Flamily

That Place In The Sun

December 2, 2009

I’ve seen a lot of the world. I’ve traveled across Canada, and the continental U.S., and parts of Mexico, and most of Western Europe. I lived in Spain for two years. I’ve taken the train from Barcelona to Brindisi and a boat to Greece and  had a misadventure on a Greek island. I’ve canoed up [...]

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Thankitude

November 27, 2009

I’m Canadian, so I celebrated Thanksgiving weeks ago, but still, it’s hard to ignore all the cheerful goodwill and gratitude in the air when American Thanksgiving rolls around. Also, the pie. That’s all anyone has been able to talk about this week: PIE, pumpkin or otherwise. And stuffing and turkeys and liquor. Oh, and gratitude. [...]

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Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Monsters

October 29, 2009

A few weeks ago, I said this about Hollywood’s defense of Roman Polanski: What message does it send to our sons when the rape of a young girl is dismissed as something that is not that bad? What message does it send to the would-be Donalds of the world? To the would-be Roman Polanskis? To [...]

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Happiness Is A Small Girl In A Rock Band

October 5, 2009

More evidence that my (almost) four year-old is ten kerpillion times more bad-ass than I’ll ever be: I know. She puts you to shame, too, doesn’t she? (For the record, she can last about 35 seconds longer than I can playing Nine Inch Nails on Rock Band. By the time she’s five I expect to [...]

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Letters

September 15, 2009

A friend called me, last week, after I’d written about struggling through the process of sorting through some of my father’s papers. “After my aunt died,” she said, “after we went through all of her things, I immediately went home and dug up all the old love letters from old boyfriends and notes and letters [...]

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Here Be Monsters

August 11, 2009

Today, I went into my father’s home, a thing that I was afraid to do. I don’t have words yet to explain that fear, nor do I have words to explain – to narrate – the experience of overcoming that fear. This is such a complicated story. Or, perhaps, it’s not. A father, well-loved, dies, [...]

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Miles To Go

August 9, 2009

Yesterday, we drove – my mother, my sister and I – through the hot, dusty valley toward my father’s home, and we fought. A wrong word here, a raised eyebrow there, a tinder box of raw, snapping nerves and the flicker of a hint of a suggestion of an accusation, a tiny lick of angry [...]

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Him

July 31, 2009

I don’t say much about him, here. I wrote something about that, once: I don’t say much about my husband here, on the blog. He appears, now and again, a peripheral character in the stories that I tell. Sometimes, rarely, he comes to centre stage, as an antagonist or foil, in some adventure or misadventure [...]

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Roadkill

July 15, 2009

It was a mother duck and her three baby ducks, and I was pretty sure that we were going to kill them. It wasn’t so much the impending massacre that made me scream. Nor was it the fact that the baby ducks – tiny mottled bundles of matted fluff – were so adorable. I’ve seen [...]

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Epitaph For A Grandpa, Loved.

June 28, 2009

Requiescat in pace, Grandpa. You were loved and will be loved, always. Always. ******** Life goes on, and though I’m stumbling a bit from grief, I am keeping moving. Literally. To the east, and then onward, backward, to the west. We would have visited and kissed and hugged and loved and overwhelmed Grandpa when we [...]

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