Learning New Places

The light outside my window is strange, a glimmer of remembered sun on the horizon almost extinguished by lowering clouds. The trees, many towering far over the roof, are a mix of brown and silvering limbs, the dense green of pine and the lighter shades of bamboo and ferns. The branches are still, waiting for new weather to blow in. This view and that of local mountains and rivers have become normal to me although I was not born here, nor was I raised here. I was born elsewhere, in another country, then raised in another place much colder than this.

Over the years I have learned to read the weather in this place beside the mountains, so many mountains that they catch the clouds and deliver more rain here than to other places close by. I notice this although my livelihood is not dependent on the weather. Perhaps that is why it took me a while to understand the seasons in my new place. Would I have learned it more quickly if I was a farmer?

Farmers would need to know much more about the weather. When to plant, what to plant and when to harvest are all vital to know if they are to wrest a living from the land. This makes me think about the immigrants coming to a new country many years ago. Some traveled great distances, some migrated a shorter way but still there would have been change, new surroundings, new ways of living and doing things. Even city dwellers would find differences in a new place of abode, particularly with a change of  province, state or country. Even the language could be different, from altered common terms for things to a whole strange tongue.

I think of this as I do my research, finding documents to outline the life of a line of settlers in Nova Scotia in the years at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. It was a Nova Scotia much different than the one where I once lived, a civilization not too unlike the one where I live now. In the late 18th century it was an immense treed land beside the water, at least in Pictou where the man I am researching first settled, but I like to think that he would have learned to read the weather much like I did when I first came here.