Wannaskan Almanac

On this day in history...way back in 1881...Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.  Clara Barton is a true American hero.  Her story is an inspiration to everyone.  Clara Barton was working in the US Patent Office when the Civil War began.  She, and others, began gathering bandages and supplies for the soldiers.  Eventually she decided that this was not enough, so she traveled to the battlefields and began to care for the wounded.  She was a nurse, cook, and companion to many soldiers and earned the name "Angel of the Battlefield". After the war Barton traveled to Europe.  There she learned about the Red Cross, an organization that was based out of Switzerland.  This group was promoting the protection of the sick and wounded during wartime and the formation of societies to give aid voluntarily.  When she returned to America she began to work towards establishing the American Red Cross with influential friends, such as Fredrick D...

What happens when we experience a severe loss in our lives? What is our reaction? What’s to be done? What responses do the people around us have to our distress? What reactions do we want them to have? For some who have experienced a loss, the solution is isolation, as we shall see; however, something or someone always seems to intervene to break the solitary state, as will be apparent in Segment 3. When it is a young person bearing the loss, coping strategies are few, no matter how brilliant youth may be. Perhaps more than any other time in life, relationships are highly volatile during adolescence – and important, in equal magnitude. Relationship is all there is! This is true whether we are talking about the natural world, human interaction, or stellar bodies. And if this statement is true, we may do well to attend to relationships in equal measure. Perhaps this Song says something about how life is diminished as relationships dwindle. Since a loss of relationship occurs in...

The Oxford English Dictionary reveals the richness of our language. And the poverty, paucity, penury, poorness, aridity, beggarliness, dearth, deficit, and exiguity of my own vocabulary. Nothing moves fashion forward faster than inappropriate people wearing what's currently in. The capitalist cult claims to gladden our hearts, But its priests are abusers who take the best parts. More dead car batteries: we assume the headlights will go off by themselves. More dead pedestrians: we assume they're beeping their car doors locked. I must remember to take my pill in the morning. I must also remember not to take it twice. @jmcdonnell123

Hello and welcome to a mid-May Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is May 18th. The grass has finally greened and my Lily of the Valley is poking its fingers out of the dry dirt, reaching for a promise of warmer days. A big thank you to our Monday Poet-in-Residence, Jack Pine Savage, for covering for me last Saturday. Our family lost a dear friend unexpectedly and I knew she'd be level headed and clear eyed about the whole death and dying thing, while I'd be a rambling, blubbering, nonsensical mess. She completely hit the mark. Please take a moment to read her profound poem, Deeper Order , which she shared on last Saturday's post. I'm a pretty happy person. But, as I told my mom, who suggested I be positive for the kids' sake when we'd just gotten the news, "I'm just going to be sad for awhile." But I do understand her counsel. The daily spin of the washing machine of life still turns and chugs, agitates and fills with water, suds f...

   Friday Greetings from Joe McDonnell.    On this day in 1902 a Greek archaeologist identified a heavily corroded 2,000 year old piece of bronze as the earliest example of an analogue computer. The mechanism had been found two years earlier by sponge divers on an ancient shipwreck off the coast of the Aegean island of Antikythera. The diver at first thought he was seeing corpses on the sea floor, but they turned out to be bronze and marble statues.    The divers went off to another area looking for sponges, and returned to the wreck at the end of the season. They retrieved several artifacts and forwarded them to the authorities. The archaeologists in Athens got considerably more excited than the sponge divers had been and sent the Greek Navy down to retrieve more artifacts.    The following year while examining this curious hunk of bronze, the  archeologist Valerios Stais discovered that it contained a geared wheel. He theorized that ...

I sat on the picnic table one evening, unassailed by flies or mosquitoes, listening to mourning doves ‘coo-cooing’ beyond my line of sight; the distant water-thrashing territorial disputes between opposing pairs of Canadian geese along Mikinaak Creek; the melodic trills of redwing blackbirds from the tops of the trees; and robins, here and there, singing happily from the woods. To me, it’s pure heaven. The breeze arises in the treetops, then descends. Between gusts, I can hear water rushing through an upstream beaver dam. I hear one bluejay talking to another. I watch a handful of goldfinches hunt for sunflower seeds  below the birdfeeder that my wife insists on using even though natural food abounds now, just so she can see them in all their variety. “Do you know purple finches poop is purple?” Bullfrogs sing-song from the water; tree frogs peep from the trees. The branches of the dozen or so bur oaks that once bordered the Martin and Irene Davidson home, reverberate behind ...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for May 15, 2019, the 20th Wednesday of the year,  the 135th day of the year, with 230 days remaining. Nordhem Lunch : Hot Pork Sandwich Earth/Moon Almanac for May 15, 2019 Sunrise: 5:42am; Sunset: 8:58pm; 2 minutes, 38 seconds more daylight today Moonrise: 5:06pm; Moonset: 4:36am, waxing gibbous Temperature Almanac for May 15, 2019                 Average          Record         Today High              13                  40                19 Low                7    ...