If you've read my award-winning novel, Dance Me a Revolution, you'll love the sequel, Beware When the Cormorants Dance. If you missed Dance Me, I can get you a copy...

Today's Photos: sun couldn't rise through the clouds, but early morning excursion gave us Canada Geese swimming in formation and a seagull reflecting😉

October 8, 1953. It was a parent/teacher open-house that afternoon in Grade 2, Bedford Park School, Toronto. The night before, for the first (and last) time ever, I had a painting of mine hung on the classroom wall. The night before we’d gone out for dinner, and my mother had screamed a lot in the night. Dad reassured me her pork chops at the restaurant last night must have upset her stomach and not to worry. But I was soooooo excited about having that painting on the wall, I wanted them both to come and see it. We had a tiny print of Tom Thompson’s ‘Jack Pine’ hung on the kitchen wall, and I was determined at 6 years old to be a painter as well as a writer, so my painting was really important to me. Both Mom and Dad said they’d come “if they could.” I waited and waited until every parent had come and gone with their student. No sign of mine! The teacher finally insisted I go home. I was heartbroken. As if that wasn’t enough, when I got up on our big porch, it was Granny Mildon, who opened the door, a woman who never liked young children much. Clearly a disaster must have happened! “No,” said Granny. “You have a baby brother.” Still, at almost 7, that didn’t mean much. Then the phone rang. It was my father and he told me Peter John had been born and mother was fine. “Can you hear Peter?’ Dad asked proudly. “He’s the loudest in the nursery.” No question, I could hear loud screaming in the background. My little brother had a good set of lungs from day one.

Today's Photos: A shot of the lone heron we've been watching for, now in the marina, plus a very bright sun-rising

I hope everyone is having a lovely #MagentaMonday xx #BeachRose #RoseADay #RosePhotography #FlowersOnX #flowerphotography #gardening

FYI: Involuntary care doesn’t change the toxic drug supply. It doesn’t build housing, it doesn’t eliminate poverty, it doesn’t create employment, and it doesn’t change what people are released back into. Stop treating social failure as an individual pathology. Invest in housing, income security, employment, healthcare, harm reduction, recovery services, community and connection. Address the toxic drug supply, and ALL the social determinants of health. Don’t just intervene in a crisis, change the conditions that keep creating it!

When Dad got called to a new church, Spring Garden Baptist in Toronto in 1951, we moved into one of those narrow houses with the narrow backyards on Roslin Avenue in Toronto. I didn’t like it much, and started getting colds often. By November that year, I got my first bout of pneumonia. I don’t remember much about it except the nasty pain of mustard plasters burning my chest, and my first discovery of power… I opened my eyes at one point to see a beautiful woman with blue eyes, and a mane of bright red hair lighting everything like a halo. She was handing me back my Teddy Bear that had fallen on the floor. My mother’s cousin Marion was a nurse and missionary in Africa, but happened to be back in Canada just then. So Marion came to stay at our house and look after me. That’s when I realized that if Teddy was on the floor and I cried out, the beautiful redhead would come and return him to me. Teddy began to fall from bed often. What power!

Today's Photo: Sunrise over the Juan de Fuca Strait looking almost like a painting

My Dad completed a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Divinity at McMaster University in spring 1947, and was called to be the Minister of the Baptist Church in Eden, a village in Ontario’s tobacco farming country. I must have been around nine months old when we moved there. I loved the wide open spaces. There was the parsonage, then the cemetery, and then the church. From the time I could walk I was free to race across the cemetery back and forth accompanied by Juno, my mother’s Cocker Spaniel. I gather it was Juno’s job to protect me from all dangers. However I’ve been told I was found down in an open grave once and another time, strutting along the white line of the highway through the village with Juno. I had an amazing amount of freedom for a toddler. Alas when I was 3, Dad got called to a church in Toronto. I don’t remember much about the parsonage except the snowberry bushes around the front yard. I knew instinctively somehow at 3 that those berries would be poison. And I hated the backyard that was as narrow as the house. I’m told I complained “I can only run straight up and down.” Mercifully we moved to Hamilton in 1953, but that’s another story.

Today's Photo: The sun finally made it through the cloud, and some birds are up as well.

It was a very dark morning today!

It’s time to check in on the ballroom construction again. JEJ: we’re trying but we need more balls.

Today's Photo: We're getting closer to the season when it's all cloud-rise or fog-rise instead of sunrise

Why the hell would anyone in Canada be buying Driscoll’s anyway? 🤢 Now they’re facing a class-action lawsuit over allegations of chemical residues in their berries. Buy Canadian. 🇨🇦 Leave Driscoll’s on the shelf. Boycott them. share.google/09oigWMoSIBHhWO…

Banff is gorgeous and played an important part in my life. I worked there one summer, and more important I took a creative writing course at the Banff School of Fine Arts, from W.O. Mitchell, Alice Munro, Sylvia Fraser among others and they turned me into a professional writer. 🇨🇦❤️

This may be an unpopular opinion, but it happens to be true, an important truth.

Dementia in power

I do too. For me, I feel there's something extra special about sunrise. Sunset too, but I don't find it as exciting—perhaps because as a little one sunset meant bedtime, so boring.

The trees know it's autumn