Five Years a Writer

Background by Amanda:   Let me not overstate its reach, but I have this blog and Val has noticed that it has some readers. Hence, her request a few days ago to have a guest post. She has really gotten into it now, so she has penned a second guest post. Her writing is as clear as her position on matters of nature and cycles and climate change. Rarely a fun or light topic, but always an important one. Through Val’s eyes, over the years, I have come to see and appreciate the wonders of the natural world in which we live — the flowers I have always seen, but the birds, the trees, the tiny little lichens — for all those, I have gained both appreciation and delight thanks to Val’s gentle and persistent modelling of how to be one with nature. And how to observe, to take note, and to name what is happening. Even when it is distressing.   **************************************** Guest post by Val Paape Amanda and I have owned a cottage in Hecla/Grindstone Provincial Park on the shores ...

Guest post by Val Paape On an early June weekend in 1971, I made my first trip to Hecla Island. On the weekend just prior to the summer Solstice in June of 2021, 50 years later, my partner, Amanda, and I made a trip to our cottage at Grindstone in Grindstone/Hecla Island Provincial Park on Lake Winnipeg.   Fifty years is a long time when looked at from a human lifetime perspective. But from a biological and geological timeframe, it is nothing. At least that is the way it used to be. On that first trip to Hecla Island in 1971, upon rounding the curve after the intersection of Highway 8 and the Pine Dock Road, huge numbers of birds could be seen in the ditches and as we approached and drove along the marshland leading up to the lake shore where the causeway to Hecla now exists, the diversity of bird life increased. A few that I remember: large numbers of Meadow Larks and Killdeer along the roadside and in the fields; Red-Winged Blackbirds, Yellow Headed Blackbirds and Mourning Doves...

I have written before to honour my father, Colin Le Rougetel, so today I want to mark Father's Day with two pictures that, really, tell the tale of the man as I experienced him. Adoring and admiring husband : Colin and Anne met in London, my father very much taken with her red hair. The tale is that he was struck at once and the love remained all his life. He adored her, even when — the legend goes — she banged a cast iron pan on the table in frustration at something he had said. Their marriage is a template for how to make a good life together, with roots in family if not in location. We moved frequently for his career before settling in Edmonton, Alberta in the mid-70s. The picture of the two of them dates from sometime in the 1960s.   Loving father : I remember Dad as often absent in my early childhood, because he traveled a lot with his sales & marketing work. But I don’t equate that absence with a lack of love. My memories of Dad include opening stockings far too early on...