When I was in my late 30s, I travelled to the Temagami area of Northern Ontario.
There was a retreat there for native men who had experienced…
Stories come in the refraction of light through the trees.
They are born in the interplay of shadow and light, given percussive counterpoint by the…
There’s a circle of stones in the front yard.
The dog and I gathered them one day in the old pickup and brought them here from the area near a…
In the mountains the night sky is startlingly near. Darkness falls gradually here, the line of things lengthening in shadow all languid and loose…
The moon on the water is a pale eye. Benign, it hangs suspended, unmoving like a dream upon awakening.
The sky that illustrates the curve of this mountain is an impossible blue.
Cloudless, it becomes at once near enough to touch and as distant as a…
There are mornings here when the quiet comes to fill you. You walk the line of lake cautiously, not wanting to break the spell of it.
The land is a sacred being. You learn that when you spend enough time with her.
Eventually, you come to regain your senses and you discover that…
There’s an old cast-iron woodstove on the corner of the deck overlooking the lake.
It used to heat this cabin.
In the corner of the yard nearest the gravel road is an old wringer washer. It sits beneath a fir tree with its barrel filled with earth and dirt and…
We are surrounded by red.
Against the flank of mountain the pine trees wither.
Within them the pine beetles flourish and as they eat their way…
In our home the television is hardly ever on.
There’s something about having the open land a step away that makes it irrelevant somehow.
There’s a hard push from the west that sends stark cumulous banks over the top of the mountain and in the thrust of it through the trees…
There are moments here when the light comes to fill you. When the sun floods across the peak of the far mountain and everything is thrown into a veil…
In the mountains, just before sunrise, the world is an ashen place. Even the green tends to a murky grey and the trees loom in the near distance like…
Someone put a flag up on the mountain. Standing at the edge of the lake it flaps and waves high up where they helicopter-logged a few years back.
This house we call a home nestles between towering pines and fir.
It’s 25 years old now, built by the knowing hand of a 72-year-old bachelor…
These are the days of summer’s end. Above the mountains clouds become a heavier grey ominous with snow that’s a mere month or so away.
I got my first writing job in 1979. It was as a reporter for a now defunct newsmagazine called New Breed in Regina, Saskatchewan.
I lied to get it.
We love to ski. There’s a resort a short drive from the cabin and we head there as often as we can in the winter months.