Summerside Santa Claus parade

It is all pretty amazing. I went to visit Mary last afternoon and she mentioned the parade last night. A frigid Monday night on this snow-bound island and there was a parade planned. I recalled from previous November's vaguely a parade involving Christmas. I had never really participated or really cared, as the holidays are not in recent years that joyful. Perhaps since my fathers death that cold winter day after New Years in 1972 is the time it became so much less a joy for us all.

But here we drove up to the mall and parked near the post office. The street was clogged with all the town, bundled children and the old too. Well below zero and it being an impromptu decision to see this quaint site, we shivered as Mary with childlike twittering and glee watched the parade. My Air Force cadets were in front, followed by our tiny local news rag the Pioneer-Journal. The hugely rotund cheery be mustached mayor went by, not unlike the mayor in the munchkin land of the" Wizard of Oz". The famous tale of greed and evil written by my Great-Grandfathers (David Chamber's) best friend, Frank Baum.

To my amazement even a septic tank suck truck was in the parade. Only here or somewhere deep within the spine of Appalachia. Our local radio station's float blared Christmas music and the children in the parade threw candy at the crowd. I even caught a pack of peanut M and M's. That was the first time I seen such a thing.

Long ago I journeyed as a teenager with a hunting buddy into Northcentral Pennsylvania. It was a cold November day there, above the place where the mapmakers place the compass. A sparsely populated land of mountains and moonshine, deer and pain. There coming into the dying railroad junction called Renovo, we observed a crowd playing baseball in the icy streets. It was 2 AM on a Tuesday night before deer season and we were scouting a campsite. Baseball at 2 AM in the snowy mountains of a dead town. I had never seen such a thing.

We followed actually "in" the parade down Granville Street. Huge snow piles made grandstands for most of the town on this cold dark winter night. Only here. Only in the quaintness of this and what is this place, at the surface. Above the poverty and howling winds and ice. But such weather and life, the sea, the snow, binds a people. It is a maritime camaraderie. It is unique in its cold and its pain, its warmth. My Mary childlike as we parked at the parades end, the Waterfront Mall close to my soon x-home, off Water Street. The huge potato ship the "Tasman Start", in port still as the harbour is now solid ice. There cookies and Cocoa are served free with colorful marshmallows and a live singer of Christmas tunes maritime interpreted with an acoustic guitar. The ship will plow out of the ice away with island potatoes bound for some near or far place. As I shall plow and pull away back to another time and a whole new world. Old in its memories, new in its loneliness.


Mary's fat cousin said nothing as she piled on the sweets. Mary, proud of her height, strength and by island standards, lithe form , scowled in disapproval.

I amazed my lady and the entire town by dancing with Mary on the mall floor to "Silent Night". She was amazed and the rather rag-tag bundled crowd looked on. I wanted Mary to have a special memory-I am not sure when I shall return to this place. My De facto "hometown".

I shall point the old red truck south in less than a week. My 52nd birthday is today. I talked to my son and we made plans. The valley of the Yellow Breeches beckons. To leave behind the pain, love, anger and the cold, wind blown Northumberland Strait. The forever winter, the snow.

First Snow

So the first snow came to my island paradise last night. The wind howled from the North as rain turned to driving ice pellets, then a hard wet snow. Its all frozen now. The trees coated in sub-arctic white. My hands almost numb cleaning snow from the blazer, doors frozen shut tight under a leaden grey sky and strong North wind. The island to be for the next 6 months.

Soon I drive South to Mechanicsburg of all places. I have rented a home close to the chimney house and the Yellow Breeches of my youth. My son seems concerned that he cannot spend much time with me there. With his new and very busy life, the parents fade to less importance. This is as it should be. My Mary would rather bind me and keep me in her coat closet than to see me leave. I think Shel is also concerned. Perhaps mostly over money, but in my heart I hope its more than that.

My return to this paradise is uncertain. It is a long road-not the 1000 miles, but in the open hole that is where my heart is. I may decide to drive home here in January. To face an island winter. Or I may winter fish with my son along our streams-Clark's and the Breeches. I am not sure.

So a new adventure takes hold from a place where I know the Arsenaux's and Gallant's, the MacKenzie's-Oh, my Mary MacKenzie. Strong and tall and gentle and sweet. A body forged from winter walks and hard work. Quite a woman. Krinly eyes from having seven more years than me and from a life of many tears. Maybe I will return and marry her. I could and have done much worse.

So I sit her writing this blog...Oh, some read it. But all in all its for me and my beloved and far away children. Even my sister..she may never read these entries, but I know she will be happy to see her far travelled and often absent brother.

