Uniting for Women’s Rights

November 13, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The Underground Railroad was run by abolitionists and helped enslaved blacks flee to freedom in Northern States and Canada. Project 2025 wants to ban abortion nationwide, and make it difficult for women to access health care out of state. Is it time to band together in support of Woman’s Rights? Abortion is legal in Canada. […]

Can’t Breathe

November 6, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

He put the people in place to undermine human rights, and give him immunity from crimes. He promised to end free and fair elections. He is arming himself with those who will do his bidding. America was warned of the danger. From up here in Canada, I wonder if this is how Rome’s neighbours felt […]

Patterns and Progress

September 4, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

I chose not to drink having grown up in a family of alcoholics. I wanted my children to have the experience of a parent who was present and predictable. It was an ideal, and certainly not perfect. My children, a generation removed from the trauma, choose to socialize with a drink. I’ve never seen any […]

War – Not War

July 7, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

Somedays, words elude me. I want to say the war continues in Ukraine, but ‘war’ is not the right word. It suggests two-sided, as in a dispute that has escalated and come to blows. What happened in Ukraine is not that. It is an act of terrorism and greed at its most heinous. Ric and […]

Learning What Matters

February 21, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

Parents brought children to the occupation in Ottawa. They set up camp on a main thoroughfare, in front of apartment buildings and retail shops, and obstructed the lives of others. They honked their big rig horns, left their diesel engines running day and night, and set up barbeques, and food tents, and bouncy castles, and […]

How To Start a Cult*

February 16, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

Find an issue people are able to get passionate about, say, child trafficking. 2. Share information and increase the outrage. Start with facts, but insert the occasional manufactured story to test the waters. Maybe try Pizza Gate. 3. Increase paranoia by suggesting that so much is hidden from the public. Again, use actual cases, for […]

Don’t Take It Personally

February 9, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

Spurred on by my mother, I left home at the age of seventeen. It was the right thing for all involved, but when my parents replaced me with two cats, I couldn’t help but feel slighted: I’m deadly allergic to cats. When my mother-in-law spiked a meal with milk, hoping to prove that food allergies […]

Self-Portrait and Mountains

March 7, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

Many moons ago, I won an award for my artistic talents and was immediately counselled to drop the art program. That same year, I wrote my first novel, and after it was graded, I burnt it. I wasn’t meant to be creative, I decided, and obediently signed up for advanced math and other academic subjects. […]

“Before We Were Yours”: A Review

July 24, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

Before We Were Yours, by Lisa Wingate introduces the shameful story of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an organization run by Georgia Tann, a woman who made money by abducting poor children from their homes and selling them into adoption. Wingate’s novel imagines what life would be like for siblings taken from their homes and […]

We Are Called

January 29, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

My husband is googling “The Declaration of Independence”. I am just trying to breathe: a tempest of emotions, thoughts, and fears attacking rationality. I try to think back to another time when I felt such terror…to reassure myself that this will all pass…but I think about my son who recently converted to Muslim for the […]

Sun Certainty

Clouds bundleshift and foldcotton strata Trees huddleconfidence incommunity Emotions stackone on anotherco-mingling hues Beneath layersan eternal glowsun certainty. (First published April 2021. Image my own)

Peachy Keen

Not Everything Is Defined by Age

As a child, I knew no limits, setting out on adventures with never a fear for how I’d find my way back home. Now, nestled in my home, I limit myself to certainties, fearful of risks. Some days, I wonder about that child, and how it would feel to wander freely, and it makes me […]