`The Cedars’, February 1980

View of the house from the highway

View from behind the house, fields and then the Trout River just below the tree line

View of sheds belonging to our neighbour, Donalda Smith

View of the house from rear

 

I owned this house, located about fifty miles south-west of Montreal at 4359 Route 138, from June 1979 to June 1997 when I returned to live in Montreal. The house was about 100 years old when I bought it; the best thing about the house is that it was adjacent to the Trout River; an old barn (to the right of the house above) burned down around 1985 and was replaced with a post and beam barn of the same size as the original barn. We sold the house and the new owners lasted about two years and then sold it; whoever bought the house a few years ago totally demolished the interior and renovated the place, nothing of what was once there is still present. 

Marya Fiamengo at The Cedars, spring 1993

Here's CZ and Marya on the Morrison Bridge.

CZ and Marya at the Elgin Cemetery.

Marya and CZ at the Cedars.

Marya on the Morrison Bridge.

SM, CZ, and Marya at The Cedars.

Dream Journeys: The Journey Home

The Cedars, 1983

The Journey Home

1) On my Fifty-Second Birthday

I have returned, on foot,
to the Cedars, the country house
where I lived almost twenty years
before returning to the city.
It is cold outside and the yard
is littered with cardboard boxes
and broken farm equipment.
As I approach the house
I wonder how the new owners
will receive me: perhaps
they are still angry
at discovering thousands
of bats living in the attic, as they
complained about this
after they moved in.
How could country people
not have expected bats
or even mice
in a country house?
But they seem not to notice
my presence, and they appear
nice enough. I am like a ghost here
walking from room to room
while these people
talk, eat, and are oblivious
to me. These new owners
have put in big windows,
the rooms are larger now,
walls have been removed
and a smaller, more efficient
wood stove installed.
The house is messy,
beds unmade,
some rooms not used at all
just containing junk.
This is my old home,
but there is nothing left
of my having lived here.

Honey bees on UBC campus

Walking by the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus last week I noticed honey bees gathering nectar and pollen in the flowers (pictured above). Notice the large pollen sacs on the honey bees' legs. There were also a few bumble bees, and other bees, but the honey bee is always of interest and anyone who has kept bees has a fondness for them. Back in the mid-1970s my friend R.R. Skinner opened his hives for me to observe his bees. That was interesting and I knew right away that one day I would keep my own bees. On my visits to R.R. I would write down pretty much everything he said--I seem to have the ability of sitting and listening to people talk about themselves for many hours in a non-judgemental and fairly passive way--but R.R.'s stories about beekeeping were always interesting, including moving hives on his bicycle and overwintering a hive in his bedroom. Beekeepers can be quite obsessive about bees, and this obsession seems eccentric to people who have never kept bees. But one man's eccentricity is another man's normal life.



Above, the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus.

It was in the early 1980s that my friend, the poet George Johnston, sat down with me and went over what I would need to establish my own apiary. I ordered some beekeeping equipment through the mail but also drove to Bedford, Quebec to pick up boxes of bees. That's how you buy honey bees, several thousand come in a wooden box with a wire mesh front and a queen bee contained in a small box inside the larger box. You literally dump the bees into a hive like bits of Styrofoam; however, the queen bee is released into the hive only gradually so that she will be accepted by the other bees. How do you release the queen gradually? There is a sugar plug that the worker bees and the queen eat opening a space for the queen to emerge into the hive. If, for whatever reason, the worker bees don't like the queen, they will quite literally kill the queen, which means more work for the beekeeper as she will have to be replaced. There is also a smell to bees, it is feral and reminds us that bees are never domesticated, only contained. I went with George, and possibly with George Elliot, about whom George has written some memorable poems, to beekeeping seminars across the border in New York State. These events were always memorable and enjoyable to attend. I also remember, one time, driving home from Bedford with boxes of bees and beekeeping equipment and the brakes failing on the car... somehow I still made it back home, maybe fifty miles distance. That was interesting...

I used to have about ten hives that I kept in the field, near some apple trees, about a hundred feet behind The Cedars, our house on the Trout River in Huntingdon, (more correctly, Godmanchester) Quebec. I had a big hand-turned honey extractor that I bought second hand, but like many beekeepers I preferred making comb honey. Comb honey is cut directly from the frame, it's honey the way bees make it in a hive, but it also means you've destroyed the comb the bees have made, while with liquid honey you can recycle the frame with the comb on it because all you've done is cut off a surface layer of wax before extracting the honey. You extract the honey by the centrifugal force of spinning the frames. There's money in bees wax that can be made into candles and pollen that some people believe has health benefits, but this should be qualified, if you want pollen for allergies or whatever, you need local pollen since your allergies are to local plants, not pollen from China that has dubious if any value. Beekeepers have always known that bee stings can help relieve arthritis, and this seems to be getting some press in recent years; however, I remember R.R. suggesting that the bee sting acted as a kind of accupuncture treatment, and maybe this is a correct explanation for this .

