Wannaskan Almanac

Tales of Queens and Armor Then the keel plunged And shook in the sea; and they sailed from Denmark. Right away the mast was rigged with its sea-shawl; Sail ropes were tightened, timbers drummed And stiff winds kept the wave-crosser  Skimming ahead; as she heaved forward, Her foamy neck was fleet and buoyant, A lapped prow loping over currents. Mortality We all know it. We all do it. We don’t think about it much until me must. We know almost nothing about it, so we imagine and fabricate what its depth and height. As recent as the nineteenth century, it was still considered our common portion of living. Mortality. On one level,  Beowulf  is from beginning to end a poem about confronting death. It begins with a funeral, and proceeds to the story of a murderous monster. Beowulf enters the story as a hero who has chosen to risk death in order to achieve fame, and perhaps, treasure.  As Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother at the bottom of the mere, even his close friends belie...

     Eric Amundson was here recently to do some sheetrock repair and painting for us. I worked for Eric’s father Curtis several years ago. Curtis and his brother Roger farmed three thousand acres and I was their hired man.    Eric had a younger brother Michael who loved all things electrical. He had taught himself to walk by pushing a vacuum cleaner around the house. One of his treasures as he grew older was a discarded tractor voltage regulator. The voltage regulator was a small steel box, weighing about half a pound. It had a short wire hanging out of one end and Michael carried it everywhere he went.    One day Curtis and I were out putting up a new barbed wire  fence for cattle. Curtis had an augur device on the back of a tractor to drill a hole in the ground and my job was to walk behind and put the eight foot wooden post into the four foot hole. As I tamped in the soil around the post, Curtis drove ahead 30 feet and drilled the next hole. ...

Hello and welcome to a sunny, last Saturday of the month here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is February 26th. We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming due to illness. I'd heard that a bout of stomach flu had ravaged through our Wannaskan hamlet a few weeks ago. Our family is pretty healthy so I was feeling relief when it seemed that wave had passed us. As a mom at church this week regaled accounts of having all seven people in her household ill at the same time, I shuddered.  The first to fall was the First Grader. I kept him home on Thursday, feeling optimistic that he just needed his guts to settle and he'd be back to school that afternoon. What was I thinking? Friday, it was clear he'd turned a corner, but there was another kid coming down the block. Me. The last time I retched like that, it had turned out I was pregnant. "You're not pregnant, are you?" Living in a home with two cultures, you can bet that how to treat the stomach flu can quickly b...

       Teresa and I were jaunting around Cornwall a few years back and one day we stopped in a little town for lunch. It was a nice day so we took our lunch to the picnic tables out front. An older gentleman invited us to sit at his table and after introductions, Bert told us he had grown up in London during the Blitz. He said one morning he and his mates arrived at school only to find their school had been flattened by a bomb. They had just begun celebrating when their teacher arrived. “Don’t worry, lads,” he said. “We’ll be meeting for class in the church.”      I should have asked Bert where he and his family went when the bombs were falling. I knew a lot of Londoners went down into the tube, the subway, and slept on the platform. Other families had Anderson shelters in their backyards. The first Anderson shelter was built on this day in 1939 in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming.      The shelters consisted of fourteen ...

  " ... a four-year old cow moose ..." WINTER FUN #I Ole Dahlin (1863-1930)    Olla Olof Olsson was born februari 10, 1863 to Olla Olof Anderson (1830-1873) and Hed Maritt Jonsdotter (1826-1901) in Yttermalung, Sweden. He was 25 when he emigrated to the United States, coming to the Warren, Minnesota area in June 1888. By fall, he was in the growing village of Malung, while it was still a part of Kittson County. Apparently the large number of Olsons was causing name confusion, so Olla changed his name to Ole Dahlin.     Ole first lived in south Stafford Township near Bush Erik Erickson, but later moved to north Stafford Township with Halvor Erickson (Bush Erik’s brother), and lived there until Halvor’s death, at which time he sold the homestead to Emil Olson in 1918.    Ole had a good relationship with Native People and always spoke highly of Chief Mikinaak. There were several of their burial mounds in the yard west of Ole’s house which the Ojibwe ...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, February 23, 2022, the eighth Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of winter, and the 54th day of the year, with 311 days remaining. Wannaska Nature Update for February 23, 2022 As of yesterday, available information suggests that Wannaska has had about thirty inches of snow so far this winter. February 23 Nordhem Lunch : Updated daily. Earth/Moon Almanac for February 23, 2022 Sunrise: 7:18am; Sunset: 5:57pm; 3 minutes, 30 seconds more daylight today Moonrise: 1:23am; Moonset: 10:21pm, waning gibbous, 55% illuminated. Temperature Almanac for February 23, 2022                 Average            Record              Today High             23          ...

 Yes, it is 2-22-22.  What a wonderful date.  It looks like swans swimming in single file.  If you were born on 1-11-11 (as in the year 1011) then you would be 1011 years old now.  If that is you, make sure you join our birthday club.  The information will be sent out on 3-33-33.  Hmm...something seems fishy about that date.  I guess that I will have to come up with new material before 1011 more years pass! So what are the most elegant, aesthetically appealing dates in history?  A quick google search turned up all kinds of dates, but they were not what I was thinking.  For example: I am not sure what date these represent I am old enough to remember a time before google misinterpreted my every question.  We had to do something called thinking...or thinkin' as it is called among us old folks.  So here goes, I am going to come up with my own list of interesting looking dates. January 23, 4567.   That is an easy one....

Praise and Departure for Home Until the black raven with raucous glee . . . Out of the 30,000 lines of literature left from the Anglo-Saxon period, almost 4,000 lines are preserved in the text of Beowulf , the story of the warrior with the strength of 30 men in each arm. It is a story of the supernatural as well as a record of Anglo-Saxon history. Because there was little literacy and few books in Medieval England, scops were the key to recording history. They upheld the history of England since the very beginning, along with the ancestry of her first settlers. Beowulf was recited long before it was first recorded by Medieval Poets, known as scops (pronounced shōps). Scops travelled to Mead Halls around the Anglo-Saxon countryside to recite their poems to the warriors who had returned from battle. As the warriors celebrate around mead and beer, the scops sing lines of praise for the heroes of battle, accompanying their melodies with a harp. Scops were important in Anglo-Saxon society ...

   Last week I celebrated Charles Darwin's birthday a day late. This week I will celebrate the end of evolution a billion or two years early. Back in Darwin's day, lots of scientists believed in evolution before it could be proved to be true. Darwin's theory knocked two big holes in our overarching dome of ignorance.         First, he said Nature selected certain traits just as farmers did when breeding livestock. And the reason Nature did this was because the environment kept changing. Darwin was mistaken in some of his pronouncements. No one's perfect, and later scientists have made many corrections and followed the trail way back into antiquity. Way back.    Nature has had all the time in the world to experiment. One writer said that Nature is also shameless, but that depends on what brings you shame. So Nature got started with the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. It was a bloody mess for the next nine billion years. Then things calmed do...