Wannaskan Almanac

  Thinking that the grapes in your vineyard would not make good wine is the ultimate sour grapes. Pre-Big Bang was the egg stage. Now we are larval or maggot. Purgatory will be pupal, and at last we'll be ready to flit, flutter, or buzz around Heaven.  If a motel claims to be just like home, keep going.  We must make a basic smell test to determine whether we’re in the presence of God or just in the presence of ourselves.  We call our political opponents stupid, but intelligence is evenly divided across the spectrum. Application of that intelligence to our various fears is what makes all the difference.  No nation will ever be great that charges for a second cup of coffee.  Good writing gently corrals us readers to its logical conclusion. Bad writing forces us over an arid plain till we drop.  When I’m confounded by science it’s a comfort to know the giant brains of Newton and Einstein were confounded too.  The alcoholic smashes his last bottle on...

Well, summertime is now two-thirds over. August is somehow almost here and activities like cross country are going to start up soon. BUT, what happened in the second half of June and much of July? There is much to tell but little time to tell it, so I will be slightly briefer on the topics that I will be mentioning.  So previously on Dave’s adventures, I described my lovely week in the Twin Cities. I’ve got to say, ever since that week, I’ve been trying to find ways to go back. Once I got back from the cities, I did literally nothing for the next two weeks. Absolutely nothing. I had nothing to do, nowhere to be, so I did nothing. We had recently rescued our little kitten which gave me some entertainment, but still, nothing really happened until my mom told me about an opportunity to be in Popcorn players. Of course, I said yes. To those of you who don’t know what Popcorn Players is, it’s a program run by Warroad Summer Theatre to produce a show with children ages 6 to 16. In my nat...

    If you ever drive down to old Cape Cod, you'll have to have to cross one of two bridges that cross the Cape Cod Canal, unless of course you're driving a boat. That reminds me of the time Jerry and Marion Solom drove their boat Indian Summer to Cape Cod. Jerry planned to traverse the seven mile canal from west to east.    Storm clouds were gathering as Jerry and Marion approached the entrance to the canal. They had lowered the sails and were motoring along when Jerry sent Marion below to monitor the compass. Just then a blinding squall hit. A violent wind churned the waters as Jerry kept heading east. At least it felt like he was traveling in the same direction, till Marion called up "You're going west!"   At first Jerry couldn't believe it.  He was sure he had been going the same direction all the time. The rain was so heavy he couldn't see shore. "Are you sure?" He asked. "Yes, the compass says you're going west, out of the canal....

Tanker blant bringebær 'Thoughts Among Raspberries ' The little woodlot thick with raspberry bushes.     “Wild raspberries don’t taste the way they used to,” I said aloud to myself, plucking tiny fingernail-sized fruit from spindly vines behind where the barn used to stand in 1970; then again, my memory isn’t what it used to be either. There were other raspberry bushes with more berries on them deeper in the woods, but it had rained earlier that evening and I didn’t relish getting my pants soaked wading to get them. Maybe deer, raccoon and bear had eaten the ones closer to the trail, the tossers ...     I had cleaned the little woods the year before of old farm debris: rusty barbed wire, bullet-hole laced and dented water troughs, broken blue-green canning jars, a wringer-washer tub among other things. I had cut down dead and fallen trees, and had let two different neighbors in to cut some firewood thus opening the woodlot canopy a little to let more sunsh...

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of new words... the trill of frippary... and the apogee of offbeat... the human drama of semantic explication...here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, July 27, 2022, the thirtieth Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of summer, and the 208th day of the year, with 157 days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for July 27, 2022 Blueberry Bounty Back in the day, shepherds “controlled” their sheep by shaking their staffs to indicate where the animals should go. When a shepherd had more sheep that (s)he could control, (s)he had “more sheep than (s)he could shake a stick at.” That’s how it is with this year’s bumper crop of blueberries. And are they ever tasty! The forest roads are full of cars, and the pickers are driving away with pails full. When it comes to eating your blueberries, Word-Wednesday advises readers enjoy a balanced diet to avoid the outcome of some blueberry-binging animals… July 27 Fickle Pickle Wedne...

