Happy Birthday Queenie

My true centre is my capacity to fall in love with everything around me.
- Malvina Hoffman

They say that the lifelong challenge for Cancerians is boundary making – they have trouble marking out where they end and the rest of the universe begins. I have always felt that to be true. Picking my way through the no man’s land of my intersection with life is sometimes a problem, because even though I think we are all tiny, interconnected carbon specks, other people don’t. Which is why I love to travel. Because when I travel, I can ignore boundaries and fall in love with everything around me every day.



Today is my birthday and I am thirty-five. I am a smoker, so I reckon I’m probably half way to my next life. If I’m lucky.

Half way there. As Yoichi would say, “WOW!!”

Yoichi is the Japanese wwoofer staying here at the moment. A Murakami novel of a mind, wrapped up in a slender little frame, with big spectacles and a nifty Casio translation machine that we use to torment him. We call him Yoichi Parker because he loves jazz and plays the alto sax. He smiles quietly to himself whenever we do. He’s an ecologist. He cycled around the coastline of Japan by himself last year and built a fire every night and cooked squid and potatoes and pumpkins and ate them looking out at the sea. Now he has a girlfriend who is studying in England. His English is neither good nor bad, but he has the endearing habit of shouting “WOW!!” at completely inopportune moments. For example:

“Yoichi, I’m going into Wolfville, would you like anything from the shops?”

“WOW!!!”

“Would you like anything?”

“Yes no.”

“YOICHI, I - DRIVE – (mime driving) NOW (point to watch) - TO - WOLF-VILLE (point west towards the town). ME. (point to myself, do driving watch thing again). WOULD – YOU (point to him) – LIKE – SOME-THING – FROM – THE – STORE (point to plastic Sobey’s bag)? COCA-COLA, CHOCOLATE, POTATO CHIPS?”

“Aaaaahhhhh, you are going Ulfwill?”

“Yes. Would you like me to buy you something?”

“I come too?”

“Sure.”

I think there should be a wow here, but there never is.

Anyway, halfway there – wow.

I got up early and read my birthday emails and then Ron arrived at 7.30am and when I let him in, he had a present for me. I knew he would. I was up early to get it really, although I didn’t let on. But I could tell he was pleased I had made the effort.

He bought me a birthday cake. And thirty-five candles. So I put all the candles on the cake and when I turned round he was standing there with the fire extinguisher in his hand. We laughed till we cried.

We laugh a lot, Ron and me. Or Wrong, as I call him. Cos he likes the last word does Ron. Oh yes. He’s been married three times. He has a girlfriend now; she works nights at a call centre over near Berwick. So he really only sees her at the weekends. He mentioned the fact that he had a waterbed this morning. He’s had one for twenty years. So now of course, I cannot get the image of Ron and Arlene on the waterbed in his trailer home, which is on top of the North Mountain across the bay, out of my head.

Ron is George’s friend and he’s putting a new floor into the tofu shop this week. In return, George is going to give him an old car he has sitting in the yard. And then he’ll fix it up and give it to someone else for his winter wood supply. Everything works on a barter system here, because nobody has any cash. The completion of these transactions is the cornerstone of the social life of this community. Firstly, you have to call over for a chat about what you want. And what you can trade. And when and where it’ll get done. And then when the work starts, you both go to the lumberyard or the repair shop or Harley’s Discount Hardware to buy whatever supplies you need to get the work done. Presumably so you can agree on what to spend.

You get up early and drive over and work from eight until about four thirty because you get breakfast, lunch and a beer at the end of the day. And then you go home and do your own chores. Everyone has a vegetable garden or some chickens. You don’t go to the pub because their beer is too expensive. Maybe once in a while you go over to the casino on the M’qMaq reservation and blow whatever you have.

Ron’s last wife did that with his savings account. And then got herself a good lawyer, and made him sell the house and give her half. Which is why he’s in the trailer. And she sold his dog to someone and wouldn’t tell him who. Everyone thinks she was a right bitch. Ron won’t be drawn on the subject. I asked him whether I could be wife number four and he just smiled and said I was too mouthy.

So I cooked eggs and we made some coffee and drank it and talked about the time he was a truck driver, bringing lumber down into the states and how scary that was compared to driving across Canada. And what Newfoundland is like, because I want to go there.

