Written March 10, 2023, 6 p.m.

At the end of February I caught Covid. I came out to Madoc to recuperate with the dogs. I started to feel a bit better, in the cold air, snow and sunshine. So I charged up my cordless drill, put it in a backpack, put on my cross-country skis, and took the dogs with me to the sugar shack. Over a few days I hung forty buckets on maple trees. Some of this work took place in a blizzard.

After ten days of night sweats, soup, Kleenex and paperback books, I finally tested negative. So I went back to Toronto. Back in town I watched the weather report for Madoc. The temperature went above freezing for a few days, but it was not weather for much sap to run. So when Mimi and I drove out to Madoc today, my expectations were low.

But the situation I found here was not what I expected.

Yesterday marked my first day of class at the school formerly known as Ryerson, now named — in the inimitable wisdom of its board — Toronto Metropolitan University (a fellow instructor remarked, “It took them a year to come up with that?”)

Whatever the name, duty called, and so I gamely packed my battered copy of The Elements of Style (a book I am pretty sure I have never convinced a single student to consult, let alone purchase) in my satchel, and set off on the 506 Dundas Streetcar. The Dundas car trundled east through grey Toronto (it’s the greyest and mildest winter I can remember). We crossed Chinatown, and then downtown, and then I alighted at Church Street. Every time I visit this part of town it feels more crowded; cranes clogged the skyline around me as I walked up the street. The roar of construction, ever-present in Toronto, feels a bit more deafening here. I stopped at Metro to buy some clementines and apples for the students; a guy ahead of me stooped just in front of the supermarket door, picked up a tiny cigarette butt from the pavement, lit it, and sucked mightily; a reminder that there are lots of marginal people in this part of Toronto.

Five years ago this fall I took a buyout from the newspaper where I had worked for a long time. I took the plunge and enrolled full-time in the Master of Forest Conservation at the University of Toronto. The move resembled to some extent a leap off a cliff. Through massive support from my partner and our children, and from my classmates, I pulled it off.

This path I now walk has been full of potholes, twists, turns, and bad weather. I succeed. I fail. I struggle. Ironically, the toughest thing about forestry for me is information technology. I have struggled with Geographic Information Systems, learning management software, Contentful, Mailchimp, Excel… you name it. It’s a challenge.

When I was 16 I visited Europe for the first time. I stayed with my sister and her boyfriend in Soest. Then I rode a train to visit Paris. My memory of that train trip was staring out the windows at the Dutch cattle. The cattle stood, heads bowed, grazing on the grass in the fields. At the time I lived on a farm in Quebec and I saw cows all the time. But something about these cows caught my eye. The pasture seemed unnaturally green and the cows, remarkably well-fed. The scene, for me, screamed prosperity.

This summer I spent ten days in the Dutch countryside. My son and I took a trip, by train and bicycle. We saw a lot of the Netherlands, from Groningen in the north to Tilburg in the south. But what was weird for me, was, we didn’t see a lot of cows.

On the weekend I dismantled a low wall I’d built of pressure-treated planks to retain our vegetable garden in our back yard, in Toronto. The wall had bowed out badly and looked ready to collapse. I thought about a trip to the lumberyard to buy new planks, but then I decided I’d rebuild with the material at hand. I pulled out the nails with a hammer and pounded them straight again. I backed out the screws with my Robertson screwdriver, my power drill being at the cottage.

All this effort with a manual screwdriver made me recall a strange period of my life when I became obsessed with building my own bed(s!) This pathology lasted a decade, off and on. Why, during university and long afterwards, every time I moved to a new apartment, did I go to the lumber yard to buy two-by-fours and plywood, and wood screws, and construct my own bed?

My sister Marie-Josée Sheeks, a mother of four, lives in Budapest. Hungary shares a border with Ukraine; since Russia invaded Ukraine last week, Hungary has taken in close to 200,000 refugees from Ukraine. The other night my sister went to help out and sent this note to her siblings in Canada.

By Marie Josée Sheeks

I wanted to tell you about my evening. There are refugees coming in to the city via one of the train stations (it’s the one that was designed by Eiffel, the guy behind the Eiffel Tower). I’ve been meaning to go over and see if I can help.

So this afternoon/evening, I made a quick visit, because the big kids were out, and my younger sons were alone together, so I didn’t want to leave for too long.

When Gunter Vierich escaped East Germany in 1949 or 1950 – he can’t quite remember which – he carried a small sack with very few possessions. He left his village near Leipzig and met a smuggler at the edge of a forest. In the night he and a few other East Germans threaded their way through the woods to the West. Gunter tells me this story while seated on his tractor seat, outside his home in Madoc Township, Ont., having paused in the job of cleaning snow around his house.