Story Cake

Forced perspective

September 4, 2022

One tree drops a walnut just a breath before my head would have been there. I pick it up – green, cracked open by the hard path – and wonder at measurements of time. Permanence, confinement, illusion, the cross-currents of loss and gain, the rhythm of my breath.

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Irish Rules

August 14, 2022

Irish Rules, hey Maggie? Okay then I think I’ll make some of my own up, since Grandma was born there.

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Earth Day, 2am

April 22, 2021

Fragile, gentle pieces survive intact and still beautiful in the sunlight, half a world away from the little village where they were made eighty years ago.

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particularities

April 1, 2021

I am not been feeling generous with humans of late. Maybe because I’ve read and signed and shared more petitions than I can count over the last week. Myanmar’s big-oil supported military shooting at citizens, Trans Canada Pipelines & TC Energy’s horribly distorted value systems, the fact that we only protect TEN PERCENT of our […]

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The Ladies of Laurel Street

March 11, 2021

I was seventeen; what did I know? In my own mind, very very little. And yet, astonishing things happened that still echo across forty years. We compare notes, my old friends and I, just recently re-connected after decades of life and distance. I’m fascinated by the fragments of us that have shown up on the […]

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Before the Plumber

February 19, 2021

5am mid February, 1.25 hours from the Canadian-US border. Early early pre-dawn sky looks like a dull ultramarine red, slightly warmer and washed out along the eastern horizon. At the corresponding time in the evening – post sunset, the sky is deep intense indigo, flecked with the one or two stars strong enough to shine […]

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Recall; the Muppets

January 14, 2021

It’s taken me five hours to find the inner stillness required to properly enjoy a pot of tea, damnit. Twitchy, grumpy and unsettled since Tuesday evening. Yesterday I went to bed at 7pm and rose at 1:30am of course, doing my best to find serenity* while writing and drinking coffee. At 6am I took myself […]

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Home to roost

December 28, 2020

A tradition when moving into a new space is to go to the closest Walmart and find something living in the plant section that I can rescue. This was the living green thing I found in a shoved together stack of ‘special buy’ tropicals in the middle of a box store aisle in March 2019. […]

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The Stories come seeking

March 7, 2020

Stories that want to be told come in through the eastern window in the morning, or sometimes down onto the roof with the rain. There’s a beautiful one that follows me everywhere I go now, about the water that washes the eastern shore on Georgian Bay and how that is like, and also not like […]

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Cat, processing, news.

February 8, 2020

This sixteen-year-old cat I foster spends her first week here under a blanket. She drinks water and sleeps. Processing, it feels like. The loss of her former foster dad, who had to move into long-term care. The four days she spent at a shelter full of a full spectrum of other cats, all negotiating and […]

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tea lights

December 22, 2019

This surprising year. This morning’s write is populated by a surprising jumble of images – the giant blue Christmas bulbs on the giant tree at the Distillery District’s outdoor Christmas market. A market that featured a Christmas Angel who wandered through big fat snowflakes and the crowds, occasional a capella singers, a snow-covered booth selling […]

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