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Today I remembered this conversation I had with my nephew Jackson when he was about four and laughed for about half an hour: ‘Aunty Sarah, come play outside with me.’ ‘OK, but let’s put our jackets on first.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s cold and you’ve just been sick.’ ‘But I’m hot from running.’ ‘But the air […]
October 16, 2011
“If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won’t either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass […]
May 4, 2011
My grandmother’s grandmother was married at sixteen, widowed by thirty-five, and remarried by forty. Take a moment to catch your breath. Her second husband’s name was Leandre. My grandma always gave me the impression that Alphonsine found him annoying but livable. He was a well-off merchant in the town nearest to the farm she had […]
April 5, 2011
One of the things delaying my working on my grandma’s biography is that I’ve had trouble with the idea of writing about a real person. I have trouble with what’s true, what’s important, how to tell a story that other people actually remember bits of. Once I transcribed that first lot of tapes of my […]
March 2, 2011
This post is the second in a series I’ve started about my Quebecois family history. (The first one is here.) At this point, I’m planning on posting once a month. It will probably be ten or fifteen posts in all. It is partly preparation for novelising some of the stories I know and partly because […]
January 24, 2011
It occurred to me recently that I come from a long line of storytellers. There are no published authors or poets or journalists in the family tree, just people who tell stories, some true, some less so, mostly greatly embellished. We like to tell stories about each other to each other and everyone has a favourite tale.
November 29, 2010
This entry was originally posted on 14 July 2008. I still use it as an example of the randomness of the opinions that I blog about and it has come to mind recently since Ben Law talked about the diversity of families that exist in our country. I can’t believe I wrote this over two years […]
March 6, 2013
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