Rural Routes, Blog Version

My Christmas cactus is ahead of its time.

It bloomed six weeks before Christmas and now it is blooming again six weeks before Easter.

It does this quite consistently from year to year. I know that I might be able to change the timing by changes to watering, location and temperature, but I am content to leave things as they are.

FOUND IN THE BASEMENT

We believe that this is a fruit juicer.

Cut up the fruit – an orange, perhaps, or a lemon – place it in the bottom of the container, then press down with the handle. The pulp is forced to the bottom, while the juice flows through the sieve and can then be poured out via the lip on the side.

MEET LYNN

Lynn is our barnyard matriarch, a calico with attitude and the scars to prove it.

Like her mother before her, she remains somewhat aloof from the general barn cat population. She is never far away, it seems, but does not share her lodging with others. We see her coming out of the bush every morning for breakfast.

On sunny winter days, she likes to sit on our south-facing doorstep. Or on the deck railing, as pictured here.

Her best friend is the dog Jaeger, She runs to greet him whenever he goes outside. A preen and a purr and she’s off to the bush once again.

“When the Music’s Over” by Peter Robinson, McClelland & Stewart, 2016

I believe that I picked this up at McNally Robinson. Truth is, my piles of books to read are so high that when I get to the next one in the pile, I cannot always remember where I got it.

“When the Music’s Over” is an Inspector Banks novel. Banks has been promoted to Detective Superintendent and his first case involves decades-old sexual assault allegations against an aging celebrity entertainer. Meanwhile, D.I. Annie Cabot investigates the case of a teenager beaten, raped and thrown out of a moving vehicle.

“The Way The Crow Flies” by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alfred A. Knoff Canada, 2003, Hardcover

I purchased this one last summer at a used book sale at Margaret Laurence House in Neepawa. It cost me $1.

Many years ago, I had started this book, but never finished it. There are very few books that I never finish. I thought that a loonie was a cheap price to try again.

I found myself struggling again during the first third of the book and I am not sure why. MacDonald writes well about a Canadian Air Force family stationed in “Centralia” in the early 1960s. It was the time of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the race to land a man on the moon. The McCarthy’s – Jack and Mimi and their children Mike and Madeleine – lead what could be described as a charmed life, but underneath the surface run the themes of child sexual abuse, wartime atrocities, espionage and murder.

At 712 pages, it is a hefty read. After approximately 500 pages, the scene shifts to twenty years later and the mysteries of the past are solved in the last 200. I was reading faster now, but again am not sure why. Time seems endless when you are child and then speeds up as we age. Was this what MacDonald was trying to show?

There are parallels with the Steven Truscott case, which I believe the author intended. The convicted boy did not commit the crime. But while Madeleine’s sleuthing unearths a believable solution, that solution is not proven anywhere other than in her own head.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, McClelland and Stewart, 1985

I KNOW that I bought this one at McNally Robinson last year. I had read the book many years ago when it was first published, but the copy had been lent to someone and never returned. When the television series began to make waves, I decided to buy a new copy.

My oldest child, who was born the year this book was first published, says that Atwood is “eerily prescient” and I find the novel more chilling now than when I read it the first time. It was chilling enough then.

In the “historical notes” at the end of the book, scholars are studying the recorded tale as a means of learning more about an earlier time in the world’s history. The Gileadean regime did not last forever, a comforting reminder that “this too shall pass”.

BE MY VALENTINE

School artwork circa 1967.