take a shot, the bird decides to fly away. It is easy to imagine that the behaviour is intentional. I did manage a decent shot of a single bird, yellow-bellied flycatcher, and counted myself lucky.

With our collective eyes and ears and a little help from Merlin, we managed to list 33 bird species for the day. The best of them was the last. I was able to hear and ID it without Merlin’s help. It was a Cape Breton rarity, Sora, a kind of rail. It conveniently vocalized just as we returned to the car. In the most recent Maritime breeding bird atlas there was only one place in all of Cape Breton where soras were known to have bred—Big Harbour.

Days later I still savour the Big Harbour afterglow. Among the cabin’s considerable natural history volumes there are a few dedicated to the region’s geology. I peruse them to enhance my appreciation of Big Harbour’s ancient history, and in the hope of finding another.

No Longer Incommunicado

‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’

These past few months the tiny, select group of readers who pay slight attention to Peregrinations might have wondered whether the blog’s author had been abducted for ransom. Or—aggravated by the worsening state of the world—resolved to take a vow of silence. Or simply gone to his reward, the corpse hauled up by loyal friends into the top of a tall spruce to provide carrion for eagles starved for better dining options.

None of these is the reason Peregrinations fell silent this summer. Jan and I departed Victoria for our humble Cape Breton paradise exactly three months ago, July 3. Jan has a new laptop I was persuaded might be a faster, worthier tool for editing photos and writing blog posts than my own ancient beast. That might have been a good option had I made a point of ensuring that Jan's machine was armed with the word and photo-editing programs I would need to carry out these vital chores. But I didn’t, and the shiny new laptop proved critically short of the essentials I needed. 

That not-small problem was aggravated by another: the buildings and place I dub ‘Bigadore’ has many charms—ones I perhaps see more clearly than other folks do—but it is not furnished with the range of features modern folks tend to like. No running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity but for the tiny quantum provided by a single solar panel. Etc. Nor does it boast internet connectivity. Finally, though our cellphone signal is always feeble, this year it was often non-existent. This is the combination of circumstances that led to my being missing in action.

Our Boularderie Island summer was glorious, with more sunshine and less rain that we are accustomed to. August perhaps featured altogether too much sun. Day after day, even week after week, the indoors temperature reached 30°C while the outside thermometer flirted with 40°. Conditions sometimes put me in mind of my time in India. We yearned for cooling rains.

Despite the heat I would have been happy to spend our entire three months at Bigadore but Jan prevailed on me to agree to accepting a five-day absence in September to see friends and family on the Nova Scotia mainland. That hiatus was all well and good, but I was happy to return to Boularderie.

One of the highlights of the summer was making a new friend, a young American not inclined to adore Donald Trump or wear a MAGA ball cap. We saw plenty of Luke and learned we had much in common. The rear bumper of his truck featured a Bernie Sanders sticker and Luke was given to wearing t-shirts lambasting racism. Did such apparel ever raise a ruckus with fellow Americans, I inquired. Yes, Luke answered. After several weeks, without a single thing to grumble about him, I decided he was my favourite American. Granted he doesn’t have much competition.

Meanwhile, we had the cabin pretty much to ourselves, apart from excellent visits from cherished nieces, Sarah and Naomi, and their families. I have seen to it that my 10’ x 10’ workshop is dual-purpose. When not being used for producing sawdust and wood shavings, it serves well as the ‘Tom Sawyer Bunkhouse’, its amenities not much poorer than the cabin’s own.

Lynn and Louise, my beloved identical-twin cousins, were regular daytime visitors. Their skills as table-hockey practitioners continue to grow but in several fiercely contested tournaments they failed to knock the old guy from his champion’s pedestal. That will no doubt happen soon enough.  

Then came the equinox. Colours had begun to change among our own hardwoods and the maple forests of Kelly’s Mountain across the Great Bras d’Or. We were told by the weather authorities to batten down the hatches for a ‘post-tropical storm’—why not the term we’ve grown accustomed to all these years, hurricane?—named Fiona. Two days after the equinox Fiona struck Cape Breton and other parts of Atlantic Canada with no mercy. The cabin, now 51 years old, stood firm against Fiona. My woods not nearly so well. Scouting Bigadore’s trails after the big blow I found countless trees snapped in two or uprooted and overturned. 

