R.I.P. Stan Persky

“A major BC writer in the 1970s and 1980s, Stan Persky (at left) has died. The author of over 20 books, he co-founded the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement that led to the formation of New Star Books.FULL STORY

 

#15 Drought and Dreadnoughtus

September 07th, 2014

Hi, darlin’.

Not a lot to report. Today it’s lovely in Tahsis, not blistering hot, pleasant little breeze wafting the leaves on the trees.

Just saying goodbye to another summer. Those who claim to know are saying it was the hottest summer here on record. And dry. A friend of mine gave me a perfect description—said walking on her lawn sounded like walking on corn flakes.

I don’t have a “lawn.” Oh, there’s a patch of grass out in front, and I keep it cut short in my on-going and doomed attempt to counter the slug invasion. Nobody would call it a “lawn”.  In hot dry weather I let it go brown, I don’t water it at all, that way nobody has to bother themselves mowing or weed-whacking it.

My figs came ripe and my next-door neighbour has been a true stalwart and eats them for me. They’re much too sweet for me, they make the inside of my mouth pucker and my throat tighten.

Me and my fig tree… it’s just another example of how my best ideas bite me in the butt.  Years ago my cousin’s neighbour gave me this ittybitty rooted treeling which I brought back to Tahsis and planted in the side yard.  Pretty much every year we get a couple of weeks of false spring, with warm weather and sunshine and all the things we don’t get all winter.  And the fig tree sprang to life and… even made ittybitty baby figlets.

Then false spring took her deceptive self somewhere else and we were back to ugly, ugly, cold driving rain and a wind that can destroy picket fences and the poor little fig tree got blasted, the baby figs all died and… and I got this bright idea to dig ‘er up and put her in the greenhouse. After all, she wasn’t very big. She has done gloriously well in there.

If I don’t do something she’ll lift the roof off the greenhouse.  As it is I am having a slight degree of difficulty getting in the door.

Meanwhile our local Seniors Society has found a great way to get people out to monthly meetings. They hold a pot luck supper before it’s time to get down to business. But the Seniors are meeting in a large room in the unused portion of our local school. I didn’t go to last night’s pot luck. To me, and some others, the entire school property is “hot.” Until this debacle the government has inflicted on all of us is settled, the school property will remain hot.

What else? Well, today, as I wandered through the various news outlets which arrive in my e-mail, I read an article about an archeological find in Argentina. They’ve decided to call it Dreadnoughtus.

They’ve found an almost complete skeleton of Dreadnoughtus in Patagonia and are busy chipping the rock away from the bones so they can re-assemble the skeleton. So far it’s 85 feet long, 30 feet tall, and they estimate it weighed 130,000 pounds.

What’s more, they claim they can tell from the joints that Dreadnoughtus was a juvenile and was still growing. The archeologists say it ate grass, leaves and small trees. That’s something like half the size and weight of a great blue whale.

What was that Robertson Davies novel called? World of Wonders? Well, I never read it. But the title rings true. We live in a world of wonders—good and bad, large and small.

Anne Cameron grows pussywillows on the western edge of Vancouver Island. She received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia in 2010. Her 23 books include Daughters of Copper Woman, the bestselling work of fiction ever written about B.C. and published from within B.C. She has banished herself to Tahsis, a small town not far from Friendly Cove where the shenanigans called British Columbia all began.

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