True Home: Life on a Heritage Farm

By Anny Scoones

"Her book is a gift to all of us."— Patrick Lane, author of There is a Season

Following the lead of her earlier bestselling books, Anny Scoones once again charms and inspires readers with her insights and observations. Using her experiences on a farm as a backdrop, Anny muses on the environment, fate, time and aging.

In this collection of personal memoirs, Anny reaches deeper into what nature, rural life and agriculture mean to us. She explores the thrills, joys and disasters of what really happens in the countryside and nearby towns. Stories vary from a rescued dog Anny met in the town bank, to a grand old white pine tree that was given a new purpose, to a horse who couldn’t relax without blackberries, to the joys of the garage sale—even a recipe for quince jelly. The book is illustrated by renowned Canadian artists Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak.

True Home is the third and final part of the Glamorgan Farm collection, tales of one of the oldest pioneer farms on Vancouver Island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926741772

Anny Scoones

Anny Scoones was raised in Fredericton, New Brunswick, has served as an elected city councillor, and now teaches English in Victoria. Anny lives in the neighbourhood of James Bay in Victoria, British Columbia.

Book preview

True Home

Life on a Heritage Farm

Anny Scoones

Touchwood Logo

For Patsy.

~

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862

Contents

Introduction

Family Tree

Welcome Home, Quince

Freda’s Baked Quince

Cousin Elizabeth’s Quince Jelly

Homesick

Winter Guests

The Dancing Tree

Security and the Baloney

Lady Ashburnham Pickle

The Egg

The Dominant Sow

Nova Scotia Chow-Chow

The Red Coat

Blackberry Ben

North Saanich Fruit Crumble

Raisin’s Place

Baking on Glamorgan Farm

The Garage Sale

Goose Grease

A Soft Eye

Anny’s Tips for a Bird Costume

The Pink Ploughs

Tidal Pools

Cabbage Elitism

Anny’s Summer Cabbage Salad

Anny’s Simmered Cabbage Farmers’ Dinner

Bert Returns with Madeleine

Demolition by Neglect

White Turkeys

Ladies Day at Sandown

The Filmmakers

Valnah and the Victory Tour

The Origin of Species, by Lorna Crozier

A Nest with a View

To Maude—Hollywood

Take Her Home to Die

Boris Comes Home and Buster Returns

The Turtle Wake

Grunts and Fools

Rhubarb Grunt

Rhubarb Fool

The Exterminator

Still Life with Slop and Fruit

Rural Woman of the Year

The Sausage Years and the Red Columbine

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

THE BARN FUNERAL

Watercolour by Molly Lamb Bobak

introduction

Greetings again from Glamorgan Farm. The farm and I have now been together for more than ten years. We’re both still in good shape, although there is a little more rot in the hundred-year-old log barns, and my joints are beginning to ache, especially in the morning when I try to get out of bed—sometimes it takes a minute or two straighten up. But it’s a nice ache—like the old barns, I’m settling. It happens, and one is resigned to reflecting and taking pleasure in the thoughts that float around us every day and listening to our little voices not only for advice but for company.

It’s the little observations that bring me such joy on the farm and which I am sharing with you in this book: the great purging relief when the recycle stack is picked up at the end of the driveway every second Monday morning (and the even bigger relief to see that Alice-Mary, the portly Labrador, didn’t get into the cans); the sight of the pale yellow and pink hollyhock blossoms on their tall, spindly stems, leaning against the hot red barns in August; feeling so flattered when a mother barn swallow chooses to make her nest on Glamorgan Farm and then watching her line up her babies on the rafters when they are ready to leave home—rooting for the nervous one who is so hesitant to take that first leap into the world of sunlight waiting beyond the dim passageway of the old barn; and the anticipation of winning the grand rosette at the fair for my enormous purple cabbages.

Among my greatest pleasures are the little thinks I have throughout the day, the small moments of rest and reflection between chores. I used to think that my little thinks were unproductive, wasted time, that I was as useless as a barren old sow lumbering around the meadow among the buttercups without a purpose (most farmers make sausage from such a sow), but I have come to see that they are not a waste of time at all (and Glamorgan Farm is home to many sweet barren old sows). Perhaps the insights and contentment that come from our little thinks are actually the most useful and productive of all; perhaps that’s where a certain type of creativity, compassion, or even bliss flourishes.

