Where There’s Smoke

  My husband is reading The Road. You know, the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel where the world is blanketed in ash and everything is burnt or burning. It’s a fitting setting for the situation in Western Canada this summer. To the south of us, 30-some kilometres away, a fire is burning, which a friend of […]

Homecoming

I’ve been back home for just over a week. So far, 2015 has been a bit of a whirlwind. You know this if you regularly read my blog, or follow me on Facebook, but I spent January and February at my mom’s place, helping ride the waves in the wake of my stepfather’s death, came […]

A Poem from (for) Sage Hill

This morning, the magpie took me out of my dream. Squawking and stalking the grass under the hydro stand where the owl sat, hooting, hotly seeking a mate. I was not anywhere in the west at that moment, my mind watching the smoulder of a stump turning to ash on the edge of Lake Huron, […]

The Land That’s In Our Blood

My husband remembers his grandmother telling him that when she moved east to northern Ontario from the wide, bald prairie, she would climb trees. I know why now. Born and raised on a farmstead in Saskatchewan, she mustn’t have seen many. Located south of Regina, this is the landscape that Anne Lazurko writes about in […]