Home again to the fog and rain of July

Yes, July.....

Over the last couple of weeks we took a trip: across Nova Scotia, over the Bay of Fundy on the ferry ($224!!)from Digby; haircut and lunch in St John, to Fredericton, New Brunswick, then up to Quebec (the city, capital of the province) to inspect and approve our new piano.

From there we travelled down to Montreal for a few days, then back home via Rivière-du-Loup, Dieppe, and Halifax.

Quebec was fun, but touristy. Montreal though charmed us as always. I especially loved that it is a city with street life: bikes, scooters, and endless people on sidewalks and everywhere, going places, doing things, and doing them at hours when most of Nova Scotia - and I’ll admit, all of Alençon, in France - are entirely shut down.

Getting people out of their cars and onto the streets is so utterly critical to a city. As are some truly wonderful restaurants.

Now though we’re back home in Western Head. If weather reports are to be believed it has rained every day since we left. This is a good thing for the gardens, but today I’m looking out at rain, and fog, and gentle winds, and thinking “Dear god, Nova Scotia, it’s July!”

I see grass that needs to be cut, except that it’s wet. I have refilled the bird feeders, and am happy that both the birds above and the chipmunks below have found where we moved them last minute from the deck, where they were prone to nightly attacks by raccoons, to an apparently unclimbable pole in the yard.

I’m also pleased that no creature has managed to find a way into our big, beautiful compost bin. So far that has turned out to be a great success.

Still though, I’m looking around and seeing a seemingly endless list of projects on the horizon. Certainly crawling beneath the house to seal up and insulate the floors, and somehow also insulate the laundry room, and likely to some degree the attic.

If the weather ever heats up (although honestly it’s lovely and warm outside today, although wet and foggy) we may take on the task of prying open the sealed windows. Some are very old, and some are just cheap new ones that have reached a point where, if they were people, they would choose to retire. We also know that this is an area with all manner of bugs, some noxious, some annoying, so screens matter too.

When the kitchen water-lines were replaced last winter - we were in France, and they had frozen solid and split - the plumber also removed the apparently unworking water tap on the outside of that part of the house. Replacing it is the kind of non-technical task that always falls to me.

And, of course, I want to side the barn. Basically whatever covered it thirty of forty years ago is long gone. The structure is good, the roof (aside from leak on one of the skylights) is good, so covering the walls will make it dry and tidy. And covering them with siding or shingles and TyVek will make it warm and weatherproof. Well, aside from the front doors…

Quotes for a new house roof are still coming in. In a perfect world we’d go with metal just for the sheer ruggedness of it. The winds out on the edge of the Atlantic are fierce (we’ve seen 87 kmh so far), as is the rain. A roof is not somewhere you want to cut corners - if you can afford it. And of course a house with three four additions over the years also means a wild and complicated roof with lots of edges and gutters.

My first big project was going to be replacing and extending the decks to cover the new septic tank lids. Somehow that got pushed back, first to build the swing-set for grand-kids, then for a dozen other things, then when the grand-kids’ house burned down, then…. somehow I’m beginning to think that this is how everything works in Nova Scotia.

And, beyond that, we still have about two or three acres of land that we still haven’t actually seen! There just hasn’t been the time and weather to bush-whack through the brambles and grasses, and to fight off the ticks, and see what’s there. We do know that we have an apple tree - but don’t know if it gives fruit - and have been told there are plums. Beyond that it looks vaguely like it was once a functional and fruit-bearing property, but who knows?

And, of course, there are about a hundred smaller, but equally critical fixes, upgrades, and tweaks that are needed. The list grows longer every day.

Still, as I sit here on a Monday afternoon I can hear the Western Head fog horn, and its slow and regular rhythm reminds me that all of this will get done, in due course, and in its own time.

After another cup of coffee.