Jen Holmes's Page

Spending the day with my Mom, choosing cherries and giggling over homemade Dutch shortbread. Hitting all the farm stands that are open. She prizes asparagus and I search for early Summer squash. We are both rewarded.

Oh the joy in one small cherry. One pink beet with striped insides. A small white turnip. Baby potatoes. Local honey.

For the season, my plate is full of colourful, mouth watering, locally grown…

Over hill, over dale,

Through bush, through briar,

Over park, over pale,

Through flood, through fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon's sphere;

And I serve the fairy queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green.

The cowslips tall her pensioners be;

In their gold coats, spots you see;

Those be rubies, fairy…

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

-W.B. Yeats…

The Peace of the Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.…