Category: Essay
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Bijou and the Philosopher Tree
Like an ancient tree, a story has an inevitable internal logic that the writer must find and follow.
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A shiny future
A blog without content is like a car during lockdown: parked week after week in the garage, seeing no action but from the mice running in and out its grille to store kernels of dog food in a thick layer on the engine filter. (Thanks to JL for this scenario.) …
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Why I love Twitter
As you’d see from the activity on this website’s sidebar, I’ve been living on Twitter for the past many months. For seven years I’ve been on that platform, but barely present until November of 2020. Until then, I didn’t see how it served me, I used it badly as a…
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The black animal
A black animal bounds across a snowy rural road and disappears into the trees. Identification of this large, leaping mammal is not easy!
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Life’s little brown jobs
I love being at home. It’s not that anything remarkable happens there. It’s that a succession of unremarkable moments, when truly inhabited, turn out to be quite beautiful. When I have time around my actions to feel the rhythm of the day unfolding, I also have time to observe the…
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Me and Mrs. Jones
My vehicles have names. What’s a vehicle? Anything with wheels, that I take to go on adventures. Car (Vivi, Mattie), bicycle (Genny, Francie, Gary)… Lawnmower? It’s only since moving to my little two acres, with a big patch of cleared greenery to mow, and a Greenworks battery-powered mower to do…
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Waking to the world
Last month, I moved. From a 14-year sojourn in a house in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, with a large vegetable garden, mature trees, and friendly neighbours, within walking distance of shopping centres, bars, and the library, from this place that had always treated me well but always felt too jangled…