Just before dawn on the Minas Basin

Queenie had an emotional roller-coaster of a week last week. The long soft landing had gone to my head a little bit I think. Last week, the runway of reality loomed up with a velocity that almost unseated me. But I’ve steadied again. Not without a few tears though.

After my Long Island escapades, I went back to Grand Pre and busied myself there for a couple of days, before heading up to Halifax to look for somewhere to live. Of course, I started to miss Long Island as soon as I left it, as I knew I would. At least the weekend is the weekend there, unlike the farm, where the weekend is when most of the work gets done.

The vibe on the farm was a lot tenser than when I left it. I don’t know what happened while I was away and it’s none of my business. Yoichi and Janna, the German wwoofer, had both left for Halifax, so maybe the family dynamics aren’t so good when there isn’t company. The first day there was a Saturday, so I did the farmers market in Wolfville, which was very pleasant, before tackling the hillside jungle of docks and clover that is their lawn. No wonder I have big muscles in my arms, dragging the lawnmower up and down that slope.

I actually have scarily big biceps at the moment. For a girl that is.

Sunday was even more tense, with tears and slammed doors, so I ended up bringing the youngest to the pub for a couple of hours to try and relax her. As we drove home, the most beautiful moon I’ve seen in Canada so far was rising over the hill at the back of the farmhouse. It was the continuation of the full moon I experienced on Long Island, but the orb seemed closer to earth, more rounded and more golden down here in the Annapolis Valley. Its pull has had a profound effect on my body in the last two weeks, which was a bit freaky at the time, but it’s great to be back in sync with it. However, the house was early to bed as usual, so I couldn’t watch it for long.

Searching for a home from home

Monday morning, I got the Acadian Bus to Halifax and for a while it was nice to wander the streets and drink a proper cup of coffee and be the mistress of my own hours. Even though I was house hunting. To my surprise I found myself getting a little bit stressed. Nothing like I was in Ireland, but still, the heart rate was up a bit and I was tetchy. It was strange to feel stressed, not having felt like that for two months now. I was in for worse, though, as Monday and Tuesday both were made up of fruitless hours pounding the pavements.

Monday in particular was awful – it poured rain all afternoon and I wandered the streets phoning numbers on To Rent signs all around the South End, only to find the flats were unfurnished. Then I viewed the flat from hell, you know, the one you ended up in at the beginning of second year in college when you had no money and no sense. This time I took advantage of my opportunity to have a go at a rackrenter, and I let fly at my proposed landlord, asking him how in the name of God could he stand over his statement to me on the phone that this was a nice apartment, when it was blindingly obvious that it was nothing more than a damp, basement, cockroach infested firetrap. With no windows. The cheek of him, wasting my time like that.

I felt great afterwards.

A wet Monday night

Back at the hostel though, reality began to seep through the cracks in my defences and I felt really disoriented and a bit lonely. It was raining. In Halifax, when it rains, it RAINS. A sweet little Australian girl, on her way to Winnipeg to work at a Christian mission there, comforted me a bit, and we talked about why we found ourselves meeting each other, halfway across our worlds, in a small room with six beds and no curtains in a wet city on a Monday night. What drove us to do this? We neither of us had an answer for ourselves that night.

After we put the lights out, I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I lay worrying about my job, about my house hunting, about money, about my job again, about whether I would be able to make the enormous intellectual leap they are asking of me. How am I supposed to get up to speed on the political system of a completely different COUNTRY in a couple of weeks? Not to mention learning the policy ropes. Not to mention figuring out all the nuances of the party and the provincial legislature. Not to mention coming up with innovative ideas. Not to mention doing it all at the speed of a parliamentary day, which is something akin to the speed of light. Not to mention doing it with forty people wanting me to make a mess of it, so they can get the job. I eventually fell asleep. I dreamt of my days back with the old party, the old fear of fucking up came back and prowled around me again, and when I woke I could taste its metallic tang on my tongue. I didn’t want to face the day at all.

Tuesday with a morose Yoichi

After a morning of phone calls that weren’t providing me with many leads, I met up with Yoichi, who was in a foul mood as well. Unsurprisingly, he is not yet fluent in English after just two weeks of classes, so he was engaging in that most Japanese of pastimes, metaphorically battering himself around the head for not being perfect. I really wasn’t in the mood for it, having spent the previous evening doing it to myself, so we spent a couple of hours sitting morosely nursing our Tim Horton’s cups, looking out at the sea. He was silent because he wouldn’t say anything unless he could construct the sentence perfectly. I was silent because I was panicking about what I was doing with my life. Finally we separated, as I had to view a house. Two minutes later, my prospective landlady cancelled. The evening stretched out endlessly in front of me, so I ran to the ferry terminal, but Yoichi had already gone back to Dartmouth. I felt so alone.

Wednesday, the sun blazed down on Halifax and everyone’s mood lightened as they looked forward to the long weekend. My new boss emailed me and didn’t appear to have any misgivings about hiring me. Some woman called Jill rang to say the room she thought she had let had become available again, so did I want to view it? I still can’t figure out who she was, or how I got in contact with her. I don’t remember ringing a Jill. Anyways, suddenly I had three places to view in one day. I’ll have to get one of them, I thought.

Finding a south end address

I have walked the length and breadth of Halifax city (not suburbs) at this stage. It’s quite compact, with the residential areas all situated very close to downtown. They are mostly blocks of detached clapboard houses on small lots, with trees lining the streets and very little traffic. I had pretty much resigned myself to having to trade proximity to the centre for access to a garden, having spent two days struggling with this decision. The first viewing was almost what I wanted, although it was just a bit far out, and not fantastic enough to merit the distance. Nevertheless, as I walked away I felt that at least I had something do-able in the bag.

