Fully furnished

There is an exquisite feeling of self-loathing that comes with purchasing a ticket in the hospital lottery. It’s the sense of being duped, combined with the humiliation of having your baser instincts exposed. On the other hand, there’s a sense of belonging.

Fortune good and ill

Do you have grievances? By golly, I’ve got some! One of the grievances I’m cultivating at the moment concerns the radio weather forecaster who announces, almost every day, that we have a certain percent “chance for showers,” rather than a chance “of” showers.

Make fast!

During a violent storm, lying in bed in the upstairs of our house feels a bit like being at sea. There’s definitely some give in this 19th-century structure. People have tried to tell me that the capacity to bend and flex is a design feature – that the old-fashioned building methods were meant to allow for shock absorption, to help a house withstand big gusts.

Saving food

When the federal government rolled out our first-ever Food Policy for Canada two years ago, one of the primary objectives was to address a troubling reality: there are such vast quantities of farm produce on the market that much of it goes to waste, and yet some people do not have enough.

Changing our tune

There’s a catchy new song that’s sweeping the nation, though it hasn’t been heard in the Maritimes yet. Like every other trend, it will arrive here in the fullness of time. We may have to be patient, because this hot number is being tweeted and liked and shared and copied by non-electronic means. Its increasing popularity is entirely dependent upon White-throated sparrows learning it from other White-throated sparrows, and then passing it on to still more White-throated sparrows during their migratory stopovers.

This spud's for you

My goodness, look at the calendar – National Potato Day is coming up on May 30! Wait a second, that’s National Potato Day in Peru. Canada appears to follow the U.S. lead, celebrating this tuber tradition on August 19.

Vernal notes

Spring has sprung, but the grass ain’t yet riz. Give it another week, maybe. While the field I’m thinking about harrowing is still too squishy, we’re getting some of those breezy days that really dry things out. It’s not an ill wind if it bodes well for tractor work, but it could bring another bad fire season, given the absence of snowpack in the woods this year.

Remedial food literacy

“I’m glad you guys made me eat a lot of different kinds of weird food when I was little,” said our teenager, during supper the other night. Of course, any kind of positive feedback received from a 16-year-old should be viewed with suspicion. You’re not supposed to start appreciating your parents until you hit your 20s or 30s. Maybe he is trying to butter us up – currying favour, so to speak – for strategic reasons that will soon become apparent.

Should the one-percenters control agriculture?

In 2014, when the Indian writer and activist Vandana Shiva was speaking in Halifax, I had the opportunity to sit down with her for a fairly extensive interview – mostly on topics related to genetically modified (GM) crops, which was a key theme of her address. When it was clearly time to wrap up the conversation, I blurted out a rather lame closing question, asking where she saw her work going in the next five years.

’Twas the night before, etc.

There’s a certain tradition, in the month of December,
to cast the mind backward and fondly remember –
or perhaps not so much; based on how we’ve been treated,
we may wish these past episodes never repeated.

A creeping phenomenon

As harvest season rolls along, we will soon get a more complete picture of how agriculture in the Atlantic provinces has been affected by dry conditions this year. In mid-summer, most parts of New Brunswick and P.E.I. were experiencing drought, and in some areas the situation was deemed severe.

Making the future

“You can’t change history,” buddy tells me, as if that settles things once and for all. It’s hard to know exactly what is meant by these words, which are most commonly uttered by guys who came through the 20th century pretty comfortably and would prefer that things continue along more or less the same. My uncharitable interpretation is that it’s a sage-sounding way of saying that one doesn’t give a damn. It’s a rejection of empathy – a quasi-philosophical “I’m alright Jack.”

Essentialism

Chatting with my dad on the phone, trying to think of some good news to share, I mention that the swallows have come back. “Back to Capistrano?” he asks. As is often the case with his literary or musical allusions, I have no idea what he’s talking about. He sings a few bars, but it doesn’t ring any bells with me, so I have to look it up.

Back to the land again

by Rupert Jannasch
In December 1968, Country Guide magazine described a world awash in grain. Three years later, the first of several crop failures in the Soviet Union led to the emergency purchase of millions of tons of American wheat and corn. A spike in oil prices in 1973 launched the decade-long energy crisis. By the mid-1970s, Canada’s Consumer Price Index was increasing by about 10 percent per year.

Beware the Bolsheviks!

I had a chuckle recently listening to an archival news item on the radio, from November of 1983, when John Buchanan, then-premier of Nova Scotia, delivered a barn-burner of a speech in Amherst, N.S. Addressing the local Progressive Conservative Association, he succeeded in getting his audience riled up about a very pressing issue of the day: road signage.

My darling young one
The kid has an essay assignment for one of his classes, and during supper I am invited to provide some input. Wonderful, of course! What’s the topic? “Why young people should be optimistic about the future.” Oh man, that’s a doozy. In our time, it seems there’s a surge of optimism about the past – a collective nostalgia for some imaginary golden era – but the future is tougher.

Midwinter mix-up

Is it suppertime already? As the year winds down and the days grow shorter, I’m having trouble adjusting. The positive side of this seasonal shift is that there will be more time for cooking. In the summer, when everyone’s doing stuff outside, our main meal of the day sometimes gets pushed to 10 p.m.