Fiona toppled an admired black spruce close by the cabin. This magnificent conifer, 67’ tall and 18” wide at six feet above the base lived about 95 years by my count of its growth rings. Friend Stuart Squires has a sawmill all his own; he will convert the logs to boards and two-by-sixes.

There was insufficient time to start the huge cleanup chore before our September 29 departure. I left the old place in far greater disarray than I ever have before. If the cosmos grants me the privilege of returning to Cape Breton next June I will have plenty of projects to keep me happily occupied.

By June of 2023 I expect to be in a better position to revert to normal form with Peregrinations. Kindly forgive this year’s protracted silence. In the meantime here is your link to my Flickr album, 'Downeast 2022'.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigadore/albums/72177720302522358

A Year in Bharat

Not all peregrinations need proceed by land or in the air in present time. Heritage House has just published my latest book, Capitals, Aristocrats, and Cougars. The new book is a journey into the past—to the period 1911-1926 when major league pro hockey flourished in Victoria. The ‘time machine’ I relied upon to research the book was principally the pages of Victoria’s morning newspaper of the time, the Daily Colonist. The research was a fascinating, often surprising expedition revealing much I did not know and could never have predicted. Hockey will be the lure for most readers of the new book, but Cougars also dives into the cultural, social, and political backdrop against which the city’s hockey heroes thrilled their fans a century and more ago.

Now I have embarked on another peregrination into the past. Fifty-two years ago, as a callow 22-year-old, I managed to persuade CUSO—the Canadian University Service Overseas­­—to have me appointed as a teacher of English literature at a college affiliated with the University of Punjab. The campus of little Baring College is tucked away on the outskirts of Batala, Punjab, in northwest India. I spent a year in India, doubtless the most momentous, unforgettable year of my life. 

Now I have completed an initial draft of another book, my fifth, A Year in Bharat. It describes my adventures in the classroom, my travels throughout the country, my close encounter with the Dalai Lama, the friendships I formed with a cast of unforgettable, remarkable people. A good number of friends and others have read the manuscript and have had complimentary things to say about it. Once the launch of Cougars has been taken care of, I will look to expand Bharat in line with useful suggestions my readers have offered.

Mine is a normal, fallible, forgetful human memory. I could never have produced the new manuscript absent my dear, departed mother. Over the course of my eventful year in India, I wrote more than a hundred single-spaced typed letters to my family on the other side of the world in Halifax. Doris kept them all and returned them to me years ago. I stowed them away and mostly forget about them. Then, earlier this year, I disinterred the old letters and read them all. I decided the letters could enable me to produce a memoir of my long-ago year, one rich in stories readers might like to see. Working virtually every day over the span of several weeks from January through early March, I completed the manuscript. And felt happy with the result. Bharat ends with a contemplation of the people who loomed large in 1969-70, both those who are now gone and “those who may carry on somewhere in India, somewhere beyond my reach.”

But of course, ours is the age of the Internet and I decided to ask Dr Google to help me find important people from my India past who might not be beyond my reach. There was an early success: one of my faculty colleagues at Baring, Prem Kumar, was a young poet who had already published two volumes of Punjabi verse. I found Prem, not in India, but just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. We exchanged a flurry of emails and looked forward to a crossing of paths as and when pandemic protocols permit.

Among the important people who take their turn on the stage of A Year in Bharat is one of my MA students at Baring, a young woman named Rita Bhalla, whom the book describes as the most distracting of my students. More than once I refer to her as Lovely Rita Bhalla. Imagine my surprise one day in early April to open the Gmail inbox and find a message from Rita. She had learned about me and the manuscript from Prem Kumar. The emails have flown back and forth across the globe throughout the intervening months. Rita lives in Mumbai, has two daughters and has been generous in her efforts to discover the whereabouts of people we both knew a half-century ago. 

The India of 2021 is very different from the country to which I was introduced in 1969. I have myriad questions about her country—the prevailing tensions between factions, the impact of the pandemic, the difficulties faced by women. Et al. What I learn from Rita will surely enhance the next draft of A Year in Bharat.

