Early Spring clean-up

The winds of God are out today
Exultant through the world they play.
They sweep the heavens, chase the clouds,
Blow clean and pure through dusty crowds.
They toss the gaunt arms of the trees,
The withered leaf before them flees.
The grasses from their sallies run,
Caught by the arrows of the sun.
Upward they bear me on their wings,
With joy my spirit soars and sings
Above the waves of pain and strife
That beat upon the shores of life....

Extract: The Winds of God, Secret Snow by Ethel McKenzie, 1932

For me, community finds odd little connections in a life. We moved here to Almonte, Ontario and found the heritage of the Lanark Valley amazing and unexpected. A case in point is the Mill of Kintail - one-time summer home of R. Tait McKenzie (Canadian Renaissance man born in 1867 - physician, professor and sculptor) and his wife, Ethel. It was the addendum that intrigued me - wife. So I began to sleuth and found a lovely poetry book on-line by Ethel called Secret Snow. (Intrigued? Not to worry, discoveries about Ethel and indeed, the Lanark Valley, will thread throughout this blog as we move forward in time.)

I pulled this text as today, with the early Spring Saturday enticing us outside, I celebrated the results of wind - "exultant through the world they play" indeed. What it meant was debris from silver maples, conifers and oh my, the weeping willow was strewn (love that word) over the property. This little foray into nature is an annual event - more joy than trial - and leads to hours spent under the warming sky with nothing but the snipping sounds of cutters, the grunts of two labourers of the earth and the wonderful trumpeting of the Canada Geese high above - the great birds come home to play. One cat, orange with a matching nose, delicately licks a paw while keeping one eye on our adventures, the other happy in dreamland inside both oblivious to the rather large groundhog that ambles at the back of the property or the chickadees that flirt with the breeze in the Forsythia bush. Early Spring - gotta love it.