Here goes!Posted by Maxine on September 9th, 2010

Well: I’m actually doing it. Blogging.

I’ll try to use this space to tell you what’s going on at Windhover Place; what we’re doing and thinking about here; what I’m reading… .

But today, let me just tell you about this particular day, September 9, 2010. The morning came on us wrapped in fog today. The valley, 850 feet or so below us, with its tiny perfect toy-world look of white houses, miniature cars and tractors, and fields of varying greens or freshly turned rose-red soil  is only slowly resolving into view–like a Polaroid picture with colour and detail, at first faint and pallid, and then, moment by moment, emerging more clearly.  I had remembered fall days here in Nova Scotia as mostly crystalline, but we are having high humidity again in the wake of the first hurricane to make landfall this season. (Early last Saturday morning, Hurricane Earl suddenly veered right instead of roaring up the Bay of Fundy as had been predicted. Had it stayed on course, the eye of the storm would have passed about 7 km from Windhover Place, & from our experience of Post-tropical storm Noel in 2007, that is a too close for comfort. We were battened down and braced–since the terrible experience of Hurricane Juan, Nova Scotians do not take hurricanes or tropical storms lightly–but while there were power outages and some trees down, the damage was much less than it might have been, and the Annapolis Valley apple crop, right now heavy and ripe, was not whipped and battered.  So after several antsi days last week, a kind of quiet calm that matches the greyed and cooled-down day reigns.)

The large birds of prey are back or travelling through now. We see a lot of hawks (Northern Harriers, mostly, but an occasional kestrel or “windhover”) and eagles. I haven’t seen a hummingbird for the past three or four days, and the warblers seem to have passed through, so now we’re seeing the birds that will winter here with us: finches and chicadees and nuthatches, all such welcome feeders.

My best birthday present this year? A poem written by my 10-year old granddaughter, Clio. With her family, Clio spends most of a month here with us each summer since we have been in Nova Scotia. She captures the joy of this place:

Windhover Place

Birds Swooping
Laundry Flying
Clouds Floating
Eagles Soaring
Butterflies Fluttering
Ravens Airborne
Happiness Gliding…
Because
Windhover Place is where I
like to be!

Wishing you joy in your day, as well–
Maxine