Thursday, 23 February 2023
at home
We had a trace of snow.
The porch door slides shut which protects plants in the cold nights. I can’t plant my new ones in this weather.
On his way to get mail, Allan had a look at our volunteer garden at the Ilwaco Fire Department.
Skooter did not stay outdoors for long.
By afternoon, the snow was gone and Allan took a photo walk around the garden.
Allan’s mother made that lantern.
The snow was gone but ice lingered with a forecast of another week of freezing nights.
more reading
Raynor Winn’s third memoir had arrived. I have been buying books that I simply cannot wait for the library to find for me. This perfect reading weather has made me choosy. I was waiting for the mail order arrival of some of the Minack Chronicles and more books by Mark Wallington; the latter two authors are mostly out of print.
How very much I love the writings of Raynor Winn.
I advise reading her memoirs in order: The Salt Path, The Wild Silence, Land Lines.
Another tale of what a glut of vacation houses does to a community, as is happening where we live:
The next day I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. When all my friends were reading it back in the late 70s, I didn’t like memoirs. Now memoirs are my favourite genre. And look at this, years before modern social media:
Like me, Annie liked to stay on her home ground.
I liked but did not love Tinker Creek. Too many words, too much purple prose. (I cannot excuse or explain why I accepted and loved the similarly wordy prose of Derek Tangye and Beverley Nichols and Marion Can…Maybe in much older books, it’s a different shade of purple.)
Next, I read a new book which I had requested that the library buy:
The preface gave me a sense of kinship with the author.
To my surprise, the book turned out to be as much about plant cooperation as about animals. I liked the several pages about mixed woodlands, again reassuring me about planting conifers in my alder grove.
There is a much to learn from Sweet in Tooth and Claw.
Several Derek Tangye books had arrived in the mail and I could now embark upon three more in the series…
Tangly Cottage Gardening 
With reference to yesterday’s post as well, an irreversible downside to the transition of a village to a tourist draw, is the loss of parking as day trippers gobble everything up. Locals who are unable to walk to the butcher, post office or corner grocer now find themselves driving circles. Or limiting patronage. “Quick, quick, before the tourists get here!”
The same tourists who usually do not support those businesses, many of whom end up closing in favour of yet another ice cream shop, souvenir store, or over priced restaurant.
Over the almost forty years we have lived here, we have seen the transition of working class village to tourist draw, and the change is awful in so many ways.
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Absolutely. Parking for our public job involved a half hour of driving during the work hours. And locals know to not even try to shop on the weekend. I don’t complain about much of it because my public garden jobs and resort jobs have depended on tourism money, but it seems our most rowdy festivals draw the tourists who are most destructive to the nature that could be the biggest draw. And there is nowhere affordable for workers in the tourist or service industry to buy or rent. Like the Tangyes, we moved in when it was affordable but couldn’t have done so now. Too many vacation rentals.
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I feel the same way about Annie Dillard’s writing, which seemed to me like a tangled ball of yarn that prevented me from getting to the heart of what she wrote. I tend to like spare, simple writing although I do admire a writer who can write long sentences while maintaining clarity.
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I like that fancy hellebore.
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