My Father’s Garden
Father’s Day is a special time to honour our dads. My father is in heaven and I’m left with only memories…like his garden. When spring arrived each year, my father would head for the backyard, rake and shovel in hand ready to unearth the “sleeping beauties,” as he would call his roses. As a young teenager on the threshold of discovering boys, I had no interest in his prickly flowers, wanting only to avoid the bees that rested on their petals to drink their nectar. I...
Read MoreMothering: the Pleasing Punishment that Women Bear
Several years ago—back in the mid 70s!—I borrowed a book from our local library in London, Ontario entitled, Most of Us are Mainly Mothers by Carol Bartholomew (1965)…a pleasantly semi-serious book on parenting. From cover to cover, the author offered tantalizing ideas “for other mothers in the hope that they will be less frazzled and frantic.” A few suggestions were completely off the wall, but most of them made sense. For example: When packing a lunch, be sure to include something...
Read MoreIt Starts With “L” Ends With “E”…
…and in between are “O” and “V.” It’s the time of year when hearts and cupids are prevalent, chick flicks and love songs fill the airwaves and we are surrounded by—perhaps inundated with—“Hallmark’s Season of Love.” And it got me thinking… How does one define love? We use the word in our daily conversation with little thought to the depth of its meaning. We write a letter and casually sign it, Love. Often out of habit, we use love to express our feelings, like...
Read MoreVisiting Never Never Land
Do you dream…I mean really dream? I’m not referring to those daydreaming moments when you drift off into la-la land during a sermon at church or when you’re enroute from point A to point C and you don’t remembering passing point B. And I’m not referring to the dream of winning the multimillion dollar lottery or the dream a mother dreams when she holds her firstborn child, tucks her children into bed at night or embraces her grandchildren. (That kind of dream is filled with an emotion...
Read MoreThe ‘Death’ of a Hero
Lance Armstrong said it all in his interview with Oprah Winfrey this past week: He lied. He cheated. His narcissistic behaviour “bullied and betrayed people who supported and believed in me.” Despite believing he was “invincible,” he brought shame to his Livestrong Foundation and has been dropped by all his sponsors. At one point, Oprah asked him if he hadn’t have been ‘caught’ (via the fallout of the confession of a former team member) would he have confessed. He admitted...
Read MoreTruth is a Rare Thing – Part I
I love to write! It’s a passion that has grown over the past fifteen or twenty years, and my only regret is that it didn’t happen sooner. If my high school English teacher still had his feet on this earth’s soil and if he learned that I was a published author or that I’d dare make the statement that I love to write…well, Mr. Johnston would probably laugh outrageously! Why? Because it wasn’t my passion in school. Oh, I liked the mechanics of writing, the sentence structure,...
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