Slave Days in the Queen’s Bush • by Geoff Martin 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters   Though trac-tor was one of the first words to form on my infant tongue, my working knowledge of the machines is embarrassingly slight. This wouldn’t matter much except that my father and grandfather and great-grandfather have been selling and fixing farm equipment from the Ontario villages of Hawkesville and Wallenstein for over eighty years. So it’s a personal bit of shame, this not-knowing. It’s also a strike against the way I typically define myself, as someone who is more country-kid than clever urbanite. In terms of how and where I root my itinerant living, it’s the Mennonite farmland 130km west of Toronto that I claim as home-most-home: a place of people, roads, and rivers that I presume to know better than any other spot on earth. This is not a fiction, but it is a bit of personal mythology.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Geoff Martin {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]