Five Years a Writer

  Val and Amanda: 1993 ~ 2013 ~ 2021 Anniversaries tend to be marked in years, but each anniversary arrives after a steady series of moments that pull us through each set of 365 days. If you’re lucky, as I am in my relationship with Val, then those many moments are ones of happiness and contentment more than anything else.  This year marks our 28th anniversary as a couple, eight of those legally married. According to Google’s calculations, we have shared more than fourteen million moments together — that’s a lot of moments (or minutes), by anyone’s count.  We are not as young as we used to be, but the fundamentals of our connection are not reliant on speed. Our advantage has always been core strength of shared values, deep appreciation of each other’s mind and intellect, and gratitude for the innate generosity we each have towards others — and that we have towards each other, too.  We have talked and laughed our way through the years, along the way raising cats...

Lake Winnipeg August 2021 I have spent the last few days with my body on the shores of Lake Winnipeg but with my mind sailing the biggest oceans of the world. I have travelled far in my imagination and I am the better for it.  Getting ourselves to the cottage is always a bit of an ordeal. Food planning. Clothes for a variety of weather possibilities. Ensuring the cat doesn't go to ground before we can get her into the car. But eventually we're on our way, heading to the little bit of rural wilderness we have come to know and love.  This past weekend, once settled in, I took myself on an ocean voyage with a group of women who were the first-ever all-female crew to participate in the Whitbread Round the World Race . Back in 1989, they performed what many (men) had said was simply impossible: crew together, work together, succeed together. "Women will never manage it," they said. But manage it they did.  I was transported into a new and exciting world of yachts, wild ...

Retirement is like an onion. Sometimes it can make you cry. Bike paths are a bit like that, too. They can bring you to tears before they ever bring you any joy.  Let me explain.  My neighbourhood has new bike paths being built on one of the major east/west avenues. Great news, say the bike riders, whose options for safe riding are being expanded. Bah humbug, say the car drivers, whose lanes and, thus, whose options for speed and parking are being reduced. As the lanes were being constructed, I would drive down that avenue and wonder how on earth we would ever adjust to the disappearance of the left-turn lane and how we would ever put up with the concomitant increase in time to get through a major intersection. In addition, there is now a 4-way stop further into the neighbourhood that, previously, was clear sailing for cars heading west or east. Oh the travails of change on the road!  However, as I have seen the bike lane taking increased shape on the street and I have ...

The pandemic pounds I have gained make me grateful for having been lazy in sorting through my closet. With a bit of extra weight on my frame, I am glad for the extra few inches of waistband my (formerly too large) summer capris are giving me.  I think quite a lot about clothes. Not because I enjoy shopping for them; indeed, the very opposite. I have written before  about how much I loathe clothes shopping: So many options on the racks and so few viable choices for me.   I want comfort and common sense, natural fibres and classic lines. No plunging neck lines, short hem lines or narrow pant legs for me. My body is made for living and moving, so I need my clothes to fit my form. I have no interest in stuffing or cinching myself into a piece of clothing or having it expose more of me than it does cover. Some women might want that; fine. I do not.  But some women have no choice in the matter. Have you followed the brouhaha about the Norwegian beach handball uniform cont...

The corporate top-performer cruise was not unfolding brilliantly, as the weather was cool and the seas were rough. Nonetheless, the evening event had been very successful and the next day’s business meeting had started on time, but it went side-ways during the coffee break. The servers simply couldn’t keep up with the (hung-over) participants’ need for the hot beverage. An executive member complained to management and then shared a lesson with us that I have remembered to this day. He said, It doesn’t matter how great yesterday’s event was, if today’s event is sub-par for whatever reason, yesterday’s success is obliterated by today’s relative disaster. While a cruise line not serving coffee fast enough ranks hardly even as a first-world problem, the lesson taken from it can be applied universally, I think: One’s good-performance credit margin is a fickle measure of success on which only the foolhardy rely.  To wit, our recent experience with a local vet clinic.  A while back, ...

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 ...