The Widow's Land: Superstition and Farming... a Madness of Daughters

by John B. Lee

Overview

This is a book about superstition, life in rural Canada, and it will appeal to those who hunger for memoir, the way things were, and the curiosities of life that somehow can't be believed. Almost two hundred years ago author John B. Lee's great—great grandfather departed from Ireland for the new world with the prospect of establishing a homestead in what is now southwestern Ontario. As was the tradition the sendoff began with an American Wake, for those leaving and those left behind knew they would never see one another again. In a chapter of that title, Lee writes "They stood on those morbid piers watching the white ache of mast and cloth as they vanished west, a crow's nest lowered on the wet blue curve of that deep—water distance in an arcing line like the falling down of kites behind hills." Sometimes sad, sometimes lighthearted, but always poignant this memoir begins in the wilderness with wolves and bears and stone horses, moves quickly through the centuries to the apotheosis of the thriving tradition of the family farm and from there into the period of decline and decay where the elision of time has stolen the name from the side of the barn as letter by letter it fades and falls to ruin. An exploration of the relationship between the rational and the material world on the one hand, and the world of dream and imagination on the other, Lee's book closes with these words: I am making the world I am made from.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887535635
Publisher:	Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Limited
Publication date:	03/15/2017
Pages:	90
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

In 2005 John B. Lee was inducted as Poet Laureate of Brantford in perpetuity. In 2007 he was made a member of the Chancellor’s Circle of the President’s Club of McMaster University and named first recipient of the Souwesto Award for his contribution to literature in his home region of southwestern
Ontario and he was named winner of the inaugural Black Moss Press Souwesto Award for his contribution to the ethos of writing in Southwestern Ontario. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County (2011-14) and in 2015 Honourary Poet Laureate of Norfolk County for life. He is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People’s
Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of
Windsor). In 2007 he was named winner of the Winston Collins Award for Best Canadian Poem, an award he won again in 2012. He has received letters of praise from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu,
Australian Poet, Les Murray, and Senator Romeo Dallaire. Called “the greatest living poet in English,”
by poet George Whipple, he lives in Port Dover, Ontario where he works as a full time author.

Read an Excerpt

EXCERPT: THE WIDOW'S LAND by John B. Lee

Bad Ideas
…
I suppose I always knew the dangers of wilding with my uncle. He snipped off the tip of his finger with a chain saw. He fell from a branch and broke his wrist from the fall. He uncapped anhydrous ammonia while it was under pressure in the sprayer and blinded himself for days, the skin peeling from his swollen cheeks like sunburn. He lost control of the pickup and drove it into the muck where it sat abandoned for weeks. He came racing up from the field and hit the gatepost with the wheel of the manure spreader thereby wrecking the axel and breaking the post. So, I should have known better than to trust him with guns or dynamite.
…
As I said, dynamite was not the only danger on our farm, but it was a real danger and my uncle was just the sapper to prove the rule. I remember the wooden box candled with sticks of TNT. I knew them by the paper like butcher’s wax and the colour of those cylinders like old honey gone hard in the jar. We set out one day, the hired man, Uncle John and I, to blow a stump. We drove the tractor and wagon to the field. Stopped a hundred yards from the old worry of what remained from a troublesome tree. Tom and I stood there watching while Uncle John set the explosive, lit the fuse and we ran like fire in dry weather. We dove together under the wagon when the blast came sending a fountain of earth and dead wood erupting in a pyrotechnic fan so it flung rocks and earth and broken heartwood in a spray like a giant nosegay of rotten daisies rising and spreading and falling like a sea wave fracturing on volcanic glass. We heard the result thudding on the wagon, packing the earth nearby and generally wrecking an almost self-immolating thunder of wooden applause swarming around us like hail in a storm. And that was my uncle. That was he and Tom and I in the exact centre of the hurly burly of bad ideas come to no harm. We spent two hours filling the hole where the stump used to be. Tom and I, we were a hard-working two-shoveled crew, with Uncle John leaning on the tongue of the wagon eating an apple down to the core.

And I thought of that bad idea, and the love of the adventures of farming when I heard another story concerning the use to which a farmer put his cache of dynamite. So the story goes, a man bought himself a farm and on that farm was a long abandoned lagoon. The farm had been a pig farm and the lagoon had been a reservoir for pig spoor, the liquid manure that accumulates over the wintering of pigs in a slat floor barn. The previous owner had stopped raising pigs a decade ago, but he’d never drained the last accretion of hog soil from the lagoon. It had sat in the weather for ten years so the feces went hard to the rim leaving a rubbery black tarpaulin stretched out like a vulcanized floor.
It was so stable you could walk to the middle as though you were walking upon a much-weathered trampoline.

The man looked at the useless lagoon. He prodded the surface and said to his wife, “I think I’ll try to drain that old lagoon if I can.” And he poked it with a stick. He prodded it with a fork. He jumped on it like a kid on something half inflated. And it did not yield. He said to his wife, “I have some dynamite in the shed. I think I’ll blast it so I can break through the surface and drain the liquid underneath.” He tapped a hole in the centre and plugged the hole with a single stick of dynamite.
When it blew it simply punched a hole the size of a hole an axe might make in ice. He said to his wife,

“I guess I’ll have to use more dynamite next time.” And she watched as he candled the surface like a cake you would make for a Brobdingnagian’s birthday. And when he lit the fuse the whole lagoon erupted like Vesuvius hurling a geyser into the wind black and oily like the gushing of crude from a well. It flanged across the yard swathing the entire western wall of his house like a rogue wave, a veritable tsunami of pig manure coating the brick from shingles to cellar with a patina black as licorice.
And it came darkening down the glass eclipsing all the light where his wife looked out through splash that stole the light from the air like the sudden coming of an oncoming storm. Needless to say, this did not please. She had imagined her husband’s project was a bad idea. And that bad idea remains on the west wall of their country home coating the siding and impregnating the brick like grease on a post or butter on toast. The day he pulled the plug on the pig lagoon almost ended their marriage.
That big squall, that rogue wave. The one he detonated on the day of bad ideas.

Some people are just too much fun. Uncle John was one of those. And I loved being his pupil.
I’m not certain he was what Robert Bly had in mind. But he was the kind of wild man I want to be when I grow up.