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 It is, in essence, an archive of published and unpublished work.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...

 A few years ago, in early May, when the sun was surprisingly warm, and the trees newly leaved in a golden green, I took a walk into the woods on an old walking trail. I had been walking for about thirty minutes when a bird flew out of the brush front of me. I froze in my tracks. To my surprise, instead of assuming the “if I don’t move you won’t see me pose”, or flying off, the bird began advancing toward me very slowly.  It was a ruffed grouse,  the size of a very small chicken, with stripped reddish brown and white neck feathers, a wide fan shaped tail with a bright black border ,and a little crown or tuft on the head.  The brown and white stripes in her feathers gleamed in the sunlight and occasionally she spread her tail out like a black-bordered fan. I stayed as still as I could – how often do I encounter a creature in the wild? – as she advanced very slowly, until she was about six feet from me. Then, still strutting very slowly, bobbing her head and and displa...

  My name is “Old Beady Eye and this is my story.   I am a heron, a great blue heron, one of the tallest creatures on this shoreline, tall, silent, regal, and you may never notice me, because I have the power of such steadiness that your eyes may slide right over me and beyond.  Only if I make a move, stab my long beak into the water   in one quick jab to catch a little silver glimmer, a fish perhaps, or a small sneaky crab sideling silently through the shallows,   or I may decide enough is enough and silently raise my great wings to leave the scene – only then will you notice me. You will say, “Oh, Look, there’s the great blue heron”, but I will be gone before your companion notices me. My power comes from concentration, though a sharp beak, reflexes faster than the   speed of light,   and large loft bearing wings also help. I earn my dinners by doing nothing. I sail overhead, locate a hopeful bit of shallow water, glide in for a landing as quietly as...

I look out the window in the kitchen and what do I see? I really woke up on this morning, when a passing  glance out the window and across the cove revealed a small movement in the little cluster of tall, supple poplar trees, disappearing into the grove of bent and stunted hemlocks indigenous to these islands.  I am alone on this no longer inhabited island in the north Atlantic and, for one thing, there should not be poplar trees. The islands are largely spruce and hemlock, with only an occasional deciduous tree: these foreign trees must have been planted by the first descendants of the first settlers a little over 100 years ago. And, there should not be an unfamiliar movement in those trees.  As I watch anxiously a largish black bird waddles out of the underbrush followed by a procession of small black creatures – ah! ducklings.  Mama Duck (we must assume it was a mama) was headed straight for the water and in a long line, reminiscent of a kindergarten teacher lea...