Heidi Watts

  Welcome!! On this site you will find work in progress and published work from the last fifty-five years. It is, in essence, an archive of published and unpublished work. I have tried to indicate the date each piece was first written and the date it was revised and published, either here or by some other means. This selection includes, or will include essays on education and nature, poems,  memoirs, travel logs, stories and random thoughts. There are  four  categories, including Memoirs, Nature, Nova Scotia and Travel.  My literary career began in approximately 1946, when I became the editor of our school newspaper, The Mock Turtle. It was a proper newsletter, printed on rather dingy white paper by that modern wonder, a mimeograph machine with a hand crank, which tended to go rogue and spit either ink or paper around the room. But it was a proper Newsletter with a picture of the Mock Turtle  on the masthead borrowed from Edward Tenniel, and a byline from  one of the psalms, “…the voic

Warblers are irritating, and that’s the truth. It’s a beautiful spring morning, the mist just disappearing and the sun promising a full Monty. I take my binoculars and stroll quietly down to the mailboxes and, just like yesterday, there is a yellow warbler singing full bore, "whichety, whichety, whichety." Where? Must be right there in that bush. But I can’t see it. No. Have I ever seen that bird there? No. She/he flits from branch to branch veiled by the baby yellow-green leaves of spring, barely hatched. The sound has moved. I try to scan with the binoculars. The sound is close, here by my ear, no, over there to the right, "whitchety, whitchety, whichetey…" out of the corner of my right eye I see a tease of yellow.   Ok, be like that. I’ll try another spot. I walk slowly up the trail, listening for sound, looking for another swipe of yellow, or any color on the wing, and at the crest of the hill, right there on the lowest branch of the big maple, right where t