The Greening

Despite this being my second day home after our month long visit to the UK, I find myself still suffering for a kind of double vision.  I’m here but my thoughts are also overlapping with the recent memories of being ‘back home’.

Spring has finally made herself known here in the frozen north, after a long, long winter, but the greening has not quite caught up with the warm and verdant south west coast yet.  We have a few weeks to go before we can even begin to compete with the spring we’ve left behind.

As I walked Winnie through our fields this morning, enjoying mild spring weather and the sight of our future hay pushing it’s way past the old brown growth, I felt a tinge of sea air on the breeze.  I was reminded of the joy of rounding a hill and seeing the sea pushing out towards the horizon.

My head is full of plans right now, with spring underway our minds and bodies are all about the farm.  Yesterday Stephen and our friend Shawn worked on finishing the frame to our new hoop house, a massive boon for us this year.  In the afternoon, clad all in summer gear, we trundled en masse to visit our neighbour and the two cows he is looking after for us.

We stood in the hot sunshine and talked about future breeding, how soon the fencing will get done, the relative merits of different bulls; it’s all farm talk all the time and I love it.

But as the poem says, there is a part of me that is forever England.  A part of me that is walking on the headland rather than the fields, that place where I recognise the plants in the hedgerows and where the seasons are what I know.  Here in Canada, a place I love, I am always still learning and will always be taken by surprise. That’s what makes it hard but that is what makes it wonderful.

I’m so happy to be back and getting stuck in to the work here at the farm, this is the time of year when the planning and talk of winter finally becomes a reality.  The pampering I’ve had at the hands of my family has filled my tanks and I’m raring to go.

But. Well of course it’s never that easy to leave, saying goodbye is surreal and sad.  And I think, in truth, there is a part of me that never leaves, that lingers along the beaches and hedgerows because that part of me belongs there.  No matter how much I adore my life here, on a true spring day when the sky soars above and the earth is a carpet of emerald green, there really is no place like home.