Orange Moon Over Jeddore Harbour

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October 25th, 2011

Published by: mooresb

Orange Moon Over Jeddore Harbour by Leslie Hauck October 25th, 2011

Dispatches From Halifax It’s 7:30 AM and still quite dark because the sky has been burdened with clouds full of snow. Like timed-release capsules, they are dispersing their therapy slowly and carefully, a shower of gentle, soft flakes. I look away from my computer screen occasionally to watch the light get stronger, higher on the Round Field just in front of the horizon line of dark green spruces; to gaze there I look over my clump of Sumac trees and one Larch tree that not long ago brightened the landscape’s palette with nearly flourescent orange and red, and bright gold. There is a misty quality to the air and the light; could be a touch of fog.

The Viking boat gets a bit bigger each year (now they are talking next year’s being as big as a small canoe), and so does the crowd; but the ambiance is wonderful in this electricityfree house full of candles and kerosene lamps burning. The youngsters play in the hall and 2 bedrooms up the spiral stairs shining flashlights down on the adults and giggling. We all know each other well, many of us work together in a group advocating for our forests, and it is an opportunity to work the room and chat with some people I don’t see as often as others. My neighbor, Darren, has rowed over departing our side of the harbour, West Jeddore, at sunset with the huge, orange moon on his bow, and then departing the party in East Jeddore with a big, old ship’s lantern lit, sitting in the stern of his boat.

I have been in a phase of waking and rising any time from 4 to 5:30 AM, so by 6:30 I had both stoves crackling and the house well on its way to cozy warmth, coffee consumed, yesterday’s dishes washed; I was ready to go upstairs to my office and check my email. It has been quite nice to avoid it for days. But before I’d even gotten out of bed that morning I was laughing out loud to myself about what Adam did the night before. I think I can say I have never laughed out loud, alone, in a dark bedroom after just coming out of sleep-full unconsciousness. Last night was the 2nd annual gathering of friends -- the evening has no identifying name yet -- where around 45 people, big and little, pack into Kate and Adam’s small Cape Cod style house, the main floor containing one open room for sitting, dining, and cooking. We talk and laugh, and eat and drink our way towards the focus of the evening. This began as a New Year’s celebration between just Kate and Adam, making a model Viking ship out of papier mache and a fabric sail and launching it, aflame, into the harbour below their house. It ritualized a way to identify those things they each wanted to let go of, and make new wishes for the coming 12 months. Now, they invite all the people they know who live along this Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, stretched out along a 50 km shoreline, but still defined as neighbors, to join them in this ritual. We pen our wishes on scraps of wood and birch bark and fill the vessel with the fuel for its fiery demise.

I’m sure this is not really as unique a group of kindred spirits as it seems to be to us. It has been rolling along for years continually adding people, beginning about 15 years ago as a small snowball when I first met Joyce who lives up the road from me. Then Darren moved back home after traveling the world and bought the little house around the bend. Parties and get-togethers began to freckle the years’ calendars, and some of us like Kate and Adam, Joyce, and me have annual gatherings with a theme or focus. That snowball has kept on rolling and getting bigger and bigger, and I remember someone at one party giving Joyce and I credit for starting it all. Probably everyone of us except Darren are CFA’s, ComeFrom-Away residents of The Shore, people who may not be sure why they moved here in the beginning, but know now; people who for some reason have a bond created by living on what used to be ‘The Poor Shore’ – where you could buy a house and some land cheaper than anywhere else in a onehour radius of Halifax where many people work. 1


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