It’s been a busy week and I’ve been heads-down at my desk for a good chunk of it. Putting together a Friday’s Fave Five post reminds me of the good things that also made up the substance of this week. Time spent in the beautiful Wakamow Valley. There’s a lot to explore and I look
We sit in the sanctuary of the beautiful old St. Andrews church (originally built in 1912, rebuilt in the early 1960s after a devastating fire) where my parents were married 75 years ago. We’re here for a sold out spring performance by the Moose Jaw Community Choir. I imagine my parents standing at the front
It’s another beautiful sunshiny day in Moose Jaw and Gerry suggests a short walk. There’s still snow on the ground in places, remnants from last weeks storm, and there’s a bottleneck at the front door while decisions about footwear are made. He opts for Sorrels I slip my feet into Sketchers, refusing to don boots
In the morning, we go out to run errands, and when we get home and I open the door leading from the garage into the laundry room, I expect to see my tiny dog Murphy waiting to greet me. Every time I get ready to go out, I pause, asking myself if I need to
I spend a silent and solitary day at home: writing, reading, potting flowers, staking tomatoes, and watering plants. But it is that moment when I’m standing barefoot on the grass in the backyard watering the tea garden and breathing in the gentle scent of lilacs that is, perhaps, the sweetest. I drop the hose, walk
We’re almost a third of the way through this year. I’ve slogged my way through most of it, lifting one heavy, mud-caked foot after the other, in a fugue-like state. I can’t say why. This is life. It’s not always mountain top and it’s not always valley, sometimes it’s mile after mile of flat nothing-to-see
Over the course of the millennia, all these multitudes of ancestors, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time—to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have
This—the landscape of home—would lure me back with its winds and desperate clouds and endless expanse . . . Linda Joy Myers, Song of the Plains, A Memoir of Family, Secrets, and Silence The map on the navigation system in the car is void of anything. There are no lines indicating roads or railway tracks;
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon We arrive in Moose Jaw, the city I spent my childhood in and, after
In the summertime my thoughts turn toward the place I consider my heart's home: a tiny hamlet on the Saskatchewan prairie where my grandma raised her three children alone after the sudden death of her husband, and where she remained until her death. I can't say exactly why this place holds such a special place