September 14, 2021
Gleanings
- My heart goes out to Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend with the swollen testicles.
- I feel helpless and lost and angry. Screaming into a pillow would feel great about now, and I might do that later, but as a balm, this morning when I got back from a walk around the neighbourhood, I made cookies.
- what does it mean to be fake? to be unreal? to live inside a different and brighter world, where good and bad are clear and immediate?
- I hate being a data point on someone’s learning curve.
- This is the story about a woman who has so far made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed but who has been changed by now in more ways than she will be able to set down in a simple blog post on the internet.
- Today I am delighted to be writing about Margery Sharp, who has somehow flown beneath my radar for far too many years. And this in spite of her being the author behind one of my favourite childhood movies—The Rescuers.
- What if the decision is one to experiment? To play? To fear, and do it anyway? Heck, to fail?
- James is back on campus this week for the first time since February 2020. He returned to a time capsule covered in a layer of fine dust. On the wall above his desk he found print-outs of a newly minted three-year-old and a kindergartener just learning to ride a two-wheeler and no pictures at all of the baby who hadn’t been born and is now marching herself into daycare.
- The beast in Red X – a barghest, a mythical creature that traces its origins back to northern England – is the spirit of a 19th-century homosexual now haunting Toronto’s gay village, where a succession of people have disappeared without a trace.
- I didn’t expect to find myself sitting in the Urgent Care department at the Hotel Dieu Hospital a mere three days into our arrival in Kingston. Who would?
- It takes character to wait well—not usually my strong suit.
- Flowers and poetry, wine and celebration, sweeping and polishing. These are ways we remember our dead.
- In fact, simply having the piano in the house is a source of incredible pleasure.
- I went sailing for chrissakes. The kids were left to fend for themselves for dinner. Can you even believe that? Guess what? They were totally fine. And I was even better than that.
- How wonderful to exclaim “I exist like this and I’m actually quite ok with it!” Such a simple sentence and yet for so long, so impossible to utter.
- Everything is connected, isn’t it? The hearths uncovered on Orkney, their spiral pots broken.
