Saturday Photo: The Path to Thanksgiving and a New Government
The leaves are beginning to turn colour here, and the sky is the brilliant blue that always makes me think of my mother quoting Helen Hunt Jackson’s poem about “October’s…
Mary Soderstrom
Saturday Photo: Roman Road and Road through Time
Here’s a photo of the Roman road at Conimbriga in central Portugal. It’s only one of the many roads I’m thinking about now, as I go back to the preliminary…
Up Next: Road through Time
Pleased to say that I’ve just signed a contract with the University of Regina Press to publish my next non-fiction book Road through Time, probably in Spring 2017. It’s about…
Saturday Photo: Dancing Grass
Just because it’s another nice weekend…
Required Reading for the Election Campaign: The Best Laid Plans by Terri Fallis
In my other life I lead book discussion groups in Montreal-area libraries, and, knowing that a federal election was coming up, I put Terry Fallis’s The Best Laid Plans on…
Saturday Photo: Cosmos, the End of Summer, Climate Change
I’ve always loved these sun-loving flowers. Cosmos are the stars of many gardens around here at this point in the cycle of the seasons. I suspect they won’t be so…
Saturday Photo: End of Summer and the Spiders are Busy
An Anyone who’s read Charlotte’s Web or gone walking early on a September morning knows that spiders are especially busy this time of year. This web was glowing in the…
Saturday Photo: Runners and Rainbows
The last long weekend of the summer, and the weather is wonderful here. No rain in sight, but I did find this rainbow when out walking this morning. The runners…
Saturday Photo: Back to School
This week Jeanne started kindergarten–hard to believe that she’s now five. Like millions of children in North America, she’s said good by to summer, and gone skippingly into a new…
The New Normal: How Social Networks Make "Migrating" Possible
Last year a photo of African migrants holding cell phones up in Djibouti won the World Press Photo prize. The men were trying to pick up a good signal in…
Saturday Photo: Tomatoes and the Hundred MIle Diet
August is a month of many pleasures, not the least being the arrival in markets of real tomatoes. Most of the years I don’t buy them because they don’t taste…
Saturday Photo: The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test–Or What the Rich Drive
Not that I’m going to make fun of the environmental concerns of these folks who are shown powering up their two electric cars, but I mean, don’t low gas-guzzlers and…
Saturday Photo: Proof the Bees Were out
We may end up with more pears this year than the squirrels can eat! Last year we had perhaps a half dozen but this year there are lots. I’ve started…
Saturday Photo: Orange Wave…
This is from a photo I took of a clementine back in 2011, just after the amazing sweep of Quebec by the New Democratic Party. Election night was amazing–nobody believed…
The Only Reason for an Early Election Call Is in Order to Spend More on Advertising
Don’t get me wrong: there have been times in my life when I just loved political campaigns. Hard to explain, but the kind of rush a political junkie gets after…
Saturday Photo: Resilience and that Other Goldilocks Planet
There’s been a lot in the news this week about the discovery of a planet that might be hospitable to life as we know it. The scientists have amused themselves,…
Saturday Photo: Street Furniture, or Living Outdoors
Didn’t have my camera with me the other night, but Thom, his mother, Grandpa and I made an after-supper visit to a local artisanal ice cream place. It was a…
Saturday Photo: Cemetery Gates over Time
The gate on the north side of Mount Royal Cemetery are just about finished. The stonework was completed before the snow fell last winter, but it’s been some time for…
Night Hawks in the Night
Not to make too much about it, but when I woke up about 4 a.m. to open the windows after a thunderstorm I lay in bed listening to nighthawks flying…
Saturday Photo: Where are the Nighthawks and the Ducks?
This photo was taken a couple of years ago at a pond in Parc Beaubien, a rather civilized neighborhood park near us. For several years ducks had been nesting at…