“In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it“.
Marianne Williamson
A brief scan of this increasingly venerable journal – using the handily provided ‘search’ feature – will reveal many references to the peninsula upon which The Girl and I live. This narrow strip of land – running north/south for around 12 miles above the provincial capital, Victoria, is bounded to the east by the Haro Strait, to the north by Satellite Passage and to the west by the Saanich Inlet and Finlayson Arm.
In recent centuries this has traditionally been farming country and is designated as Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) land. This protects the area from too much development and also supports the smallholders.
It is, inevitably, true that not all of the land is in use for commercial farming; there is also quite a bit of hobby farming and other token gestures to the letter of the law. It is, however, a most agreeable fact that one can – without leaving the peninsula – support pretty much all of one’s dietary needs.
This is not just down to the farmers. We have something else precious here – we peninsula dwellers. That something is a powerful sense of community! Please do indulge me whilst I offer a few brief illustrations.
Just a few weeks back we had a text message from the neighbours behind us here. Their family own and operate one of the biggest blueberry farms on the peninsula and are, at this time of the year, wont to turn up with a huge punnet of freshly picked blueberries for us. Most welcome indeed!
This Tuesday just passed there was an early morning ring on our front doorbell (a little too early for our liking to be honest). It was our next door neighbour to the north. Now – we don’t really know this gentleman very well – partly because he is a tenant in the property. Regardless of that fact, here he was bearing a big cardboard box of pears, the which had been harvested from the trees around his residence. We accepted graciously.
No more than a few hours later we were approached by our neighbours on the other side. These good folk – retired police officers – have recently taken up vegetable gardening and have proved themselves so successful that they now possess copious quantities of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. We gratefully accepted all these wonderfully kind offerings – passing on in our turn any excess to other good friends and family.
In our opinion, this is how communities are supposed to work and, given the attempts by others (whom – frankly – I have no need to name) to destroy these finer facts of our existence, we are even more determined than we were already to do all that we can to preserve this finer, truer way of life.
I invite any gentle readers to do the same.
P.S. – Our neighbour to the north just revisited with a large bag of grapes! What can I say? (Thank you!)…
Are you one of those good people who find themselves mildly annoyed (or even a little nauseous!) when long-term couples regale all and sundry with overly eager descriptions of their togetherness – their single-mindedness – their soul-matedness – their inability not to finish each others…