I never know when I complete another book manuscript whether I will be able to persuade a publisher to take it, whether it will be a success, whether people will want to read it. I have the same doubts this time. But I already feel richly rewarded in the effort to produce Bharat, the memories the effort has stirred and—of course—by having in Lovely Rita the most prolific pen pal an old duffer could ever hope for.

This Old House

Big Bras d’Or’s greater metropolitan area features two dwellings near and dear to me. One is the cabin I built a half-century ago, relying on resources largely limited to a few hand tools and a strong back. The other is an old house I long ago dubbed Wuthering Heights, presumably because it stands imperiously by itself on a hill with a view to kill for. From the early 1980s, it was the place where my Boston friend Bob Nagel liked to spend his summers and hold court for his legion of friends. 

The history of the old house predated Bob by several decades. It was built some time about 1890. In 1938 a catastrophe befell a local family, one reflected on the face of a grave marker in a corner of the Big Bras d’Or cemetery. The headstone lists the names of five children of Archie and Amelia Dunlap who perished in a house fire. The children ranged in age from a five-year-old namesake daughter, Amelia, to Daniel, 14. The Big Bras d’Or community rose to the occasion, providing a new home for the Dunlap parents and their surviving children—the same house that in forty years or so would become the place where mirth and merriment would be routine adornments of a Bob Nagel summer.

The lost children’s mother had been one among the tens of thousands of English “home children” exported to Canada from 1869 to 1932, children who had the bad luck to be orphans or to have parents who lacked the means to look after them. On June 17, 1899, Amelia Thompson was one of 98 children who arrived in Halifax aboard SS Siberian. Amelia was seven years old that late spring day. She was given a new home by a Boularderie Island family.

In the fullness of time Amelia would marry Archie Dunlap and begin her career as wife and mother. There are other names on the Dunlap headstone, including that of Henry, who was born in 1914—when Amelia was 23—and lived only to age 6. Yes, there was great misfortune in the Dunlap home, but there were joys too. My friend Shirley, Amelia’s granddaughter, has fond memories of her grandparents and the happy hours she spent with them in the old house. She has a picture of Amelia taken in 1959 on the front veranda. In the image Amelia is sitting in her rocking chair, smiling.

In 2002 I took the lead role in building a new screened porch for Bob at the front of his house, just where Amelia had sat in her rocker years before. The porch supplies marvelous views of Kelly’s Mountain, the Great Bras d’Or and the Bird Islands, and it became the venue for countless festivities in the years from that time right through to 2015. Shirley was among the celebrants in many of them.

When Bob left us in 2016, his many Cape Breton friends grieved not just for their lost friend but also for the happy times they had shared with him on the porch. There are steel ships and wooden ships, he liked to say, but no ship like friendship. Passing from the dining room into the porch, friends walked under a sign: THESE are the good old days.

People come and go, and so do old houses. Eventually Wuthering Heights and the 147 acres in which it stands went up for sale. At age 130 or so, the building was showing its age: a crumbling foundation, floor joists in some parts of the main floor a fella was disinclined to trust. My bet was that Amelia’s place had only a slim chance of surviving. The new owner would almost certainly raze it and replace it with something new.

But I was wrong. Rather that demolishing the historical house, Dinao, the new owner, decided to save it. A good thing, I say: the house is not only shot through with history, it has ‘good bones’ too. Under Dinao's stewardship, crumbled bits of the foundation are now repaired, new windows are in place, and just this past while, a shiny new metal roof will emancipate Dinao and her friends from having to worry about rainy days.

On Saturday Jan and I led Lynn and Louise on a tour of the excellent trail Dinao and her friends have built from the woods behind her house all the way to the provincial park at Dalem Lake. The trail is a thing of beauty and a joy for outdoorsy folks who like birds, wildflowers and the great variety of mushrooms that flourish in the forest. Savouring myriad memories at the old house, we all rejoiced at what has become of Wuthering Heights.

Bob is not available to see Dinao’s work but I have no doubt that he would rejoice in the knowledge that the old place will continue to be rich in laughter and delight for years to come.