Harvest Moon
It’s the season of Autumn when the legendary Harvest Moon turns and burns bright orange in the southern sky – September 19 this year. That’s an important date in our family because it’s my granddaughter’s birthday. She’ll be six. Isabella was born September 19, a day after the birthday of her Grandma, known in our […]
Deerbank Farm
It is a glorious winter morning in Manitoba. The sun rose far south of where it comes up in summer. The wind is blowing enough to make the tops of pine trees surrounding the yard sway to the sigh of a breeze making its way through the branches. The fields are white. It was warm […]
Aches and Pains
I vowed long ago that I would never, in old age, bore friends with talk of my aches and pains and doctor visits. My physical condition is important to me, but methinks not to others. Aging zaps the life out of you. Your systems shut down and you slow down even more. Your hearing fades; […]
Fall Supper
I went to a Fall Supper in the Community Hall of Dominion City one Sunday evening a few years back. Dominion City is not a city at all. It’s a village of barely 500 people on the Canadian prairie a dozen miles north of the Canada-US border, a farming community with just a few recreational […]
Gig At Elmwood MB
I played a gig one Sunday afternoon in the Elmwood MB Church of Winnipeg where I grew up. I sat one Sunday morning about a month ago in a pew in that church with my cousins Lloyd and Kathy Penner after not having been there in years. I noticed in the bulletin an announcement that […]
My 83rd Birthday
At 83, I can still think and walk. What a wonder! Two or three generations ago people died in their 50s and 60s, and earlier than that they died younger. Today life expectancy in Canada is 80 for men and 84 for women. So I’m three years past the expectancy date. Not bad eh? I […]
Garage Cleaning
Cleaning the garage was one of my greatest challenges because there were memories I had to let go. It was not just a matter of making three discard piles – electronic recyclables, clothing and garbage. If there had been no feelings involved, I could have done the job quickly. But there was more to it […]
John Coltrane
We went on a modern-day pilgrimage to the church of St John Coltrane on Fillmore Street in San Francisco one mid-August Sunday. John Coltrane was a guru whose claim to fame in the Christian milieu was composition and performance of his liturgy for saxophone called “Love Supreme”. He composed it midway through his musical career […]
Ste. Elizabeth
Life on Deerbank Farm near Morris, a prairie town of 3,000 in the middle of Canada, is vastly different than it was in California’s Silicon Valley. My pace in the last lane was still in the fast lane in San Jose, but on the farm it has slowed. In the Valley I was surrounded by […]