It was a long, damp grey winter, as usual, and I had a very stiff, sore neck from a fall on the ice during the previous winter. Have you ever had such a stiff neck that you couldn’t turn your head in either direction without turning your torso? I tried physiotherapy and massages, Jacuzzi tubs and hot-water bottles, but nothing worked. It was really quite frustrating when I was in the pig field, chatting to my dear sows Mabel, Matilda, and Rose, not to be able to turn around to see if Boris, their huge, grizzled old husband with the great yellowed tusks, was coming up to nudge me aside for loving his wives.

Reluctantly, I was persuaded to join a yoga class. I’d also considered an ad I’d seen which said, Pain Relief with Cranial Therapy, Fully Clothed. But I was too nervous to call. My pig veterinarian did yoga and she looked fit and calm and healthy; the mayor did yoga—she was my divorce lawyer years ago, and always swore it kept her calm in court and relieved all pain; and my old horse trainer with dislocated hips had taken up yoga and found she could get on a horse again without using a box. I was skeptical—I resisted the whole idea: having to wear skin-tight pants, which show every lump on your thighs plus a pot-bellied midsection; having to go barefoot, which shows all the thick deformed toenails, overlapping, calloused toes and bunions (let alone swollen, pale, dry ankles); and having to lie down on a rubber mat that other people have probably perspired on—the whole thing made me rather cynical. But I thought if it helped my stiff neck, I’d give it a shot.

I have to admit I was nervous when I walked into the yoga studio, and I know I rolled my eyes when I saw the green tea brewing under a poster of a turquoise and yellow sunset. And I wasn’t only nervous, I was completely self-conscious! I know I was supposed to empty my thoughts, but the whole thing for me was totally embarrassing. I lay on my sticky rubber mat in my tight pants, praying that nobody noticed my feet, deformed and hardened from forty-five years in tight riding boots, and listened to the instructor, a young woman. She told us to close our eyes and observe our breath and to forget all thoughts, but I couldn’t, and lying on my back was killing my neck! We did some exercises and some stretching poses, which included straddling over something called a hedgehog, and my neck felt pretty good.

Finally came some silence, and I realized that silence with people is really uncomfortable to me, but silence in the woods, or silence with my dear old barren sows, or silence with my cabbages gives me bliss and serenity, a deep contentment so satisfying that I feel part of nature, and not only part of nature, but I feel a deep empathy with nature.

Then the instructor hit the gong and we all opened our eyes and sat up. She read a short quote from a Buddhist teacher whose name is Thich Nhat Hanh. He talked about Home, and how our true home is now. In other words, this moment is what is important—this moment is our true home, he says.

I was moved by this thought, because I agreed. Glamorgan Farm has taught me to seize and love the now moment, because on a farm, life is condensed—so much sadness one moment and so much joy the next. Birth and death and different forms of both go on every day and night, and to cope, I have learned, one must love each moment, for that is the reality and truth and fate of nature right then. Our true home, I realize, is at the moment, and within us—we carry it around inside—I suppose you could call us mobile homes.

This book is dedicated to my dear friend Patsy, who died of lung cancer as I wrote these pages. My last moment with her was the best moment we had ever had in all the years of our friendship. She couldn’t speak, but squeezed my hand, in her little bed overlooking Patricia Bay. I had brought her a bouquet of red quince buds and she opened her eyes to see them. This was the moment of our true home, and when she went to sleep that night forever, I wasn’t that sad, knowing that we had had that moment.

So that is why I have decided to call my third and final book about Glamorgan Farm True Home, and why I have dedicated it

to Patsy. Mabel, Matilda, Rose, Veronica, Buster, Raisin, Boris, and all the rest of us on Glamorgan Farm wish you a joyful read.

welcome home, quince

In 1900, Glamorgan Farm consisted of hundreds of acres spreading out in the form of meadows rolling westward toward Patricia (or Pat, as we say) Bay. Richard John, a Welshman from Glamorganshire, brought his family here in 1870 and built an elegant family home where the peeling yellow grandstand of the Sandown Racetrack now sits. The blackberries are enveloping the building, as racing has all but ended, and the property is slowly reverting back to the earth. The original driveway to the John house was off the Trans-Canada Highway, also known as the Pat Bay Highway, which, in 1900, was a dirt lane.

