A PERFECT TIME FOR THE LIBERATION OF WRITER IN RESIDENCE

There’s an election coming. I think. Time to escape. Out into the great hinterland of Muskoka......out into the still snowy woods I’ve been admiring for months from my office window.

I can’t stand elections. I hate rhetoric and self-serving spin, and seeing as this makes up most of the content of advertising and speeches, working around the property for the next five weeks seems a good idea. Not to avoid my civic responsibility or anything. Just to sidestep the b.s. I know how I’ll be voting and it won’t be the result of an attack ad, or a story spinner working in the back room as a speech-writer. I think I’ll go and cut some wood before I get mad thinking about the way democracy facilitates fiction.......because surely we know what spin means? A tasteful and strategic manipulation of truth for gain.

Last fall I took down about twenty trees on our property, and each cut hurt like hell. All these trees were planted by me, back when we first arrived at Birch Hollow, and we had nothing but a sandy brown lawn, a few boulders for decoration, and a tiny scraggly woodlot in the side yard. I wanted trees. Lots of trees. I just forgot about things like “roots wrapping around sewer and gas lines,” and “vegetation from those trees growing on my shingles,” and “no light getting through for my partner’s flower gardens.” So I had to cull what I had sown, and it was a miserable harvest. I could almost hear them cry when I had to axe them to the ground. While I felt terrible removing those wonderful little maples, some brought from the Village of Windermere, where we had a family cottage, it did create more light for gardens this year, remove the threat of sewer line strangulation, and potentially save us from a gas line rupture. Roots can do that kind of thing. I just didn’t know it when I planted them in clusters, not far from gas line arteries.

This spring I’ve got a monstrous job cutting up the trees I cast onto a large pile in the sideyard last November. It will take about a month I’m sure, to tidy up. It hopefully will take the whole period of the federal election campaign. When I come in, I’ll be too tired to pay any attention to their barrage of advertisements, and I won’t even make it to the late evening news, before passing out from exhaustion. I’ve got those trees to trim, you see, and gardens to brighten this spring, and can blame all this handyman stuff, for not paying attention to the folly of political candidates......and unless they want to come and lend a hand here at Birch Hollow, I’ll just vote based on knowledge, not on the quality of spin foisted upon the masses.

I’m actually glad I set myself up for all this yard work. It will be so much more pleasant than watching candidates climbing all over themselves to get their message out. I’m staying out, and it’ll be great! Sure, there will be a few pesky candidates wandering through the neighborhood but they’ll probably stay clear of the axeman, rigorously chopping away in this own dimension of real and honest work.

No spin required. No spin wanted!