My favourite chair is a soft one. And an old one. I love to sink deep into its comfortable arms and rest my head on its high-cushioned back. Then roll up the footstool, stretch out my feet, take a deep breath, and relax. Sometimes I sip coffee and sometimes I […]
Columnists
There are a lot of black birds but not all of them are Blackbirds. We have quite a few birds in the same family, including orioles, meadowlarks, and the bobolink. But we also have three black birds which are true Blackbirds, and can be quite confusing to the amateur birder. […]
Sometimes I’m tempted to shed responsibility. I crave a distant time and place when my parents told me how to spend my money, and my college advisor told me what to choose for a college major. When my doctor told me exactly what to do about my health, and my […]
How can you live without time? Or more accurately, how can you live without a time “piece”? That’s the question I had to ask myself many times last week high in the Colorado Rockies. To begin with, my wristwatch kept perfect time, faithfully signalling one activity after another. But then […]
Well men, we’ve had the biscuit. Done. Kaput. We’re obsolete. We may be wanted but soon we won’t be needed. First a little background. For hundreds of centuries, two genders had to be in intimate contact for reproduction. Men were the hunters and warriors. Women tended the hearth and nurtured […]
There are probably more stories about the wolverine than any other mammal in America. It is supposed to have amazing strength, be extremely intelligent, and have a very ugly disposition.Whether these stories are all true or not, no one really knows. The wolverine is the shadow in the deep woods, […]
Amber was born 100 years after her great-grandmother (Amber’s my granddaughter). As I watch her grow, I wonder, “What will her world be like?” Amber’s great-grandmother was born in 1896, when the average Canadian lived 47 years. For most, electricity was unknown. Cars were toys of the rich. Airplanes hadn’t […]
It was a gray day. That I have to admit. And yet, the grayness wasn’t at the top of my mind. It was the spring of the year in 1949, and I was walking across the northern Indiana campus I had so grown to love. In a way I felt […]
Oops, let me rephrase that. Daylight Saving Time is great. Getting that extra hour of sunlight in the evening does marvels for the soul gripped with the last vestiges of the winter blahs–even if this winter wasn’t particularly long, or cold, or plagued by repeated snow shovelling. What I detest […]
The woodcock is a funny-looking bird–hard to see, hard to shoot, and with a lot of its sense organs out of place. The woodcock is a mottled brown colour, much like that of dead leaves. You can almost step on him before he roars up in your face and disappears […]
“Grimpons, grimpons,” sings the French professor in the 1960s Disney film, “In Search of the Castaways.” All the while smiling, and making you feel for sure that anything is possible. Anything at all–if you just keep climbing. The word, says actor Maurice Chevalier, means “let’s climb. It is the French […]
At last, Virginia has her red convertible. Except for one detail, that is. The red convertible is green.The picture came in the mail today. There Virginia sits, a young and perky woman in a brand new luxury convertible with sporty tires. And the only touch of red in the picture […]
