Thinking of Home

Nova Scotia, hunker down and watch yourself until Earl passes you by.

Do You Have a Bucket List?

Just watched the movie The Bucket List tonight. I'm a bit of a sucker for Morgan Freeman and (occasionally) Rob Reiner movies, and it was an ok flick. But, as things usually go, I was puttering around after the movie, and then, in the only place a mom of a small child can do any thinking, I got to considering my own bucket list while having a quiet piddle.

The "gist" of this movie is that two guys, having only 6 mos to a year left while dying of cancer, decide to complete a long wacky list of things before they "kick the bucket" (hence the name).

Now, they had a lot of dough at their disposal, and I do not, but I do have (I hope) more time, so I think it evens out.

(Now, don't snicker...)

My Bucket List:

1. Raise one sensible, caring and wonderful child to self-sufficiency.
2. Get my PhD.
3. Publish something of which I can be proud.
4. Spend some quality time with my folks some day soon. (They live far away.)
5. Write my screenplay... even if it ends up sitting in a drawer forever.
6. Try to give back what I have received.
7. Touch Nova Scotian soil once more.
8. Enjoy a real, honest moment of restful self-satisfaction.
9. Get to a point in my life where I can actually lay my head down at night without worrying and truly appreciate it.
10. Live long enough and use my time so well that I am required to make another Bucket List once this one is completed.

Anyone else?

Beautiful

I took a wander this morning, to clear my mind and focus my energies.

It is lovely outside. We had a hard rain yesterday, so everything is fresh and green. It is not too terribly hot, but the sun is gold and dripping. A breeze shakes the pines outside my window. The spring animals are starting to come into their own, with juvenile squirrels and rabbits and birds covering every where, making every park and yard into a school room. The air is fresh and the sounds thrilling. It is that time when the flush of summer colour overlaps with the crispness of impending autumn. I love this time.

There are many things on my mind. I am starting to think of jobs and job hunting, planning ahead for the big 2009 that will (hopefully) mark my launch into my profession. Many of the best schools for me to teach at are in the States…

How can I be separated from this place, this land? Is the rain the same there? Will the snow be the snow I know so intimately here? Will I feel the same jolt through my feet when I walk on foreign grass and soil? Will I bleed internally for Canada? Will they reject me and my strange, “exotic” ways? Will I learn American fear? Will it erase Holly as I know her? Will I become disconnected?

If my heart breaks over the distance from Nova Scotia in my exile in Ontario, how could I stand the exile to another country all together?

Am I strong enough to live on batteries uncharged by Canadian soil? Would my heart remain buried here always, only to leave me without one elsewhere?

Or, perhaps, is a place just a place, and every nook and cranny can be beloved it if is home? After all, only four years ago, I never would have dreamt of loving Ontario land as much as I do here. Now I feel like I belong to it, somehow; Nova Scotia is the mother, and Waterloo is the aunt that I have come to visit.

After all, North America is only carved up by the hands of greedy humans. And nature is a law that snubs the concepts of our limited minds.

But, then, perhaps I am rambling.

Go out and enjoy the day, wherever you are.

(An appropriate tune for today.)
*

The Pipes are Calling

I grew up in Nova Scotia, the land of the highland-away-from-the-highlands. Growing up there was both a burden and a gift. If you are not Scottish, it can get discouraging or frustrating to grow up in a land of faux-Scottish nostalgia (including kilts, fiddlers, busts of Scott, etc., etc., etc, as well as a million traditions involving beer), and you can even begin to hate the enshrined Nova Scotian tartan.

Further, what did we learn in public school phys. ed.? All of us - all the German, Native, Jewish, Irish, British, Acadian (and so-forth) students? The "highland fling". Every year. A section on Scottish folkdance, every single year of public school. Can anyone explain why a Jewish student, for example, would need to know how to traipse around a sword for fun? When, exactly, will that ever come up in adult life?

The sad part is that I would be quite surprised if even in Scotland they force kids into that.

However, Nova Scotia is in a particular position. We are long separated from the “home land,” yet the heart still longs to be ore in the highlands hunting a deer. The few actual Scots there who remember what Scotland was actually like are few and far between, so the reconstruction of the bonny over the ocean is furtive and rather sad.

But do not mistake this as entirely commercial or tacky, although Nova Scotia does use this Scottish connection for tourism bucks. Really, many in Nova Scotia cultivate the Scottish connection as some small way to tap into a beautiful and serene place that exists only in their imaginations.

And, yes, this does get a bit much, especially for those groups, like the Germans and the French and the Natives and the Irish, who have done a great deal to build and sustain Nova Scotia in their own right.

However, having said all this, now that I find myself in Ontario I find myself tapping into that old Scottish vibe, or rather the Nova Scotian version of the Scottish vibe, as a way to connect to home.

Today, from somewhere, and for some reason, while we were strolling after supper, I heard the Pipes. I never could tell from where they were coming, as there is no cemetery close by and I saw no parade. They were a long way off, perhaps, but such is the glory of the bag pipe. The way that they drift is a mystical force… Rather like how the Scots themselves have drifted across the world. (And the best thing about the bag pipes is that they are much more moving from a distance than close up.)

But the mere sound made me feel like I was back on Hollis or at the Waterfront in Halifax, for nothing says Halifax in the summer like the pipes. I couldn’t help but smile, and I stopped and listened. It sounded like home in a way that was completely independent of ancestry.

So, I guess I stand before you as an “adoptive Scot.”

Thanks, unknown piper.