Summer Moved On

Me too! I finally left Green Dragon Farm (again) and travelled east to Cape Breton Island to stay on another homestead/eco-farm for two weeks.

I celebrated the fall equinox together with Gerlinde and Stephan, which was a nice way to close up my time there. After more than three month at their place it really was hard to leave them and all the other great people (and of course the faboulos animals) I met there. But it was also good to finally move on, I had kind of overstayed my visit there anyway and the two of them will be glad to have their little house to themselves for a change, I guess.

The last weeks there were exciting, but not always in a good way. Somebody stole hay from their barn, somebody reported a free-running fallow deer (which had been out of the fence for a while) to the authorities, which put a lot of stress on Stephan, because he had to find and shoot it out of season while he actually would have prefered to be on the hayfield, trying to make up for the lost bales. One little drama seemed to follow the next and the atmosphere on the farm was tense, to say the least.

The only good thing happening was Tuennes, a little tomcat which moved into the house and got to stay in my room. It kind of broke my heart to leave the little fellow behind when I left, because he was getting very attached to me quickly.

The place I am staying now has wonderful people (a couple with three kids, 5,7 and 9 years old), a bunch of dogs (5 if I counted correctly), two adult cats and three tiny kittens (three to four weeks old, the cutest little things), fourteen highland cattle (with the calmest and tamest bull I ever met), five goats, two pigs, several Soy sheep (a rare breed from the St. Kilda archipelago, I had read about them, but never seen any of them for real and never expected to find them in Canada of all places) and a few chicken.

Even though there are (as is to be expected) a lot of things which need to be done before the winter, the atmosphere is a lot more relaxed than on Green Dragon Farm (which might be due to the fact that Kate is working full time, so the family income does not have to come from farming). Today I took a long walk through the forrest together with Brooke and some forrestry consultants who offered to look at the development potential of the woodland here and brought some firewood in the house. The rest of the day I spent petting cats and dogs.

I have a nice little room with windows in three directions which allow me to see the beautiful sunrise over the valley, see the cattle on their pasture and some of the woods which are just starting to turn red. Cape Breton is famous for its Indian summer.

I think it was a good choice to come here, even though I miss Tuennes and Gerlinde and Stephan.

I booked a new flight, BTW, I will now return to Germany on October the 18th and stop at my parents place for a few days, so I should be back in Muenster around the 22nd or so. And I start to look forward to that as well, it will be nice to see my friends again and have all my books and musical instruments and computer and whatelse available again.