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I love fall
I love fall. Crisp sunny days. The crunch of leaves under your feet. The first Macintosh apple. Watching squirrels pack away enough food for winter. Skunks ambling up the boulevard. Well, maybe not that last one, but you get the picture. I have plenty of friends who soak in every hot humid summer day, and mourn the beginning of fall, but I’m in that minority that celebrates that first day that it’s cool enough to wear an extra layer and drink a cup of tea that seconds as a hand-warmer. They love their shorts and tank tops. I yearn for… Read more…
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Changing with the times
Yesterday, as I was driving home, I saw my first flock of starlings this fall. They were dancing across the sky, magically swooping and twirling as one single unit. I’ve always been astounded at how birds do that. I know that geese, flying in formation, take turns as leader, but a flock of birds doesn’t seem to have the same, as they morph into different shapes, and double back again and again, never leaving a single member behind. When I saw this, I was coming home from a choral rehearsal, and the similarities between the birds acting as one, and… Read more…
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Are you happy
I’m reading a book called The Happiness Curve. It posits that our 30s and 40s are the most unhappy decades of our lives – where stress lives and where things bottom out, so to speak – and that in our 50s, we regain a great deal of balance and happiness. I think there’s some truth to that, at least in my somewhat privileged Canadian experience. I have a circle of friends who are either approaching or are just past that magic half-century mark and we’re all seeing a bright shiny future coming closer and closer. We’ve been heard humming Pharrell Williams’ iconic song. Many of… Read more…
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Lighting up the sky
Beyond my garden fence last week, I was treated to an amazing light show each evening at dusk. I don’t remember seeing this many fireflies in many, many years. A few nights ago, the neighbour kids were out trying to catch them in jars, just as I did as a child. When I was in Costa Rica a couple of years ago, we experienced bioluminescence in the water. Motion caused it there, so the more we moved our kayak paddles at night, the more the phytoplankton glowed, forming magical patterns in the water. The science behind the light is bioluminescence. When… Read more…
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Three little words: Ruminating on June’s Pride Week
Three little words. Three little words have the power to change lives. Almost thirty years ago, three little words changed two lives as “I love you” was spoken and a life together was born. Fast forward fifteen years and three children later and three different words changed five lives forever. It’s the leadup to the annual Pride Parade in Toronto, and just like past years, I approach this time with a real mix of feelings. During this time each year, we read stories from around the world in the papers and heard others on TV about men (and women) who come… Read more…
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From idea to reality
When I was a little girl, I loved to play make believe. I invented stories about who I was, where I lived and who I was going to grow up to be. Times were simpler then. Black and white TV, no cell phones, no internet. Lots of time to read books, ride bikes and scribble in journals. There were woods to walk through, ponds to find frogs in, hills to toboggan down, a creek to paddle up, and lawns to stretch out on while staring up at the clouds. Sometimes I was a princess, sometimes a teacher. One day I was… Read more…
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Musings on memories
Memories are funny things. Some are so vivid it’s like they happened just yesterday. Others tease and tantalize you with barely-there wisps of something so close that you can almost grasp them – but that scatter when you try. I love looking through old photo albums. I am sure that memories are heightened – or even formed by photographs. I am sure that some of my childhood memories are only be “remembered” through family retelling plus a photo I’ve seen hundreds of times. Memories can be made sweeter – or more bitter – with the passage of time. For me,…
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Spring, where are you?
Behind my house yesterday, there was a mallard duck taking a morning snooze on the banks of the little creek that is running quickly due to the spring melt. And the day before, a sleek brown otter ambled along it. A little closer in, a pair of hungry yellow-eyed grackles greedily gobbled down seeds in a recently filled bird feeder. They’re part of a whole flock that arrived this week. They’ve temporarily scared away the songbirds – although by afternoon, I could hear them singing in the distance again — while the rest of the flock perched high up on… Read more…
