Returning after three months in Bremen, Germany, my home in small town Canada looked like a ragged mess. For the first time my eyes actually saw the abandoned wrecks in people’s front yards, the unruliness of the forest. In Germany, it had seemed to me that everything had its own place, and each thing had been tidied away carefully into that place.

Back home in Black Creek, it seemed that none of the artifacts of man really belonged on this ragged land. The rusty carcasses of old broke-down cars were being digested by the ferns, overtaken by the salal, our straining and lazy civilization was being mulched down.

For awhile this messiness was like grit in my food. With time the irritation and my unfavourable judgements passed, but my eyes were never the same.