Wannaskan Almanac

Hello and welcome to our first chilly fall Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is September 12th. Yesterday marked the 25th commemoration of 9/11. When I was a kid, I marveled at people's ability to remember where they were the day JFK was assassinated. I wondered how an event could be so impactful that the who, what, when, and where of the moment would be forever cemented in one's brain. Well, now I know.  On September 11, 2001, I was living in Brno, Czech Republic. I had just gotten home from a day of teaching English at the Berlitz school. I was feeling pretty good and in high spirits when our home phone rang. (Cellphones were just starting to be a thing then.) "Kim, I'm so sorry, but there's been an attack in America. Planes were flown into the towers in New York City," my friend Susann told me in German. I felt disoriented. Susann rarely called the home phone. We always spoke German, even though my fluency was quite mediocre. And this kind of vo...

       I used to give a book fifty pages to convince me I should finish it. Now I decide after the first sentence. I recently started a book whose introduction started off- "This book is unreadable". The book is  Finnegans Wake  by James Joyce. I had read and understood Joyce's previous book, the notoriously difficult  Ulysses . I had read  Ulysses  twice previously without understanding much of it. I had been an English major and felt I needed to be able to say I had at least read it.      I was able to master  Ulysses  on the third try with the help of two fellow  Wannaskan Almanac  writers, Catherine Stenzel and Kim Hruba. For a year and a half through Covid we read a chapter a month and met monthly via Zoom to discuss and argue over the chapters. The book takes place on a single June day in Dublin in 1904, and follows the interconnected activities of three Dubliners as they go about the city. ...

Hayes Lake State Park Saturday September 10th, 1983  Excerpt From "Hot Coffee & Cold Beer: a Journal."      I mentioned last week’s ( Sept 3rd ) camping trip to Mark, another friend of mine at the toy factory. He’s an amateur photographer; having a Canon 35mm camera and some great lenses. At the mention of seeing the otters, he became interested in getting some pictures of them and asked if I’d be  willing to show him where they might be this weekend. And of course, I was, as friends were far and in between for me about that time. Having learned we had similar interests, I thought I should make the attempt.     Over the course of the week we discussed various ideas of what to bring and where we would camp at Hayes the night of the ninth and look for the otters early in the morning on the tenth. I’d provide the food, the canoe, and camper. Mark would buy the beer and camping fee. Good enough. As it turned out, even though I took the grocery lis...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for September 9, 2026, the thirty-sixth Wednesday of the year, the twelfth Wednesday of summer, the second Wednesday of September, and the two-hundred fifty-second day of the year, with one-hundred thirteen days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for September 9, 2026 Monarch Butterfly Danaus plexippus — memengwaa, in Anishinaabe — can still be seen around Wannaska, but they will soon be heading south. In 1874, entomologist Samuel Hubbard Scudder suggested naming the butterfly "The Monarch", citing its large size and the notion that it "rules a vast domain" as the basis for the name, which he preferred to William D'Urban's "Storm Fritillary" and Philip Henry Gosse's "Archippus." Danaus (Ancient Greek Δαναός), was a great-grandson of Zeus and a mythical king in Egypt or Libya, who founded Argos. Plexippus (Πλήξιππος) was one of the fifty sons of Aegyptus , the twin brother of ...

I miss my dog.  I miss that little hate filled, angry, and always ready to annoy everyone little chihuahua.   I miss my ability to read without glasses.  I can't even look at my computer anymore without experiencing letter blindness. I miss my grandmas...both of them.  They were full of wit and vinegar...usually more vinegar than wit. I miss skinny jeans.  I don't even think they make skinny jeans in my sive.  They would be called fat jeans. I miss excitement...now I just wake up one day closer to the grave with something new hurting every morning.   I miss typewriters.  Not computers, or electric typewriters, but real manual typewriters.  The click of the keys, the little bell letting you know it is time to get ready to  hit that silver return handle.   I miss gardens.  I hate to hoe.  I hate to weed.  I hate to wait while plants grow so slowly.  But still, I miss gardens. I miss the river that I ...

The other day, a friend of mine, who has stuff on her mind, said she would go by herself to a whale watch on Sunday. It will revive my connection to the universe, she texted. I can relate. My ideal summer includes slow mornings, swims, walks, talks and reads. To that slate of activities, this year I added two weddings. Lots of fun, but. The labor intensive getting ready tasks can be a lot: shopping, packing, traveling - all the emotional intensity. There are limits to how long I can remain saturated by scintillation - I become a toddler again needing quiet time. Thankfully, the fog of overactivity has begun to lift and I’ve lately returned to woods walking - a favorite way for me to get myself back. Whenever I begin again after a lapse of days, the body complains. I start slowly, one heavy foot in front of the other. The route I chose the other day led to abandoned cranberry bogs. Gone are the years when I’d see the old box rakes and wooden crates once used to harvest berries. Now the...