The highway runs from the ferry terminal (which takes you to Vancouver and the mainland) to Victoria; on the east side of it is the seaside town of Sidney. The highway is often heavy with traffic: transport trucks and tour buses speed under the turquoise overpasses and past cement barricades, turn-off lanes, and green exit signs.

Off in a little rural area west of all this activity, on a country lane lined with hawthorn and honeysuckle hedgerows, on a hill across the road from crumbling Sandown, is Glamorgan Farm, eight acres of the original hundreds, its eleven log structures still standing (with their new red tin roofs) up a poplar-lined driveway.

The dogs and I often walk through the overgrown meadow behind the track where the grass is up to my waist and I need to carry clippers to make my way through the tangled hawthorn. There’s an old millpond, and a daffodil wood within what looks like an ancient orchard of apples, plums, pears, and some towering cherries. Rusting back to the minerals in the earth, under the thickets of rose hips and Indian plum, is an old blue Austin; only its windows and its rotting, ripped vinyl seat resist Mother Nature’s hold, although she has the last laugh by producing a few violet crocuses every spring that push through the decomposing rubber tires. The faded paint on the rounded fenders has become a home to colourful orange lichen.

My friend Freda is a keen local historian who volunteers at the Sidney museum. On Heritage Day, a municipal celebration of local history that we hosted on Glamorgan Farm, Freda and her husband, Ken, supplied all sorts of antique hand ploughs, butter churns, and farm implements. One day Freda brought me a folder of historic articles about Glamorgan Farm, copied from original photos and old newspaper columns she had found at the Sidney archives.

I read through them slowly every evening by the fire, and I came across a yellowed scrap describing a big quince bush that had been planted in 1900 at the entrance to the John farm. I deduced that this would be out toward the highway at the end of Glamorgan Road where the Sidney Chamber of Commerce has its tourist information centre, beside the RV sales centres and under the pedestrian overpass.

I rarely use that way to come home from Sidney, preferring to come down Glamorgan Road from the back way, off Mills Road and past the Legion up by the airport, so I had never paid much attention to the vegetation and landscape at the end of Sandown near the highway, except to notice at times when I rode Valnah, my Russian horse, down to the Sandown field where people dump old couches and household garbage in the hedgerow.

When I discovered from Freda’s article that the old quince might still be growing down in that area somewhere, I got on my bike on a rainy day and ventured over Sandown’s potholed gravel lane toward the turquoise overpass. Someone had declared I love Amanda in black spray paint on the tourist centre.

Between the tourist centre and the gritty, wet highway, there was indeed a scrubby-looking clump of unkempt shrubbery: sprawling junipers, entangling blackberries and hawthorn, and some unrecognizable greenery with sweet-smelling white flowers. The traffic was speeding by in the drizzle that day, sending grime and exhaust splashing over the cement barriers where I was standing. The thicket of brush was too dense to identify, but within the thriving jungle I could see a shrub with tender little leaves, striving to grasp some light, entwined by a massive vine in aggressive competition.

The following day I took clippers with me and cut through the thorns, brambles, and invasive graspers that were holding tight to the thick bush in the centre. When I reached it, I saw some pale pink spring buds on one spindly branch. It was indeed the old quince!

I spoke to Jack, our municipal engineer, who looked it up on North Saanich’s inventory of the highway construction that had taken place over the years and, sure enough, he confirmed that the quince was there, and worse yet, he said, All that brush has to be removed—it’s preventing a good sight line for vehicles. I had an idea.

I rushed down to the municipal hall to Brian, North Saanich’s superintendent of parks and everything outdoors, as he puts it. Brian is a big man who wears plaid shirts and has lived in North Saanich all his life. He knows everyone, all the old-timers as well as the First Nations people. He remembers the old community hall, the original schoolhouse, and the old gas station in Deep Cove. His children babysit for Freda’s grandchildren and raise rabbits to exhibit at the Saanichton Fair, and they regularly visit Glamorgan Farm with buckets of windfall apples for the pigs. He’s a good friend and the easiest person to talk to about ideas for North Saanich, and he’s kind to animals.

One time when he was in charge of chipping an enormous load of storm debris in the municipal yard, he delayed the work because a local family of quail had set up house in the brush and were preparing to hatch their young. The family is now a familiar sight on Glamorgan Road, darting in and out of the hedgerows, and Brian finally chipped the debris, which was then put back on the forest floor in our municipal parks.

