By then, there were people camping on the property and building their own huts in the woods. Nova Scotia was a spiritual siren, my father said. It called to their souls. There was a young woman named Wildflower, with braids and a man named Fern and his friend Spruce. And Spruce had a girlfriend named Evening Star. And more came, all with nature names, some with Sanskrit names. They did yoga and meditated and chanted and drummed. There was an architect whose wife had died in a car accident. “Transitioned,” they called it. He helped my father with expansion plans. He would winter in Lesbos and come to The Mists of Avalon in the spring. He was originally from Malta and found the Nova Scotia winters too harsh.

Without even asking, they replaced my mother’s small garden with a huge herb garden in the shape of a Celtic cross. My mother just shrugged. She didn’t even weed it anymore, so she was relieved to have someone else claim the garden. Ocean had someone fly over and take an aerial picture. He put it in a brochure to advertise the property and more visitors found us. Eco-travellers, he called them. Spirit travellers. Sojourners in The Mists. The old barn had been fully converted now. My mother was permanent staff at the hospital by then and her entire salary was going into The Mists. There must have been thirty people living there at this time in various small buildings and yurts.

My father would make me big bowls of oatmeal with ground flax and maple syrup. Syrup making was a community event, everyone carrying their pails of sap from all over the property to the cookhouse. We’d have a sugar shack and make buckwheat pancakes and maple syrup candy. And in the other seasons, we’d have the amber syrup to remember the trees’ blood.

My father would hold my hand and walk me to the end of the driveway on school days when my mother was at work. He’d make shadow puppets with his hands. We’d pretend to be dragons when the air was cold and our breath was steamy. He’d leave Morgaine sleeping in the house. She never liked to get up early.

“Your mother worries too much. When an adult worries, a child worries, Eve,” Ocean advised me. Sometimes he would carry me on his shoulders and I felt like a tall prehistoric bird that had known the crows back when the world was new.

During the day Ocean would look after Morgaine, if you could call it that. When I came home she’d show me the rye bread they’d made, or the pictures they’d painted, or the dream catchers they’d woven. He would take her to the beach to harvest kelp, and they would prepare a stew that made the house reek. But often she just played by herself all day. Even as a very young child she was able to spend her day playing with toys and invisible friends. Morgaine said Wildflower came over to clean the house and do laundry. When I’d come home on the bus, usually it was just Morgaine waiting, her hands clasped together by her heart like a little priestess. The kids on the bus called us the hippie people who lived in a cult. I had just turned eight and remember being self-conscious in a way I had not been the year before.