The Dark and Quiet

I might be packing in odd minutes during the day, bu all my moving is happening after supper.  The drive is about 30 minutes, which means I have ample time for thinking.  I feel as if I haven't done that nearly enough.

The ends of the drive are in well populated spaces, farms, acreages, yards with double generations and two houses.  But the centre?  Ah, the centre.

Through the centre of it all, Elk Island National Park reigns supreme.  The minute you pass the park boundary, you are hit with a sense of something different, something just at the edge of your conscious self, something visceral.  It doesn't  register at first but after a minute you realize it is dark.  Dark in a way that we just don't get to experience very often in our day to day lives.

As far as you see, north and south, there are no buildings, no yards, no lights, not even a lot of park structures.  It is a hint of what these vast prairies were like before European settlement.

Somewhere out there in the dark, it's  easy to imagine small groups of our native people settled under a tipi, snug in warm furs and leather, living with the land and sky instead of on it. You can almost hear their campfire stories.

You can almost hear the sounds of early prairie women, sturdy though they often were, sighing as the saw the endless stands of poplar, birch and spruce that this area was some 300 years ago.  They would have understood the task before them, and they would have known what their lives were about to be like.

I have lived on this borderland of the park for almost 25 years.  It has been part of my consciousness for so long.  I am comforted in an odd way, that it will remain a part of my world, if not daily, at least weekly for a good long time to come.

There has been a little knitting today.  Just a sock using a 3-1 rib pattern from Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks.

 This is a very fun sock blank, with much more diversity than I was expecting.  It's  just the perfect 'minutes when I am not packing' knitting for this week.  It makes me happy.

And that seems to be the light and the dark of it this week!