Unless you've kept bees you may not understand the happiness one can experience opening hives on a hot summer day. The bees are probably fairly passive on such days, but a whiff of smoke passed over the top of the frames seems to keep them busy and diverted from the beekeeper's activities. Never wear perfume or any other scent to an apiary, I've had a nasty experience being stung by doing that. I kept bees for about ten years and was put out of business by mites from across the US border infesting my bees. Don't worry about killer bees, thirty years after I began beekeeping I still don't see them as a problem here in Canada. I remember, as well, lying in the grass near the entrance to the hives and watching bees coming and going, what a wonderful sight that is! They're bringing in nectar, their pollen sacs are full, and some bees are removing dead bees; in the fall the drones, male bees that inseminate the queen on her single maiden flight, are being expelled. Don't forget, all worker honey bees are female. Lying there, in the grass on a summer day, that's when you realize the genuine affection one feels for the honey bee.

The Trout River in late winter, early spring

At The Cedars on Trout River

The old Morrison property located on the Morrison sideroad -- the house burned down years ago -- and only this shed remains. There are a few places I would say are "sacred sites" and this is one of them, another is St. Patrick's Church in Montreal. A sacred site doesn't have to be associated with any organized religion (sometimes the opposite prevails), there is a quality of quiet, depth of thought, and spirituality that can be felt at these places. Dowsers can locate them, they exist on ley lines, so you can hold out your hands, palm down, and walk along a country road, and feel the living presence of the earth pulsating in your hands. The Morrison property is located at the junction of the Fourth Concession and the Morrison Sideroad, in Godmanchester, Quebec. I remember in the mid-1990s, often visiting the Morrison property, just to sit and think or be quiet for a few minutes. It was one day, perhaps in 1996, that I decided to sell The Cedars and relocate back to Montreal. I was walking past the Morrison property when I realized that where ever I am living, whatever I have done, that who I am as a human being is a part of my essence. I don't have to live in any particular place, where ever I am I carry with me where I have been and who I am. I am on a journey in life and this is it.

An old oak--important for us Celts--in the middle of a field, on the left side of the Morrison Sideroad as you approach the Morrison Bridge that crosses Trout River from Route 138. I can see Route 138 in the distance...

I made this path just by walking on it from our house to the river. Whenever I think of The Cedars, our old home, I think of Trout River. It was a long commute from the city, about an hour and twenty minutes each way for work, but you certainly felt a lot more in touch with nature when you were out there. And the scenery was beautiful; it wasn't stunning or magnificent, but it was beautiful. The Trout River runs across the U.S. border from the Adirondacks, oddly enough an unpolluted river entering Canada from the States, and then in the perhaps ten miles it's in Canada it becomes polluted. Then, just before you reach Huntingdon, the Trout River merges with the Chateauguay River. You wouldn't want to drink the water from the Trout River, but you could swim in it, and it wasn't polluted where we lived except with some run-off from farmers' fields. The only "problem" with the river was that it was very shallow, but this was also a good thing, you could swim in places and enjoy the river, but you could also wade the river. If there was one thing I really loved about this area, where I lived for almost twenty years, it was the river. You couldn't really cross country ski there, the snow blew across farmers' fields and became impacted and icy. I skated a few times on the river, and that was fun. Mostly I'd sit in the summer on a rock in the middle of the river, it was quite narrow (maybe twenty or thirty feet wide where we lived) and read and write poems. Or walk down to the river, it was maybe a hundred feet behind the house, and stand by the river and enjoy being there.

Above: Trout River in early spring. Below: some trees by the river:

The Cedars

Our home on Route 138--six miles south of Huntingdon, six miles north of the American border--from June 1979 to June 1997.

Blackie

This is Blackie, a cat I found in our barn at The Cedars when he was only a few days old. I called him Black Lightning, because he moved so fast that I couldn't catch him. He has tufts of fur on the ends of his ears, which immediately endeared him to me. I loved that cat from when I first saw him.

Blackie loves a party, he loves people visiting the house. He's a sociable cat, extroverted when it comes to parties. He also eats at the table with whoever is there. We had Blackie until CZ developed asthma and he moved to my mother's house on Montclair. My mother said "He can't come here, I have a cat; put him down." A few days later I drove him over to her house and announced he was now living with her; "Blackie," I said, "this is your new home." He didn't object, he was always upwardly mobile. He soon became my mother's favourite. So, from the barn to our house, to our house in the city, to the big house on Montclair, to an apartment in Toronto, and next (as my mother enters a retirement home) to my brother and sister-in-law's home! What a character!

Here's Blackie waiting for his breakfast, I think it was French toast... could he chow down!

Here's Blackie (from his life in the country) with a birthday card in front of him, waiting to be opened. I think Blackie's a Taurus, like me.

The woods in south western Quebec (one)