Most of all I am sad I can't see my mother. She visited me, I like to think, on the gossamer wings of that summer hummingbird that brushed my adorable wife's arm. The summer at Cape Traverse. Shel's paradise has become my place of reclusion. I write and dream and visit with now old friends. My Yankee accent gone, I am often asked if I grew up on the island. No Philadelphia university graduate twang remains. I hope it stays away. After all, I can speak idiomatic maritimes English now. Yes, it is a dialect unto itself. Will I always say "supper" not "dinner?. I am not sure.

I shall miss my little place near the harbour of both joy and pain. A big ship is in port today. White with bright lights against the angry red strait and the icy land. It is among the most beautiful places and feelings I have had in my journey. Yes, I have been all over this world. But this, and here, and there in central Pennsylvania are home home's.

I do miss my desert. The palms. The pool. My pretty young very spiritual voluptuous blond wife. The grill. The sound of spanglish and the pretty dark skinned girls that made me smile in the past dream of tacos and roasting chili's scented air on a mild winter night along Glendale Avenue. I think I will return there. But not yet. Not just now.

Heart strings tug against the lure of the palms. My river in Yuma. My pretty Apache girl bonnie and fishing with her in the Colorado River. Yuma is a dream spot too. Shel loved the downtown. Once I stood by one of her trees by Lute's casino there. I wept. She was with me in the little shops, at the organic date farm we loved on the California side. Sweet dates. My sweet girl. My love.

I won't find her there. My army job is gone. The ordnance expert. That was me. I walked away to come here that 3 years plus ago. I found much more. I know what love is now. I wonder how many really know?

Warm Rain to Cool Blast

The cliche that time rushes past seems apt today. I was thinking of nearly flying along the highway in my corvette between Grover, Colorado and Carpenter, Wyoming. It was the fastest I had driven a four wheeled vehicle then. We hit about 135 MPH. My then young brother-in-law was with me. The low prairie hills seeming to rush up and into a clear sky, the other side uncertain. Up and down. The Vette's fiberglass body seeming to float as the sixth gear could pull no more speed with that gear ratio and horsepower. What a rush.

Now I prepare to leave my island home for an undetermined time-perhaps for always. That seems unlikely but I can't see over the hill as the wind rushes past beyond the now security of my little harbourside apartment. There is a woman here who loves me deeply. There is another lost to the world beyond my reach who I love eternally but in vain.

Shel has said she is coming to get her remaining things soon. I have given my notice to my patient landlord that I must head South with the flocks now ahead of me to see my teenage children and sister. Leaving the women behind, my new social group-as flawed as it is, as well as the ocean vista, is painful. I feel I could relapse anytime and await the winter blow and snow piles-The driving maritime ice storms and warm hearts.

But all illusions end this way. Passage into and out of this torrent of time is but for the memories taken as are the breaths of fading lilac-scented breezes and the hint of deep true long lasting joy and suffering. Life is about loss and how it is dealt with in the turmoil that is a human soul. Grounded in my loves and stories of past glory-that fleets and ebbs with my harbour tides.

But what an honest and beautiful effort that has been made. In no way do I regret my awfully early retirement and mission to the island. Now after all it is home. I dance with my Mary each weekend. She makes island fishcakes as lovingly as my mother baked bread or taught me to love what is real and natural. Somewhere along this road of years I became a romantic dreamer. Lost in that which is the finest to hold and the most painful to lose. But what a driven glory.

I know now the deep sadness and rural hardships that shape the lives of those who feel imprisoned in this paradise. In the telling of life journey to my friends here I see the blankness of longing-the unknowing as if the words and images of my life are so strange that they are sometimes unsure and afraid. I have learned the dialect. I have learned the food and the joy of an ocean harvest and the bounty of of a place that is an Eden. So my wife was right to fall so far and deeply in passionate embrace to this place in the sea.

In my own heart the wanderlust of a thousand journeys takes root again. The long path back to reality and another country to the rush and crowds that toil for that which I have lost or simply left behind as worthless trappings of a vacant life.

So times sweeps on with me as the unsettled passenger. As across the prairie grasses in that angry red chariot of my overfunded impious youth. Look forward and not to the rear says the driver. She has no need for the luscious safety of the past. Its soft security darkened as the red-mud surf of my beach at Green's Shore is during the unrelenting harsh January blow across the ice filled bay.

No time to waste now. Only to collect the fragments that remain of here and her, and her. I only hope at full throttle someone hasn't just pulled out ahead of me over the next rise. I won't be able to stop.