Five Years a Writer

Annie started out cycling in her long skirt (below), but ditched it once she was introduced to the new-fangled and much more practical bloomers.  Very soon I will get out my bicycle, hop on it wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and ride it for the sheer fun of pedalling my way through the summer weather (dear God, please send us true summer weather soon). With each pedal push, I will be thinking of Annie Londonderry — the first woman to bicycle around the world. In 1894! I didn’t know of her until I watched her story unfold on a Winnipeg theatre stage last Thursday afternoon in the wonderfully entertaining musical “Ride”, which I had seen advertised on an old fashioned poster on a hydro pole in my neighbourhood. First, let’s hear it for old fashioned posters as a way to advertise something. And second, join me in cheering for Annie, who was nothing if not audacious. Imagine, a woman in long skirts, on a bike, travelling solo (with a pearl-handled pistol in her purse) from June 1894 to S...

Anne, with cat and my older sister, circa 1959 When it’s gone, it’s over: a riff on “What I want back is what I was” Whe n my mother died two years ago today, it was not sad. Well, that’s not true. Anne: April 2024 It was very sad to be saying a final goodbye to the woman who gave me life and shaped my life with her own. But, while holding her hand as she passed on, I knew our time together on this plane was well past done. Not because of anything between us but because of the state of her body — a body that had carried her well for more than 90 years, but a body that now at 95 and a half years of age was done. It no longer could do its job. We cannot live one without the other — spirit and soul without a body. Well, that’s not true, some would say. Spirits remain and can be felt, some would say. I like that idea, but I have no personal experience of such things. My focus here is on the body that carries us, because, by her end, my mother’s body was broken. No longer able to carry her ...