Poet Henri Cole visits Elizabeth Bishop's childhood home in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Sitting on the back veranda, eating my seafood pie, I imagine again that it is 1916. White hens roam the yard. Little Elizabeth has taken the cow, Nelly, to the pasture. She carries a big stick. At the brook, they both take a drink, and she picks a bunch of mint for her grandmother’s leg of lamb. Elizabeth passes the spot where tall spruce and pine grow at the river’s edge. The water is clear and brown. This is where the church picnic was last summer. There is a freshwater smell. Elizabeth nuzzles Nelly and lets her lick her face. She is a Jersey. Very pretty with dark brown eyes. Later Elizabeth will go to the cemetery with her grandfather, who carries a scythe to trim the grass around the headstones of their kin. She will pick blueberries and caress the recumbent lamb made of stone that marks a child’s grave. She’ll sit on the lamb and talk to it.
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