First stop was The Tangled Garden ... a wonderful garden fashioned along the same lines as The Secret Garden ... and a combination art studio and store selling homemade jams, jellies, vinegars and cordials ... a prize. I picked up some special savoury jams to serve with meat and fish.
Next was Grand Pré and the Evangeline Centre where Kerry bought Acadian prints and toys and I bought a cook book. I kept looking for Un Acadien Errant on CD but couldn’t find it. It is a song that recurs in The Way the Crow Flies because Mimi is an Acadian.
Back to Wolfville for lunch from the Lunch Box, a vegetarian restaurant on Main Street.
Then on to a museum in Centreville that honours a concrete maker, Charles Macdonald, now dead, who was clearly eccentric, imaginative, inventive and an enterprising socialist. (He and a neighbour held weekly meetings at which luminaries like Tim Buck showed up. They sang communist and socialist songs to the tunes of hymns so no one would suspect!) It turns out that he practised his craft on a series of hobbit houses around Hall’s Harbour ... and once again I found myself remembering that abortive trip to Nova Scotia in 2001. Roy and I had delighted in these hobbit houses when we stumbled upon them. We’d wondered who possessed the imagination to create them. Kerry and I headed out to see them again now that we knew some of the history. We met Fred Macdonald, the creator’s great nephew, who showed us in and around the one he uses as his family cottage. He rents out the one next door ... I am interested ... and so is Kerry. It would be a kind of glorified camping in a unique place. We got his email address and will check out when it is free.
We bought a flat of peewee eggs for $1, some local corn and potatoes, and then drove to Canning for chowder. Enroute we saw a field with three brightly coloured doors opening into it. I didn’t have my camera, dammit.
In Canning we arranged to see a house in Kingsport and, as we were early, went down to check out high tide. It is impressive.
The house was not as impressive. It had good and bad qualities and was shown to us by a man with a very strong local accent and several tics ... most verbal ... which he used as spacers in conversation ... he also spat on the grass every time he made a point ... not one of those awful hawking spits that come from the lungs ... these were clear ... the kind boys practise when they are trying to appear manly. He wasn’t a very good liar because each falsehood or exaggeration was highlighted by one of these mannerisms. Maurice had gone fishing in Kingsport and joined us as we were taking the tour. He described the owner as a living museum piece.
It was a good day, and since we are likely going to be getting a taste of the weather that has flooded the Halifax- Lunenburg area with 100 mm of rain, we picked a good day for our touring.
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