having two homes

This picture shows the sunrise over my wee village. I was up early to go for a walk and found that there was a soft mistiness to the morning that I wanted to capture. When I took this I was standing on a picnic table that was covered in frost and wearing flip flops. I'll try to get a sunset next! Today when I walked I went right up to the top of that big cliff and stood on the highest peak and looked back towards my house. Sometimes this world I am living in really takes my breath away.

Yesterday in my post I decided that I would pay attention to the world as I went about my day. I really tried to yesterday. People often ask if I feel at home in England. I have lived here for so long now that I do feel as if it is another home. I have stopped carrying very much back and forth (except Tazo Green Ginger tea, sweet onion mustard, People magazine and Canadian Crest toothpaste - yes, they have the same toothpaste here, don't ask.) I enjoy where I am while I am there.

On my very first day in the UK I wandered around London. Four days and a job interview over the phone later I moved down to Hope Cove. I was amazed and breathless seeing the sea and these views for the first time. I had only ever seen the sea twice in my life before coming here. To live this close to it boggled my mind a lot. As soon as I could I walked up to the top of the cliff in the picture and stood there, taking it all in, breathing the different air, and whispering messages to the country I knew was on the other side of that vast body of water.

Anyone was has walked in the woods in Canada will know what I mean when I say that there is a feeling of newness. Even though the trees are old and you know that other people have walked the paths, you still feel like you could be the first person who ever stepped there. There is an air of freshness; the forests feel like another world. There is a size and a space to Canada. There is room to breathe, to expand. A few hours drive north from wherever you are and you are in the most spectacular and sparsely populated land. You can still sense what the first explorers must have felt when they saw it. I love it for its rugged spaciousness.

At the top of the cliff in the picture there is a wall. It was built as a fortification hundreds of years ago. The weather and time have worn it down so you don't really know it's there until you are walking along what looks like rough paving stones and down a set of steps. A little while later along a path that follows the edge of the cliff, you look behind you and you can see four circular outlines in the grass. The grass grows differently there. It's thicker, darker. It's the only remaining evidence that people lived in houses there more than hundreds of years ago. Mark's Dad was buying an apartment that wasn't built yet, but building was delayed because the builders had unearthed a Roman Centurion when they were digging. No one else seemed amazed by this.

When I was a little girl I read a book called "Shadow in Hawthorn Bay" by Janet Lunn. I think of this book nearly every time I take a walk. In it the heroine lives in Scotland. She is very aware of the spirits that surround her - the faeries and the 'old ones' who live in and on the hills. When she emigrates to the New World she is heartbroken because she can't find those spirits. She can't hear the voices in the trees and in the earth. It is only at the end that she realizes that it is she and the people she is living with who will become those 'old ones.'

I think about that story because that is how I feel about the two places. Canada, I think, despite its ancient Native culture, still feels like it is at the beginning of its life. You can feel the spirits of the trees and of the rest of nature in the woods but there is a newness there. I love its possibility. The UK, in contrast, feels full of the spirits and energies and remnants of all that have gone before. Every old house has at least one ghost, every path shows evidence of some old settlement. You never ever feel completely alone here. There are definitely faeries and 'old ones' in the hills, and I am really enjoying getting to know them all.

"Roads go ever on and on, over rock and under tree, by caves where sun has never shone, by streams that never find the sea. Over snow by winter sown and through the merry flowers of June, over grass and over stone and under mountains in the moon." J.R.R. Tolkein