So Brian was the perfect person to talk to about my idea of removing the old quince and transplanting it to the entrance of what is now Glamorgan Farm. No problem, he said cheerily. We can do that, and Cliff can prune it back. We’ve got some bone meal in the shed.

I remember having a surge of love for North Saanich, this little rural municipality where they care enough to save an old quince and a family of quail. Brian and his assistant, Cliff, came over later in the day and chose a spot on the boulevard by the white-railed fence and hedgerow.

Later in the week, a few men from the municipal yard came over with shovels. Wearing grey wool undershirts, jeans with red suspenders, and neon work vests, they dug an enormous hole (seemingly effortlessly) on the chosen site. It was a typical grey day, the air saturated with drizzle. Cliff sprinkled the bone meal in the rich black soil and soon the yellow, mud-splattered backhoe came rumbling over the hill, its oversized rubber tires bouncing the dear old quince bush in its bucket. They had done it—the quince had come home!

They gently placed the huge bush in the hole, and Cliff, as if the quince was his injured child, made sure that its roots sat in the most comfortable position, that the bush was upright, and that the soil was gently shovelled back in to stabilize it. He then snipped off a few damaged branches and we raked decomposed leaves around the base and hosed off the mud on the young shoots. Welcome home, quince, I said, and the work crew went off to their next job, repairing the storm-battered walking path along Pat Bay.

Cliff and Brian came by every so often to check on the quince (and for muffins). In early spring the bush burst forth in a mass of pink and red blossoms. That summer, everyone was talking about global warming, and there were two days in July that were unbearably hot. It was more than forty degrees, so scorching that I kept all the animals inside the cool barns. Many plants in the hedgerow were burnt, including the poor quince, whose little green leaves dried to a crisp. I kept the hose running in the night into the roots and hosed off the tinder-dry stems at dawn before the heat returned. Come autumn, the quince recovered and, with its will to live, sprouted a fresh supply of leaves and, lo and behold, produced three hard, shrivelled quinces on its thick, thorny limbs.

Just for fun, I picked the fruit. I called my cousin Elizabeth in England and asked her if she knew a quince recipe and she mailed me an old compote recipe that her father, my uncle Willoughby, used to make. She wrote me a newsy letter in a lovely, hand-written script on blue airmail paper all about her activities and her travels to Crete, where she saw numerous quince orchards. She also relayed some very interesting facts about quinces: it is one of the earliest known fruits, growing four thousand years ago in Asia, and is a member of the apple and rose family. Cousin Elizabeth also said that despite their hardness, quinces bruise easily, and I remember my grandmother saying the same thing years ago about a sad little neighbour on Galiano Island who lived alone in the woods: She was hard but bruised easily.

But my ancient quince still blooms cheerfully every spring in a mass of red flowers, and people who walk along Glamorgan Road on their lunch breaks say it fills them with joy to see it. It’s as if it greets them and says, Spring is just around the corner, everyone! on grey, dismal late-winter days. It’s really happy—maybe it is thankful that we saved it!

FREDA’S BAKED QUINCE

Take one dozen fresh quinces.

Core them and rub well.

Put in a baking pan.

Fill the centres with pulverized sugar.

Bake (temperature unknown—until soft, I presume).

Serve with or without cream. Maple syrup is another good addition, or plain yogurt if you are watching your weight.

COUSIN ELIZABETH’S QUINCE JELLY

2½ pounds apples (Mum always said that apples contain natural pectin)

2 pounds quinces

6 pints water

sugar

Wash the fruit and cut up and core (this is bloody hard work but worth it).

Simmer in 4 pints of water until soft (about an hour). Reserve the water.

Strain through a jelly bag.

Mix the pulp with the other 2 pints of water and simmer a further 30 minutes.

Combine the two extracts and measure them. Add ¾ pound sugar to each pint of extract.

Bring to a boil and add sugar, stirring until it dissolves.

Then boil rapidly until setting point is reached.

Bottle and seal.

Elizabeth says that it sets perfectly without pectin.

DOGS AND GOAT ON GLAMORGAN FARM

Watercolour by Molly Lamb Bobak

homesick

When I bought Glamorgan Farm, and actually took possession on a hot August afternoon, I couldn’t wait to