The songbirds are back: robins, meadowlarks and others – spring has come to Saskatchewan. Sometimes we can even tell it by the weather. Last Saturday was a beautiful sunny day with a high of 22° Celsius. That would be 72° in Americanese. This morning the ground was white again for several hours and the high for … Continue reading Robins and skunks on O’Malley Road
nature
Looking for sense in the scent
My wife woke me at 7:00 AM Saturday, saying "We've got to get out of the house!" When the cobwebs had cleared from my brain, my nose told me the cause of her concern. The pungent odour of skunk was permeating the house. We live in a mobile home and were aware that a skunk … Continue reading Looking for sense in the scent
Cloven hooved rodents and Irish Spring soap
I was hauling a load of garbage to the dump this morning; a pickup truck was coming my way, returning from the same errand. Shortly before we met, a mule deer went bounding across the road between us. Yes, we live in the country where the deer and the antelope roam. Way too many of … Continue reading Cloven hooved rodents and Irish Spring soap
Summer in sunny Saskatchewan
I hope everybody had a chuckle over the mistake in my last post. Two millimetres a year would come to two hundred millimetres in a century, or twenty centimetres, not two metres. If you look at the post now, you will see that I have corrected the error. Warm weather was late in arriving this … Continue reading Summer in sunny Saskatchewan
Meditations on spring in Saskatchewan
For months our yard looked barren. Spring came, the snow melted, yet the weather remained cool and we waited week after week for signs of a change. The grass was brown; the trees were dry sticks. Very hesitantly, signs of new life began to appear. Last week warm weather arrived in full force, temperatures as … Continue reading Meditations on spring in Saskatchewan
Enforced liberation?
Feminism, on the other hand, was, to the extent it presented itself as liberation, much more a liberation from nature than from convention or society. Therefore it was grimmer, unerotic, more of an abstract project, and required not so much the abolition of law but the institution of law and political activism. -Allan Bloom, The … Continue reading Enforced liberation?
Big or small, the Bible fits us all
They say that if you take a most powerful magnifying glass, and examine any flower, or even just a blade of grass, that the patterns that we see branch off into hundreds of other patterns, and they branch off into hundreds of others, and so on, and every last thing about it is as perfect … Continue reading Big or small, the Bible fits us all
Where the mosquito doth abound
. . . the Saffron-winged Meadowhawk doth also abound. I was cutting grass this afternoon and as I cut around the shrubs, I disturbed large numbers of beautiful medium-sized dragonflies with translucent saffron-coloured wings. The Saffron-winged Meadowhawks are back! We are in the third year of extraordinarily wet weather. There is much water lying in … Continue reading Where the mosquito doth abound
Flatlander Faith 