intersecting lives

I have come down out of the bituminous sands, through the acrid sooty frozen air, the instant camps and the big sad boomtown. I have quit my job and am rejuvenating my soul in the company of a spectacular woman and her small farm in a beautiful lonely valley in central Alberta. The joys and insights are simple and profound. I loll about cooking, walking, staring into space when she goes to town to work. It is the first time in several years where I have done absolutely nothing planned or involving drudgery.

She has a flock of heirloom chickens and an assortment of hounds that keep watch, calling out the presence of moose, coyote or wolves and are a blessed company on the ski trail. The snow is deep, but soft as it has warmed up here and snow shoes break through to a harder layer frozen 2 feet below.





Her beautiful and complex farm, intersected everywhere with pipelines, wellheads and air traffic is a wilderness overlain with the oil industry and scattered here and there with the discarded bones of a farming industry abandoned suddenly for more lucrative pursuits. You can imagine the dinosaurs that once ranged here. Ancient bones and fossils, wildlife trails, native pathways, old settler's ruins...