When I looked at my map I realised I could walk down to the sea on the other side of the isthmus upon which the south end of the city is built and follow it round to the second house on my list. That was how I discovered why everyone said I should live in the south end. The road cuts through a big park, then meanders along a series of beautiful streets, with big hedges hiding gorgeous houses and large gardens with mature plants and trees. I found my street, Beaufort Avenue – the fourth house down, the yellow one, she had said on the phone – and suddenly I rounded a bend in the road (an actual bend in the road, boys and girls) and there it was. It was love at first sight and I had three hours to go until I viewed it. I went and sat in the Public Gardens and bit my nails.

Thankfully, I got it and signed the lease on the spot.

So now I have a home at last and it’s very nice. The rent is EU340 a month, which includes all electricity, heat, water, cable, phone and hi-speed wireless internet costs. As well as all my sheets and towels and blankets, which saves me a major expense.

I walked back to the hostel down South St. and the sun was shining and I realised this would be my walk to and from work. The DalPlex sports complex is five minutes from the house, as is the sea. Suddenly, it all seemed plausible, workable, manageable again. Yoichi and I went to the pub to celebrate. I had a pint of IPA and he had two pints of some Guinness-like concoction they make here which is quite nice. Then he brought me to a really serious looking Japanese restaurant for sushi. We were having a rare old time, trying to get my hands to mould into the right shape for using chopsticks, and failing miserably, when I got a text message from my mother with some bad news. Which brought me right back down again, and discomfited Yoichi terribly, as he is not used to western displays of emotion. He finally decided to deal with it by eating all of the sushi except for the piece I had ruined by my tears plopping onto it.

Back to Wolfville for the last time

I had promised the farm family that I would work at the Farmers’ Market in Halifax on Saturday, but I had asked them to pay me this time, to cover my expenses in the hostel. We agreed on fifty dollars – which is outrageously low, but never mind. However, as I had found a house there was no reason to stay in Halifax, so I decided to go back to Wolfville and stay until Saturday. That way I could help with the preparations for the market and save the family fifty bucks.

I returned to complete chaos. I kept my head down and cooked dinner for everyone. There was a new wwoofer, a sixteen year-old home-schooled vegetarian called Zephyr, so I cooked tofu. Which is so boring. There was nothing else to eat, though. The atmosphere was so tense that afterwards I watched a dvd on the laptop in my room. After three days of broken sleep in the hostel, my body relaxed in the quiet of the countryside and I slept in until ten. I got up just as they were leaving to bring the produce to Halifax for the market. Oops!

When they were safely gone, Ron sloped over for a fag and a moan. He and the youngest had had a fight. He didn’t go into the details, but I assumed he had wound her up too much as usual. Then he told me they’d been moaning about having to pay me for the market. He shouldn’t have. But he was mad with them.

As I pushed the lawnmower around their endless, ever-growing acre of grass for the fourth time in a month, I began to get so angry about it I could spit. I tried not to. I wasn’t supposed to know this, so I shouldn’t get mad. And they were short of cash. And I hadn’t mentioned the fact that I wasn’t going to charge them.

But still.

The darkest hour

Next morning, I was up at 4.45am. It was still pitch black outside, with no stars or moon to relieve it. The darkest hour truly is before the dawn. As we drove through the valley, the sun came up over the Minas Basin and streaked the sky boldly in scarlet and shocking pink and orange. I thought about the funeral that was taking place at home. I wished I were in Springtown with my friends, not in Halifax selling tofu to hippies for a woman who didn’t think a day of my labour was worth a miserly fifty bucks. When she offered me the money at the end of the day I refused to take it. She didn’t need to be told twice.

Although cynicism is at best not constructive and at worst destructive and there’s too much of it in the world, the problem with idealism is that people always let you down in the end. One of the questions I often ask myself is how do I find a steady state in which to operate that exists somewhere between these extremes?

After the market, we had to do deliveries. It was very hot. I was very tired and cranky and the car was stuffed with boxes, bags and coolers. We got to the Grainery, which is an anarchist co-operative foodstore. Their order was under a box of glass soy milk bottles. I eventually unearthed it. When I brought the order in the three people in the shop, none of whom had phoned in the order, started having a row about whether or not they needed the eggs.

I pointed out that they had ordered them, so it was irrelevant whether or not they needed them. They argued some more. Eventually we agreed to take them back. I made a couple of narky remarks and shoved the egg box back into the car and we took off. Muttering to each other about feckin' hippies and how disorganised they are. We drove up Robie and stopped at the lights. Two rednecks in a pick up truck pulled up beside us and grinned down at me.

Oh, for God's sake, I thought, ignoring them.

"Miss, do you know you've got a box of glass bottles sitting on the roof of your car?"

"Oh shit!"

I jumped out and rescued the box and as I got back in the lights turned green and we sped off buckled with laughter.

Sitting on the dock of the bay

After all that, I was exhausted. I sat in the blazing sunshine on a rock in a deserted corner of Halifax harbour. Which is the second biggest natural harbour in the world apparently, after Sidney. The Mi’kmaq called it Chebucto, which means ‘great harbour’. I watched the tall ships and cruisers, motor boats and yachts go by. At one point they were dwarfed by an enormous container ship bearing a Swedish flag that boomed its foghorn majestically as it headed out to sea. I wrote a letter to a friend. After a couple of hours, I heard someone on the rocks behind me and looked round to see Yoichi, who had left the library early and found me somehow. He took his flip-flops off and rolled up his trousers and splashed around in the water like a four year old until he got me to laugh.

Yeah, it was a tough week in more ways than one. But I’ve decided to stop imagining dragons for a bit. Life is too short to be scared.