Five Years a Writer

Retirement report: Week One I am coming to you today from a new zone. There are no rats here. Or, at least, they are not yet discernible to me as rats. There are certainly people here. People for whom time is different. For whom the days have a rhythm of their own making. People who rise without aid and who close their days when they want.  It is a strange and wondrous zone this one. Still wholly unfamiliar to me, but one I am keen to befriend. I have entered it with a plan, though without a map. There is no map, of course. Each one who enters this zone arrives alone. We each find our way. We look to others. We take our cue from those more practiced in these ways. And we find our own.   My feet are with me in this zone, but they are not yet firm beneath me. Though I have already learned it is possible to eat breakfast at noon on a Tuesday and to enjoy potato chips at 4pm any day. Not because a bell rings or a meeting is called. But just because. And that is wondrous.  My ...

We moved between Canada and Europe several times while I was growing up, so my formal schooling has some gaps. Notably, in math and history.  I can do simple math in my head, thanks to the rigours of my German middle school’s drills, but algebra and trigonometry escape me. Every school system taught math differently and I was never able to make it all add up. By the time I reached high school in Canada, I entered the remedial math stream and graduated with unremarkable knowledge in that subject.  History is non-existent in my school memories, except for King Henry VIII of England, whom I remember only for his six wives: Catherine of Aragon, Divorced. Anne Boleyn, Beheaded. Jane Seymour, Died. Anne of Cleves, Divorced. Catherine Howard, Beheaded. Catherine Parr, Survived. And my most vivid memory of those six comes not from the classroom but from a movie.  Genevieve Bujold played Anne Boleyn in Anne of a Thousand Days . The scene that remains crystal clear in my mind five ...

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...

This pandemic has dragged on long enough, don't you think?  As it continues on its seemingly (though hopefully not) inexorable trajectory, I am counting time in a variety of ways: How many months have I been working from home? When did I last have a relaxed face-to-face visit with a friend? How frequently did I apply hand sanitizer yesterday? When can I go happily browsing in my local bookstore again? And so on.  But the biggest way that I am marking time in month 15 of COVID-19 is by how frequently I am resorting to, shall we say, hair accessories.  Normally, I wash my (short and neat) hair, comb it into place, let it air dry and then forget about it.  These days, I am struggling to not constantly push it off my forehead, out of my eyes and off my shirt collar. Sheesh! Too long for comfort (or style) but not long enough to do anything interesting with — like a casual pony tail or chic chignon or something. (I’ve never had either a pony tail or a chignon, of course,...

Hey, Amanda, he said. Are you counting down the days yet? Only two and a half weeks to go!  No, no, said I. It's three and a half weeks, and there's still plenty on my to-do list to knock off before I leave.  Hmmm, he said. Look at the calendar.  And I did. And he was right.  Just like that, the time has disappeared out from under me and I find myself today with just 13 working days (17 calendar days) before leaving for retirement. How did that happen? Is this always how it goes?  I figure I've been working or studying in some combination since I was 5. By my calculation (accurate?), that's 55 years of a certain rhythm and pattern to my years and months. Suddenly that is going to change.  I feel a bit like I've been on a fast-paced moving-sidewalk (like the ones in large airports) and I'm approaching the end of the ride, readying myself for stepping OFF...onto stationary ground. And just like that, the rhythm will change.  I feel I am ready for th...