The Christmas Spook Of Skunk Hallow

It was a bleak December - Edgar Allen Poe would have had something to say about it. I moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia that fall to attend my final two years of undergraduate studies in English Literature and Philosophy. Just across the Northumberland Straight and over the rolling fields of Prince Edward Island stood my grandparents farm - a modest gathering of old dairy barns and dying orchard trees. It's a fair homestead that my grandmother affectionately calls "Skunk Hallow" thanks to the more than occasional night-time visitor.

As a child my family moved a heck of an awful lot. The suburban cityscapes of Canada provided the backdrop for the many houses we lived in; but the farm had been, and still remained, the only home I could always return to. It was a constant that never seemed to waiver. I say seemed because nothing ever really stays the same. The occasional new sign would welcome visitors to the farm, the house would have a different color trim, fewer cattle would low in the fields, and, since my grandfather's retirement from farming, one of the larger barns had even been torn down. But it was still the same place. It's still my grandparents' farm.

I guess what it comes down to is that, for me, there's more to the farm than just the buildings and barbed wire that ties the fences together. The farm is really all about the land and all the work that my family has poured into it over the last hundred years or so. It's a place that has grown and groaned with the lives of an entire family history.