“The moon and starlight, how I enjoy them!” one spending a holiday on the Island offered this evening. “Island folks remark about this. But” she explained, “when one lives in a city like ours, she is inclined to forget there is a sky above the lights! Now, here in the country… well” she smiled “this is among the memories I shall take home with me: a memory of its beautiful nights.”

Gently still the moonlight falls along the fields, on the dew where the animals keep: the cow-kind resting in a dark pattern on their pasture, the ewes and lambs in the paddock, the mare and filly, just beyond. Only the wildings rove,  we fancy, a startled rabbit perhaps, and the foxes, and owls from regions of woodlands up the valley…

When with us sleep is somewhat elusive, we sometimes hear a fox bark, the sound sharp though lonely as it falls in the stillness, or an owl a-hunting, its voice across the quiet a little eerie  to hear. But there comes too, up from the broken dam by the mill below, the summer music of the stream as it drops from the nearer spillway. It is a soothing melody, a lullaby, which sooner or later bears the one on her pillow away into that strange Land of Dreams.

   – Ellen’s dairy, August 24th, 1964.

Source: Islandnewspaper.ca

“Once more Dominion day comes to have us honor again Canada’s anniversary of birth. A July child she is, born in Island places.

Canada? What does the name signify to Canadians?

We recall that the distinguished Canadian Beverly Baxter, now and for years domiciled in London, remembered after a visit to his native shores but her “kindness and courtesies” but also “the thousand glimpses of Canadian beauty… a full moon over Rockies so dazzling that the eyelids were forced down like a curtain… a mountain stream of light grey blue gurgling its story as it went sunlight dancing upon the water against a misty background of an Island in the Pacific… a solitary bark canoe on a northern lake paddled by an Indian stripped to the waist as if the white man had never come… New Brunswick’s countryside crowned with garlands of wispy cloud as we soared above them in a plane… the lights of ships reflected on the waters as midnight came to Halifax…

 To Island farm- folks such as we, Canada is, we would say a friendly sky arched over a vast and varied domain farmland and forest, lake and river, mountain and plain. Hamlet and city; bounded by seas warm and colder, and a long, unprotected but respected neighbourly line, which separates Dominion and States.

To us too, Canada means every blessing and love and loveliness of earth. It is within certain limitations — the right to live our lives as we choose with many a privilege and opportunity offered in this free land that is ours. It is a home, little or larger in valley, on hilltop or some where we choose to be, with a school, a church, good neighbours and all that about which makes life good.

It is within reason, the right to work at the calling or occupation of one’s choice which as Stevenson said “If any man love the labour of any trade, apart from the question of success or failure, the gods have called him and he is indeed blest.

Canada —our own land, we salute you Good Luck and God Bless you we say as you step over the threshold into another year. May you continue to grow strong and great.”

                                                                                     – Ellen’s Diary, June 30th, 1956

Source: Islandnewspapers.ca

In this excerpt from Ellen’s Diary, Ellen channeled Sir Beverly Baxter’s 1949 MacLean’s article, I Found a new Canada, and then reflected on what Canada meant to “Island farm folks.”

“Lovely, so lovely this day was. And at Alderlea, wholly pleasant, its paths. Busy, naturally. But as James said at supper, “when the machines work well, and the weather keeps, what more can we ask of the seedtime?” All our red fields have been cultivated, and now much of the grain-land is seeded. A few more days if fine should see the cropping here come to an end.

What has it given them, we wonder of these farmers of ours? Only the satisfaction of seeing their plans worked out on the stirred fields, good as these are? The seeds tucked tidily away in the best seedbeds they could make? Just the sowings and plantings — the be-all and end-all in a way, of our livelihood? Or did they also, as they tended faithfully to the affairs of their calling, hear the delightful bird-tunes threading in, bright and cherry in the mornings? And toward dusk the Evensong, in a manner quite as reverent as that participated in by folks in church pews. 

High and wide is this cathedral’s arched dome. And mellow the light which filters through the stained glass windows over the treetops to the west — Have they remembered as the seeds fell and were covered, tales of old land? Stories of wheat and tares of flour and the grinding of ovens and bread? For the words are old, old as the first seedtime — and very lovely too.

And been happy? And confident that no matter the world’s joys and tribulations, its triumphs and failures, its hopes and distrusts, that seedtimes and harvest will be”

                                                                                                 – Ellen’s diary, June 15th, 1962

Source: https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19620615-008

I have a notion that because of the fine weather we experienced during the winter, it has made some farm folks expect to step right from it into the cropping. 

Though through the years there have been odd springs that james and I can remember when seeding was commenced much earlier than this, even the sowing of wheat in April to be covered later by a depth of snow, going back to a leaf from the calender of 1927, I find that our first sowing of grain was on May 24. 

The entry has it: “Sowed 6 acres of oats today. Cold.”  

On the following day we “got the wheat in.”There are also other items interwoven with the more important work of the seed time such as “set the old black hen today”

   -Ellen’s diary, May 21st, 1947

Source: https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19470521-002

“And the morning blessed every graduate of class, from the exceedingly gifted top Co-Ed down to the last of the young first years with happiness agleam in their eyes. It set old Sol to beam his brightest on their account and brought to them a warm wind of the fields. In it was the essence of spring : scent of wave and woodland of hill and dale, of meadow and dell.

‘At Alderlea, here in the valley of the millstream, it seemed as though the birds put extra grace of heart into their matins, and returned thanks on behalf of this child of the farm, to whom the happiness of a day of moment. A milestone  reached on her road of life, had at length come. 

‘What an air of excitement there was in those halls of learning this morning! What smiles were reflected, what happiness in young and older: And so light the steps that answering a roll call went up to receive the year’s honours including that coveted piece of parchment, duly signed and sealed,and tied with a ribbon of white.”

Source: https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19630524-009