Cocooning At Home - All Together Now!

Here we are, on this blustery grey day of pelting rain, cocooned at home. It is a great day to be so cocooned; we have power and so heat and light, we have food supplies, we have our cosy home, communication with the outside world, and our magnificent view out over the cove to the open Atlantic beyond is still there, albeit a litlle blurry through the rain-streaked windows. In truth, it is always a great day to be cocooned at home. With the weathers forever in flux, the scene is constantly changing. Tomorrow will be such a revelation when the sun comes out again and the light shimmers on the water and the snow dazzles with effusive brilliance. We will step outside and inhale the fresh salty, seaweedy tang on the breeze.

In truth, we have been cocooning for decades, sheltering from the ill winds that blow in the turmoil of gathering storms. For a decade, we escaped the city by cocooning in rented homes on the Niagara Escarpment; for two decades, we escaped the encroaching populace of the Golden Horseshoe by cocooning in our first purchased home - a farm on 55 acres, no less, tucked away in the Northumberland Hills; and then we escaped encroaching industrial agriculture by selling the farm and buying a smaller home on the Atlantic Ocean on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Further east we cannot go without falling into the sea, and so here it is that we will cocoon for the coming decades, without losing our social spirit. One year is almost in the books already. We had not envisaged missing the community of friends and fellowship in the hills as we do, but we will make amends by visiting when circumstances are more conducive. 

We are still getting to know community around here and remind ourselves that it took many years to establish strong social bonds in Ontario. Cape Breton Island is of a size that encourages cultural and social interaction as well as appreciation of beauty in nature and the great outdoors. A nascent local community built around food and farming is a very timely development in this time of cocooning. With so many people at home, it is vital that farmers and producers step up to service their local community by providing fresh, wholesome food close to cocoons. Wild animals live within a territory or environmental niche. Butterflies forage for food and produce their honey within a small localized area. We should adapt their ways!

The present cocooning of an entire populace in each community, region, in most countries is an unprecedented, extraordinary effort to protect health by containing the spread of contagion. Perversely - from our cocoons - it draws us together in common cause. By and large, we get it, grasping that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. For once in our lives, we all get to pull together in mutual aid, by helping those less able to look after themselves. Forget the survival of the fittest of neo-Darwinism; Darwin knew very well that our survival is more a question of adaptation than of competition. There will be casualties and fallout. Many among us will be ill, many around the world will die, and many things we took for granted will be wiped off the menu, almost overnight, never to return. Not to be under-estimated, this will be an extended, vital change in our lives that will test our resolve, one that, nonetheless, should be embraced with compassion, civility... and cocooning. All together now.

The White House, Margaree

If pictures could tell stories...

then I would love to hear the history of this white farmhouse, located right off the Cabot Trail in the lower Margaree Valley, just south of Fordview. The views across the broad river valley are sumptuous, especially with a full colour array of fall foliage. The sculptured old apple tree laden with plump red fruit raises her outstretched arms skyward as if in proclamation, perhaps in anguish. 

The river glides on by as it has always done in its patient path to the embracing sea. One would never guess from the far vantage point over the other side of the valley toward the house that it now stands abandoned, in disrepair, moulding, sagging, fraying, creaking. The mountainsides it is sheltered by stand sturdy, strong, ablaze with autumnal vigour.

What merriment rang out in the dining room in Thanksgivings and Christmases past? What joy was beheld by the pastoral prospects? What spirited ghosts inhabit the wood-panneled bedrooms? What foods did they grow and what animals roamed the barnyard?

The bumpy backroads of Margaree (and the length and breadth of Cape Breton Island beyond) lead past many such homesteads entangled in vegetation and throttled by trees, soon to be swallowed up entirely, reverted to wild land, almost without trace of the stories they could tell.