Small Details

In these unusual times, it is the small details that catch one’s attention. Going to the grocery store is a different experience. Once a week, I stop at D’Aubin Meat Market in Bridgetown. This week, we needed a hambone to make our split pea soup. They had run out of bacon but offered instead a ham end, as a substitute. While there, I grabbed a bag of pea shoots, and goat cheese scones with chives and cranberries.

We are seeing changes in the availability of news from the Saltwire network. They publish the Annapolis Spectator and the Chronicle Herald. Instead, I notice an increase in online blogs – The Virus Diary (Anne Crossman), The Groundhog (Roger Mosher) and Ernest Blair Experiment (Bob Maher, Edward Wedler).

Two years ago, I was in England and picked up Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain from the Weybridge Bookshop. After listening to Robert MacFarlane on CBC Radio, a couple of weeks ago, it was time to try to find my copy. The book, written towards the end of the Second World War but not published until 1977, describes her relationship with the Cairngorms in Scotland. It is considered a classic of nature writing. Twelve short chapters ranging from the Plateau through Water, Snow and Ice to Life (Plants, Birds, Animals, Insects and Man). She concludes with Being.

“I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on a pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which God is sought. it is a Journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own”. p.108.

In many ways, it is a Geography text.
MacFarlane provides an excellent thirty-page introduction to this slender book.

Acknowledgements

Ralph and Jennifer D’Aubin for their successful meat market and value-added products. Anne Crossman, Roger Mosher and Edward Wedler for their contributions to community blogs. Heather Stewart for her cuisine.

References
Nan Shepherd. 2011. The Living Mountain. Canongate Books