Family Dinners

April 16, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

In response to my middle daughter cutting off contact, and once I got past the hurt and humiliation, I decided that it is closeness, not distance, I want to harbour in my family. Hence the family dinners. Once a month, same Sunday, I invite our kids to a home cooked meal. My husband suggested that […]

Postcard to Optimism from the Land of Obsessions

April 9, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

Clouds, like the hands of some higher being, hold up the sun, obscuring her radiance. I’ve travelled this road before – a dirt path, unfettered by progress – where tombstones mark time and trees bear witness. A mist covers the land, and I have not yet deciphered the omen in it. Still, I will push […]

One Is Not The Sum of the Whole

April 2, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

The lesson I learned, post divorce, is that letting one person dictate my well-being was ludicrous. Of course, it took me a while to get to that understanding, as I had poured all my hopes and dreams into that one man for seventeen years. I am reminded of this lesson today, with the current threats […]

Travel Woes and Goes

March 26, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

Well we made it home, but our luggage continues to travel…apparently, it is lost in space. My body is grateful to be back in the comfort of our own home. Travelling with health and mobility issues takes its toll. This trip proved more challenging than we imagined, and it was wonderful at the same time. […]

On Babies and Planes

March 19, 2025.Reading time less than 1 minute.

We are slipping away Tuesday, on a plane to the Caribbean. Will be there by the time this post goes to publication. It’s our close friends 50th wedding anniversary and we are honoured to help them celebrate. In the meantime, our fifth granddaughter is due to arrive any day, and the kids have reminded me […]

This Poem is Banned

March 12, 2025.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Historically marginalizeddisability biased –a privileged minority Women’s inequalitysocioeconomic –oppression excluded Cultural relevanceunderrepresented – diversity victim Ethnicity, gender (female)sense of belonging –male-domination systemic Indigenous communityinstitutional trauma –polarization hate speech Advocacy banned (Every word in this poem, except banned, is from the list of words forbidden in research proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation (USA) as […]

Red-bellied Woodpecker

March 5, 2025.Reading time less than 1 minute.

I try not to pick favourites amongst the many birds that grace our backyard feeders, but there are just some that always manage to take my breath away. The red-bellied woodpecker is one of them. This beauty is anxious and tends to fly away at any movement from inside the house, so I have patiently […]

Broadening my focus

February 26, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

I was aiming for the bird, my fingers wrapped around the lens, ready to zoom in, when the scene spoke to me. “Sometimes”, I reminded myself, “you need to look at the larger picture.” The larger picture, in this case, was stunning, almost as if the sky had a message it didn’t want me to […]

Three years

February 19, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

“Did you believe that war would happen?” We are sitting around chatting with some Ukrainian friends. It’s three years since the war in Ukraine started and we are remembering how unreal it all felt in the beginning. Surely Putin was just putting his troops through a military drill, we all thought/ hoped, when the tanks […]

Reading is not enough…

February 12, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

Our 2 1/2 year old granddaughter can read. On a recent visit, her older cousin carried her about the house testing her skills with random bottles and things she would not have seen before. She read them all, with total nonchalance while we looked on amazed. One thing she read was a Christmas greeting: May […]