Painting Fields of Unripe Cranberries

We are sitting on the edge of Bell Island,
painting pictures of the slate rock and
the shore and the light on the grass and
unripe cranberries. We are using acrylic
on canvas. We took a ferry from
Portugal Cove. Now the island of Newfoundland
is the mainland. We listened to a woman say,
Danny Williams is the best man we ever got
in there. He's a multi-millionaire and
he's going to bring back the mines.
We drove down to an old cemetery. A grassy
path into a copse of spruce trees. We
enter shade and cool and then it opens
onto the patch of graves. But there are
freshly sawed stumps of trees. Ants
at the sap. Someone has cleaned the
graveyard up, and it looks a bit savage.
Brand new gravestones from the 1820s.
The mines here were the most productive
in the world. So many things about
Newfoundland used to be the grandest.
There's something to learn from that.
Later, in a fish and chip shop at
the ferry terminal, I hear the bouncy
error of an incomplete ms word command.
Then the doorbell ting of success.
Someone is working here, on their
laptop.