It has been a rough couple of years.  There has been a lot that has gone on...Covid, economy issues, inflation...and mass shootings.  Some of those things seem to be out of our control.  There really isn't much that we can do about Covid.  Even with all the vaccines and boosters it seems like you can still get sick.  As far as the economy we can pretend that voting for one party or the other might fix things, but in the end the devil is still the devil.   The one thing we can do something about is gun violence. Now before you get all worked up, I am not promoting taking your guns away.  Most of the people I know own guns and they have never shot at anyone.  As a matter of fact, I walked past a gun just today and I survived...unscathed!   Hope this doesn't leave you...triggered! The truth is that guns have never killed anyone on purpose.  Yes, there are accidental shootings that happen, and they are tragic.  But a gun never...

Feminist? Most definitely. One genre writer? Absolutely not. She wrote poetry, memoirs, novels, and essays. Homebody? Hardly. Ahead of her time? Most certainly in almost every way. As a contemporary of the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound., Hilda Doolittle reveled in the midst of a writer’s extravaganza of experimentation. In a word she, was exceptional for her time and for her gender.   She published under the pen name  H.D.  Feminist. Her unique voice clears proper ladies’ themes of love,  the complexities of relationships, war and death, and , birth and death, gender, and language. H.D. did nothing to vail her bisexuality which made her an early emblem for the early LGBT rights movement and feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. She may have been gone, but certainly not forgotten by this movement, so prevalent today. Here are a few of her most striking poems.   Wash of Cold River Wash of cold river in a glacial land, Ionian water, c...

  Men will go to a wedding to party, to a funeral for lunch, while giving the baby shower a miss to play golf. If my guest wants to discuss politics or religion that’s fine, but he won’t learn my opinion unless it jibes with his own, which discussion will then be mere valium.  The WASP smiles when the LBGT group adds another letter, but what sorrow and pain is within each of those little letters. My role as grand puppeteer I think I’ll let go.  It’s gotten too much for my fingers and toes We must tie up this strong man Satan in order to plunder his goods. Better let Jesus to do the tying and let the plunder go to charity.  Our eyes adjust naturally to the darkness. We need new eyes to see in the light.  The hierarchy ranges from self to family, to country, to God. We must chose which we’re most loyal to without worshipping the idea of hierarchy itself Life is a puzzle with unwritten clues.  Life gives us a pencil. The answers, we choose.  Negotiating o...

Hello and welcome to a post-Roseau County Fair Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is July 23rd. Summer half over means slowly turning our thoughts to school. The soon-to-be Fifth Grader announced that she wishes she were back in school. This tells me two things. One, that she likes structure and routine and, apparently, I'm not providing enough of it. And, two, she has a very short memory because in May she was wailing about wishing school was over. This past week, Senior 2.0 - or perhaps it would be more fitting to say Graduate 2.0 - attended his college orientation and registration. I think I can speak for both of us when I say it was great to be back in the Twin Cities in general but especially back on the University of St. Thomas campus. The orientation leaders, decked out in their purple Tommie t-shirts paired with purple Converse sneakers, welcomed us with pom-pom smiles and cheers. A year ago, families sat in quiet clusters, curious and tense. Will this college be...

    In Canada they call them First Nations. Them being the people living there in various tribes before the Europeans arrived. The First Nations were happy to exchange beaver pelts for steel knives, guns and glass beads, but were leery of the downsides. Disease seemed to follow these newcomers and they had strange notions about property. They thought a person could own land for himself.    The newcomers propagated like the beaver themselves. But they wanted so many pelts that when the beaver were wiped out in one place, they had to push further west for fresh pelts. If the newcomers got too pushy perhaps they too could be exterminated.   One of the pushiest of the newcomers was Alexander Mackenzie from the country of Scotland. His mother died when he was ten and his father took him to New York. When the American Revolution broke out, his father fought for the British. Alexander was sent to Montreal for safety. Soon he was working as an apprentice for the North W...