The Hermit Poet

December 6, 2006

Travelling with a Shovel

Filed under: General — Neil Aitken @ 11:55 pm

The past couple of days I’ve been driving around Port Coquitlam, Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, and Pitt Meadows with a shovel and a bag of kitty litter.  It’s for a job — really.

I get paid to remove ice and snow from the areas around postal boxes.  Usually these are residential areas, often tucked away in some nook where snow plows rarely go or the sun never shines directly.  Some boxes sit on large cement pads and merely need some ice cleared off and something put down for traction.  Others are set in more forested areas, surrounded by gravel or occasionally just plain dirt.  Some of the more urban ones are unfortunately located where water gathers or where the plows pile excess snow.  Occasionally the boxes are already clear — thanks to the warming weather lately — but are cut off from easy access by high snow berms left by cars and plows.

I spent most of the day clearing the spaces around the postal boxes out in Maple Ridge.  It’s beautiful country out there.  The roads turn.  The afternoon light filters through the trees.  There are deep rich greens everywhere mixed with still clean white snow.  In the evening, driving through Pitt Meadows by the airport, the fog rolled in giving an eerie feel to the journey.  At one point I drove through a dark forest past a graveyard, glanced at the shovel in back seat, and wondered if I were breaking some ancient rule.
While I don’t think I’ll stick with this part-time job, I’m grateful to have had a few days to work with my hands.  Something about physical labor is good for me from time to time.  Especially after so much mental and emotional stress lately with exams and PhD applications.  Sometimes it is good to just be a body and a simple tool — something more raw and more real than any other type of machine.

Yes, somehow I’ve arrived at Seamus Heaney’s poem, Digging, and through it perhaps a renewal in the desire to write.  I’m not certain if I’ve had writer’s block, or merely have taken a rest while my brain explores other things.  I can feel new poems coming, some of them already forming  like the slow pearls I hope they will be .  Grown one layer of lustre at a time, I want them to achieve that deep glow.

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