Thank you Susan for hanging the flag. And thank you all for welcoming me to your great country.
Tag: Canadian
The Saskatchewan shuffle
As I held her, I rocked back and forth, swaying left foot to right. My mother told me that her mother, raised on a farm north of Saskatoon, had called this the Saskatchewan shuffle. But every mother knows it, that swaying. Every mother calls it something. Sometimes you will see a woman doing it instinctively, her arms empty, when she hears the crying of a stranger’s baby.
— Leslie Jamison, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little Brown and Company, February 20, 2024)
Notes: NY Times Book Review by Kate Dwyer: “The High Priestess of the Personal.” Photo: Kristina Paukshtite
No one tells you this
I’d never been outside of Canada. When I complained about this growing up in our suburban house outside of Toronto, my father would helpfully point out that he’d once driven us across the border at Niagara Falls and then done a U-turn and driven us right back, so technically speaking I had, in fact, left the country. I was unmoved. Literally as well as figuratively. Unlike every other person I knew in Ontario, my family had not gone to Florida for winter vacation. We had not done the drive down I-95 to visit grandparents or go to Disney World. We didn’t even make the trip to Buffalo to take advantage of the cheaper American prices at the mall outlets. The MacNicols stayed put. Travel was for other people…
Growing up, nearly everything existed for me only in books, which had the effect of making all travel seem automatically rife with adventure and exoticism, no matter the reality. When friends complained about the terrible monotony of being trapped during spring break in the back of their parents’ car en route to Myrtle Beach, it fell on uncomprehending ears. To me, the concrete American Interstate held the same unknowable mystique as Paris. Perhaps it was less than surprising then that I cleaved on to the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder the way I did: not only was she also an adventurous young girl, she was a real person; I could find the places she’d gone to on a map and know she’d actually been there, and that because she’d done it, perhaps I could do it, too. Eventually I found my way to those dots in real life along with many others, always slightly astounded that I had managed to manifest my own childhood imagination.
~ Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This: A Memoir (July 10, 2018)
Book Review: HuffPost – ‘No One Tells You This’: The Triumph Of Choosing A Single, Childfree Life At 40
Dinner! Let’s eat together…
And Then You Just Let Go
Yes you do Patty. Yes you do.
“Working primarily through staged self-portraiture and portraiture, Patty creates rich vibrant photographs that envision the world in a transformative light. Patty loves to create in the boundaries between real life and the otherworldly, the surreal and the fantastic.” (About Patty Maher)
Notes:
- Patty Maher is a fine art and conceptual photographer based in Caledon, Ontario. This photo from Instagram is titled “And Then You Just Let Go“. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and her blog @ Patty Maher Fine Art Photography.
- Don’t miss: “Phlearn Interviews Patty Maher” for background on Maher, her work and creative process.