In the Elms

I've been taking pictures, but it seems that to download I need the disk that I left at "home" in Northern Ontario, so when I return "home" in three weeks, I'll add the photos.

I'm sitting in a little house on a tree-lined Halifax Street. It has been raining for days. In my little second floor bedroom I can almost lie in the great branches of the elms just outside. The rain provides the music, and the leaves are larger and greener each day. The trees embrace me.

I used to relate to the great white pines of our northern forest, but now the leafy trees are croning their song to me of new life, of life cycles and hope for another day. I am here in Halifax learning to dance again, a new dance, moving away from my place on the shore with its good and bitter memories and looking into new possibilities. I now have a temporary, moving-on, position in Northern Ontario, but now I know that I must return here to the ocean and the province where I was conceived but not born into, but which has always called me home.