Wannaskan Almanac

The quality of old age depends on how many body parts check out between the first thing to go and the last. I pick through the rubble of philosophy and  cobble together the religion of me. Facebook can be informative and entertaining; about at the level of Interstate billboards.  I used to say there’s nothing worse than an old fool. Now that I’m old I see that it’s the young fools that are causing all the trouble.  Drinking with others does not make it less of a solitary pleasure.  I’m not in favor of Zoom and it’s ilk. It’s made it hard to doze off during long phone conversations.  No one surfs the web anymore. We’ve all found what we like and imbibe it exclusively in our favorite tiki bar.  Don’t sing your own praises. Let the band play your anthem as you stand on the medal podium.  The Golden Rule is usually a good guide. But sometimes I don’t want my eggs done unto me the way you like your eggs ...

Hello and welcome to the last Saturday of May here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is May 30th. I’m sitting here this Saturday morning in such a suspended state of surrealism, I don’t even know where to begin in talking about our experience of graduating in the time of Corona. While we celebrated a happy occasion last night – the Oldest getting her high school diploma and an optimistic launch into the next phase of her life, in the southern part of our state (not far from where I used to live, a friend told me this morning), blocks of buildings are smoldering. People are angry. Unrest and uncivil discourse is at its height while people wail, wail in desperation and in grief and in the biggest burst of anger our typically “Minnesota Nice” culture has ever seen. Society is unraveling. The seams of our dresses are stretched across a belly of despair that is so large, it threatens to rip and release the flesh. And I am terrified and fearful and, well, a whole lot of other emotions th...

It's amazing how many jobs a person can put off if he sets his mind to it. With the stay at home order and this nice weather, I've been forced to face reality. Take our old chicken shed for example. Once it was a fine little building, suitable for keeping chickens or storing stuff too valuable to throw away. But the sky is now coming through the roof and the sides and it has slipped off it's cinder block foundation. I've put a tarp over the valuables inside the shed, the last resort of the procrastinator. When the shed went onto the ground, a family of woodchucks burrowed underneath. Woodchucks are hard on gardens. Teresa suggested we get the shed back on the blocks to make it less cozy for the woodchucks. I suggested we build a fence around the garden since that would also keep out the deer. So we built a beautiful six-foot tall fence around the garden. But the woodchuck dug underneath the fence. So we put chicken wire along the bottom of the fence and ran it out ...

HEAVE HO! OFF YOU GO! “This is my last load,” I told the guy at the Roseau County Transfer Station. “You’ve said that before,” he said smiling, inspecting all the junk in my truck.      “Whattya got in here this time?” It was my tenth load to the dump this month, so I really meant it. I had removed all the junk I had thrown around our place for the past 38 years. I had become ashamed of how I alone had affected the landscape so negatively, and so decided to just act, at long last, before the bugs came out and the heat set in. The idea of taking things to the landfill had always bothered me. The fact that as a society we dumped our waste material on the land and then buried it, chewed away at my environmental perspective for decades, but not so much that I didn’t do the same thing at home, behind ‘the Shed From Hell’, ‘in the old Ford pickup and the Escort,’ ‘back in the woods,’ and ‘out by the old threshing machine,’ allowing I did, as so di...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 27, 2020, the 22nd Wednesday of the year, the 148th day of the year, with 218 days remaining. Deer Ticks are Out Nordhem Lunch: Closed Earth/Moon Almanac for May 27, 2020 Sunrise: 5:29am; Sunset: 9:14pm; 1 minutes, 56 seconds more daylight today Moonrise: 9:42am; Moonset: 1:06am, waxing crescent Temperature Almanac for May 27, 2020                 Average           Record           Today High             68                   91                  78 Low              46       ...

That title looks a little strange.  Capital and lower letters, or "case", refers to how letters are written in larger uppercase form or smaller lowercase form.  This is also known as majuscule (capital) or miniscule (lower case). Historians believe that majuscule (capital) letters were the first ones used.  Lower case letters came later.  This answers a serious question for the inquisitive.  Egg comes before egg, and Chicken comes before chicken.  I guess that will solve that conundrum.  The first alphabets were written entirely in majuscule letters.  The Egyptians are generally credited with the first alphabet.  It was created around 2700 BC. There are two things that stand out from their alphabet.  One, it is all in capital letters.  There wasn't a need for lower case.  Second, there is a lack of vowels.  This is why Egypt's Pharaoh Patsajak was unable to get his Wheel Of Fortune TV series on the river waves. That ...

Today, we memorialize war veterans. We’ve made this a holiday, even though military ceremonies are still held. Warfighters endure the obvious external battle, and if the war is deemed just by the populace back home, s/he may come home a “conquering” hero. (The internal struggle of a military person is just as real, but that’s a subject for another time.) I bring up warfighters because some of us wage continual war within ourselves, as did Sylvia Plath. “I feel certain that I’m going mad again . . .” began Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) final writing just before she positioned her head inside a gas oven and died. Her death is, perhaps what she is most remembered for – its method of self-destruction, the haunting presence she left, the husband (Ted Hughes) who had recently left her, and the fact that she was just thirty years old when she ended her life, leaving behind a body of work that remains read and praised. Below, please consider a few poems from Plath’s collected work, each ...