Wannaskan Almanac

    Every fall we get a copy of our property insurance policy and invoice. It's a thick packet and it takes all our united brain power to figure out how much we're paying and how much the company will pay us if our house burns or blows down. There's a small category called "Inland Marine," and we always wonder what the heck that's for. We have a canoe, but I would never bother insuring that.   When we check with Duane, our agent,  he says without hesitation, that's Teresa's ring. Duane has lots of clients and I'm in awe that he can remember such minutiae as Teresa's ring. But why is a ring insured under Inland Marine Insurance? Shouldn't that be for boats? Duane explains that Inland Marine insurance is not for boats, but for stuff like personal jewelry. Boat Insurance is for boats. So why the strange name. Duane said it came from shipping insurance that had started long ago.    To me, shipping insurance means Lloyd's of London. The curr...

  Sundown Beneath Skies as Blue as was That Day with Leaves Upon The Ground        A black plastic bag pivoted from its perch on a weed in the field and for a moment appeared as a raven feeding in the dirt. A hawk circled the tractor, its wings perpendicular from its body, un-moving except for the feathers on its wing tips and the tipping of its head as it watched my long lazy circles in the field below. A shadow crossed the grass ahead of me and disappeared in the silhouette of spruce trees on the gravel road, then reappeared that wound around Mikinaak Creek, then dropped off the road, down into the long grasses and was gone.    I saw the shadow again -- there, it had returned. Again it disappeared into the silhouettes of the spruce trees, spiraling out and away from them, then reappeared as a raven just over my head so close that I stood upon the tractor seat I could've slightly caressed its breast.     I looked at the faded red hood o...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 7, 2026, the fortieth Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of fall, the first Wednesday of October, and the two-hundred eightieth day of the year, with eighty-five days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for October 7, 2026 pumpkins Curcurbita pepo are now widely on sale for pie-making and jack-o-lantern carving in and around Wannaska. Okosimaan in Anishinaabe, and otherwise known as winter squash, is among the oldest known domesticated plants, first cultivated between 7000 BCE and 5500 BCE in Mesoamerica. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the English word pumpkin is a 17th-century corruption of the earlier pompion , denoting any of various kinds of edible gourd. The latter ultimately derives, via French and Latin, from Greek πέπων ( pepōn ). An alternative etymological theory derives pumpkin from the Massachusett word pôhpukun , meaning "grows forth round", used by the Wampanoag people wh...

 "A good neighbor is a found treasure," is an old Chinese proverb. Another classic is "Good fences make good neighbors," from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall, though it is often used to mean connection rather than isolation.   Today I am looking at the opposite.  What makes a bad neighbor?  I came up with this idea as some youngsters (easily too young for a drivers license) were ripping around on an extremely noisy and cheap side by side next to my house.  Now I am not trying to be cantankerous, but there is certainly a bunch of laws (and silence) being broken by those kids.   The noise sounded like an '80s snowmobile with no muffler.  They raced by, ignoring the traffic laws, and then stopped just a little bit down the road.  Unsure if they had disturbed the peace enough, they revved the motor over and over.  Satisfied, their unhelmeted and undeveloped heads proceeded on down the street.  I guess my house was not the only sto...

We’ve spent much of this past summer wanting rain, worrying about it, or wondering at its power. As we faced each event - our grandson’s outdoor wedding, Jim’s birthday cruise, and a late-season nor’easter - questions loomed: too little, too much, or not at all? No one wanted rain in Connecticut on August 15th. Tent or no tent? As plans unfolded for their wedding outside in a lovely wooded setting, we prayed, danced counterclockwise, chanted, and shook rattles to the sun. While it rained on the 14th and the 16th, for the entire stretch of the wedding day we enjoyed a clear blue cloudless sky and rain-free, starry night.  We had the opposite problem for the river cruise down the Rhine. Drought! Two weeks before we were to depart for Zurich, we received a letter notifying us that water levels in the river would require changes that would alter the itinerary. We met lovely people, ate great food, rode bikes past fields and windmills. However, one of the signature experiences of the jo...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 36 Man Fails to Get Audience Joe McDonnell, 79 and residing in Palmville Township, Minnesota, recently attended an Authors Fair. "I've never written a book," McDonnell tells reporters, "though I have written for various publications over the years, most recently the blog that this story appears on. When I applied to appear at the Authors Fair, I was told the Fair was for authors who had published books. When I explained my situation I was given a space at the Fair. I thought there would be a time to read from my writings to the general public, but the general public never appeared. This was the first Authors Fair and I expect there will be a bigger crowd next year." In a later communication, McDonnell reports that reader view stats for his blog have increased. "One of my fellow bloggers had brought a QR code so fellow authors at the Fair could find our blog. "Marketing is not my strength," he writes. Man Modif...