Driving Minnie's Piano by Lesley Choyce Read Free Book Online

research and donning the
cloak of occasional historian. I know more about the history of
this province than I would like to and wish I could return to
innocence. Arriving here for the first time in a summer in the
early 1970s, I believed I had washed up on the shores of paradise.
Years later, in flight from aforementioned ambition and the
hostility of urban worlds, I held onto my mythology as long as I
could. Even now, I prefer to ignore, if I can, the knowledge of
this province's military past filled with inglorious battles
between empires, scalping of Mi'kmaq people by British soldiers and
all the remaining clouds of injustice that hover over this
land.
    Despite the beauty of this
seemingly benign place, it is a coastline of nearly continual
disaster of elemental proportions. That bedrock beneath my well is
a scrap of massive rock left over from two continents in collision.
The hills that bracket the beach are both drumlins - soils and
stone left over by the retreat of immense, dispassionate glaciers
that ravaged Nova Scotia. The drumlins themselves are eaten away
year after year by sea and rain until they will one day disappear.
I'm the world's biggest fan of drumlins and have written about them
in magazines more than once. My only true cyberfame is this: if you
do a search for information about drumlins on the Internet, you
will quickly find your way to me. I've borrowed my knowledge from
scientists but have gone on to make poetry, film and fiction about
these seaside hills of glacial deposit until, in my own mind, I
have become the king of the drumlins.

    The spruce trees in my
backyard repeat the same lesson over and over to deaf generations.
Allowed to grow too close together, they reach tall and spindly
into the salty air. Vast acreage of this shore is forested by
sickly spruce trees with short lives due to the compacting born of
an aggressive desire to survive and compete. But given room to
grow, a black spruce, considered by many here to be a veritable
weed of a tree, becomes a grand cathedral within a decade or two.
It stands both broad and pinnacled, appearing almost royal and
sentient on the hill behind my house, the topmost boughs blowing in
the sou'west wind and the sound of the wind in the lower branches
perfecting an Aeolian chant that could inspire poets from any
generation.
    Below these trees, I raised a
family, taught two daughters the language of wave and stone, shared
the code of living, which is the prerogative to save all living
things, to protect what needs protecting and repair, through
unceasing effort, the damage we do to our world and to
ourselves.

    Here in November, the waves
shift from grim to majestic as the wind changes, and the sky turns
from grey to mauve to blue. A morning of reflection gives way to an
afternoon of surfing the backs of waves ushered in by Sable Island
storms. Beyond that, the world will catch up with me. It will track
me down by phone, fax and e-mail and keep me away from the marsh,
the shore and the sea.
    Although I feel myself a long
way from my own demise, I have the occasional dream of a fine
primitive burial for myself. Somewhere back up among the splendid
spruce, I see someone whose arms look like my own digging into the
soil, carving down to the hard smooth surface of the bedrock that
was once Gondwana. I see someone taking great care to clean the
bedrock surface until it appears as if it is the polished marble of
some European cathedral floor. Then my body is placed flat upon the
stone floor and I am at my final rest. I expect there are laws
against such things, one statute or several, that says a man cannot
be buried by his home above the sea, but the dream
persists.
    A few of us know the precise
taste of a stone plucked from the shore and placed in the mouth or
another one dug up from the bottom of a well, washed and set on the
tongue. That taste of sea and stone, of wave and land, will always
remind me of home.

    A Stone’s Throw From the
Sea

    Awake at the