Surely we were destined to meet

A few months back, Frances Graff was cleaning out a closet in her home in Washington, D.C., when she stumbled upon a 2003 clipping from the Globe and Mail – a Lives Lived column I wrote after the death of my cousin, Charlotte Grover. The Globe story delivered a flood of memories. When Frances was …

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Back to the Future Redux

Action! The camera zooms in on a reasonably pleasant, reasonably capable, reasonably skilled adult – that would be me – leaning comfortably on a podium at the front of the Norwood Town Hall. Smiling even. Eager to launch her presentation. Cue black-and-white flashback, set in the high school just a couple of blocks away: Said …

Diaries capture life’s forgotten moments

I now have proof of what I’ve long suspected: my memory bank is as porous as a kitchen sponge. I can recount – in detail – youthful incidents where I behaved stupidly or where circumstances piled up against me. But moments of youthful glory? Not so much. One day while I was rummaging around in …

Severe cold indeed!

My book Life & Legacy may be a done deal, but the research rabbit holes still taunt me. Just the other day, Ancestry.ca delivered an interesting tidbit – a 1908 newspaper obit for Annetta Elmhirst, whose gravestone identifies her as Nettie Annetta Elmhirst. A couple of weeks later Ancestry.ca added an "In Memorial" for Annetta, …

‘Bucket list’ is full of holes

During the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021, I didn’t dream about hiking the Inca Trail, camping under the Northern Lights or skydiving (as if). Sure, I missed vacations, but most days my so-called bucket list was much simpler than that. Bliss would have been “dinner and a movie” at our local rep theatre, …

Will it never end?

That question flashed through my brain on a regular basis – usually in full caps – while I was researching Life & Legacy, my book about my grandmother, Ruth (Birdsall) Elmhurst. Sure, I was fully engrossed in the research. After all, my endless forays down family-history rabbit holes were unravelling my own Peterborough County roots …

Messages from my grandmother

Letters flowed from Ruth (Birdsall) Elmhurst’s pen like a fast-moving creek, her quirky penmanship barely keeping pace with her speeding thoughts and earnest observations about the world around her. Ruth, my paternal grandmother, closed several of the missives in my stash of letters by listing the other people she had to write to that evening. …