Then Yoichi got up and when he came into the kitchen, he bowed to me and handed me a small package that contained a pair of lacquered chopsticks.

Then George and Anna and their daughter Heather, who are the family I am wwoofing with, sang Happy Birthday to me and we all went to do our chores. Tomorrow night we are having a bonfire and some beers, but Friday is our busiest day because we have to do the Farmers Markets in Halifax and Wolfville on Saturday, so we have to get all the produce ready. Ready to us tofu in plain, herb and smoked. Free range eggs. Apple cider. Tofu dips, burgers and patties. Soymilk. George and Anna brought the produce into Halifax and put it in the fridges for tomorrow. Heather is making burgers. Yoichi and I are planting soybeans and corn, and we have to hoe the potatoes and bank them, and try to hoe the cabbages. But it rained last night and the ground was really sticky so I gave up after two rows and went back to work in the garden.

I am clearing ground for them. First I strim the wilderness back. It’s tricky, because I am keeping the hollyhocks, the bluebells and the wild mint and parsley, so I have to precision strim, which is not easy when my glasses are covered in bits of grass. Then I go over it with a heavy-duty lawn mower and take the last of the growth out. Then I rake it and dump barrowfuls of weeds on the compost heap. I dig up all the burdock roots and the docks and the thistles. Then I go over it again with the lawnmower and George tills what I’ve cleared if he can get the rotivator in. Sometimes I have to dig it out by hand.

It doesn’t feel like work, it’s a meditation. Even though it’s backbreaking, I can do it for hours, even in the rain. Whereas Yoichi and I are united in our hatred of hoeing and will use the first hint of mist to throw them down and find something else to do. I feel very close to Paddy, my gardening friend who’s dead now. I remember evenings watching him dig out beds, weed and plant, and when I start to do the same thing; I don’t have to think about it. George and Anna say I’m a natural gardener – I have an eye for it, whatever that means. Paddy and I have long chats about the state of the earth. There are too many stones, he’s disgusted, and when I ignore one he nags me until I go back and prise it up and out. Together, we’ve cleared over half an acre in just a few days.

So yeah, halfway there. Have I learned anything? Apart from the fact that I’m mouthy!!

Well, I’ve learned that I can do a lot of things, most things in fact, but I suppose the one thing I can’t do is be happy unless I feel that my work is in some way helping the earth or the people who live on it. I know this sounds appallingly right on, but I can’t think of another way to say it.

I’ve tried to fit in with the way things are done. I’ve really tried. Because people I care about want me to. Because it’s easier to live in a city and have an office job. Because for a long time I thought I was making a difference. Because I wanted to be successful and respected and well regarded. Because the work that makes me happy doesn’t bring wealth, or even financial security. But when I was wealthy (relative to the rest of the planet I was) and successful and a city girl I was miserable and lonely. As my sister Gypsy said in an email today, living in a city is such an inhumane thing to do to yourself after a certain point.

Even though I’m eking out my money and worrying about it constantly, even though I’m dirty and covered in mosquito bites, even though I haven’t been to the pub in two weeks, even though nobody bothers to acknowledge my job applications because I don’t have something I don’t know I don’t have, I am mostly blissfully happy. I am surrounded by people who are closing ranks around me because I make them smile (and hoe their pumpkins!). So maybe I was right to get out of the cul-de-sac. And although I am only reversing out of it yet, carefully, carefully, some days I feel like I’ve made the right choice.

But it’s all on a knife-edge still. Every day I panic at some point and want to pack my bags, run to a city, get an office job and have my old life again. But that is not what this year is about. This year is about learning new ways of living.

The most important thing I’ve learned in my two weeks in this community is that everyone knows their worth, their potential contribution to the overall work that needs to be done, whether it’s farming, caring, building, or whatever. Everyone hates the multinationals and shops local as much as possible. Everyone avoids tax through barter. Nothing is thrown away. Everything is recycled, reused, composted. Not because Bono told them to do it. Because they can’t afford to buy new. I can’t afford to buy new at the moment either. So I have to learn to trade. And in order to do that I have to determine my worth. My potential contribution.

As Ron would say, that’ll take some figurin’.

As Yoichi would say, WOW!!!!

Just after I posted this, I got an email from the *** offering me an interview. How ironic.