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around–Margaret is at one of her interminable Save Gwendolyn meetings–so he’s unembarrassed to rasp, to no recognizable tune, the song of Autolycus: “April, the sweet o’ the year, when the merry daffodils appear.” He mangles the verse. His memory has begun to wear at the edges, like his coveralls. There was a time when he could trumpet, even when in his cups, in that former wasted life, the entire madrigal.
    He lays down his trowel, straightens, his back creaking like a rusting gate. Is it the somnolent country life that brings on this decay? Yet he is only sixty-eight. Doc Dooley, who holds the secret of Arthur’s high cholesterol and balky heart, is eighty-five and runs in the Garibaldi Island marathon. Run, jog, walk, he orders, and if you can do little else, wobble.
    He closes the garden gate, washes his hands by the tap behind his country house–two storeys, 1920s gingerbread–and contemplates playing hooky with rod and reel. Below thehouse, where mown grass gives way to white-scrubbed drift logs and the rippled wash of Blunder Bay, his outboard beckons from his sagging dock.
    But no, he must hike, must stay faithful to Doc Dooley’s regimen, a mile and a quarter up Potter’s Road and down Centre Road to Hopeless Bay, to load his rucksack with mail, skim milk, olive oil, and…what else was on Margaret’s list? Three tomatoes and two lemons. No need to write everything down.
    She is keeping him on a strict diet. She blames herself for the minor stroke he suffered two years ago, attributing it to her over-bounteous table. “Eat light, Beauchamp, and avoid fats,” said Doc Dooley.
    He skirts the upper pasture to look for holes in the cedar fence. Occasionally, and by no evident means, the goats escape under, over, or through it–wise locals drive carefully along Potter’s Road. Some thirty kids are expected at Blunder Bay Farm–Margaret has a way of knowing these things–so it will be a busy month. Other residents include chickens, geese, a horse called Barney, Slappy the dog, and a pair of cats named Shiftless and Underfoot.
    The path descends to an alder bottom, then rises to a dry fir forest before joining the road. He is puffing a little, his nostrils filled with the soft scents of a pleasant spring day.
    Avoid stress. Another of Doc Dooley’s prescriptions. Isn’t that why he fled to Garibaldi Island? To escape the city’s ferment, the law’s wounding duels? He was fat and foundering, lonely and ill, about to be divorced by a faithless wife. Arthur is a farmer now, he hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom for half a dozen years. Life has taken on a rosier hue since he fell in love with Garibaldi Island, then, just as quickly, with his neighbour, Margaret Blake, organic farmer, environmental activist.
    She gave him eyes to see nature’s artistry after six decades of city blindness, when gazing at concrete, not conifers, at shop windows, not still ponds, seemed the natural way of humankind. Arthur’s milieu was more conservative than conservationist.“Let’s save this environment,” a fellow member of the Confederation Club once chortled.
    But rural life comes with its cracks and stains. For one, he didn’t anticipate living with Margaret would be so hectic. For three of their five years together, she served as Garibaldi’s elected trustee, volatile, disputatious, scaring people with her gingery tongue. Now her ire is focused on the proposed development at Gwendolyn Bay, its threatened deforestation. On that issue, this is an island divided. Friendships have been broken in heated debate at permit hearings. Locals driving by still wave, but many no longer smile.
    Arthur’s annual pursuit of tomatoes, carrots, and cabbage has kindled in him a love of green and growing things, refreshed each spring with the new life about him. He supposes he’s an environmentalist, but sees it as a lost