Wannaskan Almanac

 A RAVEN story from 2000     Mikinaak Creek is the name of a major tributary of the South Fork of the Roseau River beginning in Section 21 and ending at its confluence with the Roseau River in Section 2. Mikinaak or Mickinock (as is on State and county maps) is an Ojibwe word for snapping turtle and was also the name of an Indigenous ‘Chief’ that lived near Wannaska and Roseau whose band was known to have camps in various places near Wannaska.      According to what I learned from my late Uncle Martin D. Davidson and Aunt Irene Palm Davidson, from whom I purchased this farm in 1971, Mikinaak’s band had a camp west of here about one hundred yards near where a wagon trail later passed along the bank of the creek. Within this vicinity on walks over the years I found an octagonal muzzle-loading pistol barrel. Martin found and collected quite an assortment of arrowheads when he first cleared the land; a collection later stolen from young Dean Davidson ...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for August 30, 2023, the thirty-fifth Wednesday of the year, the eleventh Wednesday of summer, and the two-hundred forty-second day of the year, with one-hundred twenty-three days remaining. Brought to you by Minnesota BeadGypsy , on the second-to-the-last day of the 20 percent off August necklace sale.   Wannaska Phenology Update for August 30, 2023 Harvesting Reds Late August bears many red fruits. One of our personal favorites here at Word-Wednesday is the cherry tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, cerasiforme variety, a type of small round tomato believed to be an intermediate genetic admixture between wild currant-type tomatoes and domesticated garden tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes range in size from the tip of your thumb to the size of a golf ball, with a shape ranging from spherical to slightly oblong. Most often red, you can find other colors such as orange, yellow, green, purple, and black. The cherry tomato is regarded as a bot...

And now for something a little more familiar...fractured history!  Today is August 29.  This is the 241st day of the year.  241 is a general area code.  If you receive a phone call and the area code is 241, it is probably either a spam or scam call.  Please don't hang up on me...er, I mean...please carefully screen your calls! Oh yeah, fractured history is what the Almanac is about today.  Sometimes I get distracted.  Other times I get retracted.  Did you know that there are 109 words that contain "tract" in the Scrabble dictionary. Of those 40 are 11 letter words, 30 are 10 letter words, 18 are 9 letter words, 14 are 8 letter words, 5 are 7 letter words, 1 is a 6 letter word, and 1 is a 5 letter word.   Oh dear, I have gotten off track again.  That reminds me of a story I read as a child.  In this classic Little Golden Book from 1945, Tootle is a young locomotive who loves to chase butterflies through the meadow. But he must l...

              I t's fun to go onto the internet and search for notable events that happen on a particular day.   Today, in 1921, my father, Laurence Bragan Langton, was born in Richmond, Virginia. Had he lived beyond his 86 years, he'd be 102 today. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic, I Have a Dream speech today. I yoke this event with Dad's life because after World War II, he was living one version of the postwar American Dream. I was in my thirties when I wrote this descriptive essay about him in 1985; I hope you enjoy it. His Yard One Dexter Ave., Waltham, Mass. No zip codes then; operators still asked, Number, please; and mail got delivered twice a day to the monumental scale, four-apartment, wood-frame house where I grew up.  It was through these daily mails that Dad received his Popular Mechanics along with a jumble of other periodicals of the do-it-yourself genre —unpretentious perpetrators of good...

  The garden in August reaches perfection. In September it wilts, in October it dries, in November it shatters. In December it's covered in snow and dreams of the Spring. Those who grew up in the depression became thrifty.  Those who grew up in the Energy Crisis became lazy.  I once saw my team, hopelessly down in the ninth, go on to win in the sixteenth.  Of course they ended up in the cellar that season, but three cheers for perseverance! However poorly, ineptly, or noisily done, twenty minutes of meditation every morning is a game changer.  In its haste to build, the new city wipes away every trace of wilderness. The mature city lets wilderness creep back in.  Perfection asks us to use its nickname—“Better” The market hates elders ‘Cause they drive an old car They want everything cheap  Blah blah blah blah blah  Don’t cast your pearls before swine. Give those swine a bucket of slops first, then you can bring out the pearls.  Since the the ...

Hello and welcome to the last Saturday of summer here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is August 26th. Hello, everyone. I think you've been wondering where I've been. My mom always wakes up early on these beautiful Saturdays. And she does it without me. Until one day, I decided to tell her to wake me up when she wakes up. And that's how we got here. Let's dive in. So, after all these weeks of my mom waking up early - very early -  you probably want to know what I've been doing. Mostly sleeping (while she's writing these beautiful blog posts.) I have Czech writing. I have Czech homework. It is pretty annoying, but, in fact helpful. For example, every year we go to Czech Republic. This year we went to Czech Republic for 6 weeks. That's different because we usually only stay there for 2 - 4 weeks. And my mom came this year. (The first time in 8 years!) My Czech homework helped me because my parents make me write 25-30 words a day. And I have to write it in Czech...

"The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose." --Ecclesiastes 1:5   It's hard to argue with the Bible. The sun certainly appears to rise in the east and set in the west.  The Prophet who wrote Ecclesiastes wonders, what's the point of existence. He also says further, "There's nothing new under the sun." He may be right, but there is a different way of looking at the sun. Way back in the third century BC, Aristarchus of Samos, using just his eyes and his brain, concluded that the earth rotated on its axis and orbited the sun.    Some of his fellow scientists agreed with him, others didn't. All the knowledge of the Greek scientists was eventually housed in the Great Library of Alexandria. The library burned in a couple of war-related fires so that knowledge of the heavens went underground for awhile. The Roman Empire fell into a dark age when people just hoped to see the sun come up without worrying about who was...

    Over the years I’ve had some strange encounters with wild birds. On August 24, 2015, as I was mowing the yard a Redtail hawk, about six feet from the ground, flew through the yard weaving its way between the ash, oak and tamarack trees, then swooped up and landed on the roof of the house. It's strange to see big birds like that land land there. They've flown past it, swerved past it, hovered beside it but very, very few, have landed on it that I've been aware.      Their search for prey would be wildly successful, I think, no less than from Oak Point across the creek where eagles, osprey, ravens and Great Grey owls hold court on frequent occasion. Seeing a hawk land on the roof then look back at noisy me on the riding lawn mower, provoked my attention especially when its wings suddenly pulled its body from the roof, then simultaneously folded against it, turned, and dove into the grass talons first.     Rumbling across our rough worm...