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Remembering my father’s hands
My Dad died recently. Not yesterday, but earlier this year, after a long battle with cancer. When we had the Celebration of Life last month, when the weather was warm enough to, my mother put out books of photos of some of the things Dad had created in his life. Dad had always been an avid gardener and general woodworker, but beyond that, so the story goes, he didn’t have much creativity. And he certainly couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler. But around about the time I was an early teenager, he started taking duck carving classes. This… Read more…
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Busy as a beaver
If you subscribe to my newsletter (hint hint!), you’ll already have heard a snippet of our beaver tales. For the rest of you, let me catch you up to date. My family has a cottage on a lovely lake in the Kawartha region of Ontario. It’s part of the Trent-Severn Waterway, and sits just to the west of Lock 32, the first lock in the system, a scenic 386 km long canal system connecting Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario. Fun fact, if you’re of a certain age, you’ll know this spot, made famous by the Tragically Hip. Some folks think Bobcaygeon is the… Read more…
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How much change can one person take?!
They say when you retire that you shouldn’t make big life decisions. You know, ride it out a while and see where things settle. Yeah, that wasn’t what I did. In January 2025, I announced at work that I would retire at the end of July. It was not a secret that I was planning to go soon and my boss asked for lots of time so there’d be a good period of overlap with my successor (that’s another story!). So that started the countdown clock. In May, I got engaged to the handsome ginger-haired man I’d been seeing. His… Read more…
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Adventues in dentistry – ouch!
My teeth are crap. Always have been, always will be. It’s led to continued issues as an adult, despite twice a day brushing, flossing, mouthwash, the works. I’ve had crowns, root canals, extractions and for a long time my dentist, who I actually quite like, and who would probably have preferred to replace all my silver fillings at once, made a deal with me that we’d take it one tooth at a time as the amalgam needed replacing. This helped me spread out the expense and probably prevented a me from having a permanently sore jaw. I never understood, as… Read more…
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When the words get stuck
Someone asked me once if I had a routine of writing, or if the words just came when they came. I’ve done both – and neither, over the years. When I started writing my first novel, Another Glass of Tea, I had a full time job and it kept waking me up at 2 a.m. I tried to ignore it, but it kept happening. Eventually, I realized that when it happened, I had to get up and write. It could be 10 minutes, half an hour, or a marathon stretch that saw the circles under my eyes grow darker and the amount… Read more…
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Juice to the rescue?
Have you ever had cherry juice? No, not just the leftovers after a bowl of cherries for dessert, but a full glass of the brilliant red liquid that just hits the spot? Me neither, until I spent a year in Türkiye. Until then, I’d been brought up on apple and orange juice. Grapefruit juice or tomato juice were for fancy occasions. But that year, I learned about tiny bottles of peach juice and apricot juice and yes, sour cherry juice – or vişne suyu, as I learned to call it. After school, a gang of us would go to the… Read more…
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For the love of reading: my favourite childhood reads
When one of my sons was small, he always had his nose in a book – in honesty, they both did. But this one had an overzealous phys ed teacher tell his older brother that he shouldn’t be reading so much at recess. Me? I figured if a six year old wanted to read Harry Potter at recess, I’d just let him. He’s still a voracious reader – much as his mother is, and it got me thinking recently about the books I loved in my childhood. I still have some of them, although I admit that others got donated when… Read more…
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Reflecting on the beginning, five years on
It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years this month since I truly began my journey as an author. Cutting the cords! Covid, with its travel restrictions and all its unknowns, had scuttled the planned sabbatical for 2020, but even with the pandemic still very much in play, I threw caution to the wind, listened to the whispers in my dreams and cut the cords to my work computer and phone. I still remember the rise in blood pressure when I closed my office door. People asked me if I was really leaving it all behind. Definitely, I was.… Read more…
