Category: Uncategorized
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The taxman cometh
REWIND (January 1983) Preparing an income tax return can be as agonizing as going to the dentist. You know it is going to hurt. Making sense of all those scraps of paper tucked inside a Hush Puppies box is an ordeal. Then there are those bills and receipts that you know you received, but cannot …
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Cows won’t hurt you
REWIND (“Rural Routes”, October 1982) Bird hunting is big business these days and local eateries are kept busy feeding hungry hunters. Several days ago my husband and I were interrupted in our noonday meal by a hesitant knock at the kitchen door. We opened the door to a thoroughly wet and frightened young man who…
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Rural Routes
For 25 years, from 1982 to 2007, I wrote a weekly column that appeared in the Portage Daily Graphic and the Herald Leader Press, both published out of Portage la Prairie, MB. Entitled ‘Rural Routes’, the column was mostly about day-to-day life on the farm. In 2000, I self-published a compilation of excerpts from those…
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Three skunk stories
Story No. 1 The first time I saw skunks, I thought they were cute and furry and needed to be saved. I grew up on a farm with my parents and five siblings. We did not have running water; my parents took that big step in 1978, the year K and I were married. We…
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Just a Farmer, Plain and Simple
On June 30 I attended a funeral for a local farmer who died of cancer at the age of 72. My parents lived about a mile from where he and his family lived, less if you cut across the field. There were six children in our family, four in theirs and the youngest three in our…
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SKUNKED
SKUNKED Two days ago, my mother-in-law spotted four baby skunks along the road to our farm and was concerned about their proximity to her yard. I was not empathetic. As I told my husband K, the skunks were not hurting anyone. And besides, baby skunks are cute. That same night, I was awakened by a…
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A penny for my thoughts
Ten years ago, although I can’t believe that much time has passed, my son made a book for his self-initiated 4-H project. He wrote and illustrated the book himself and I took it to the local school to have the pages laminated and coil-bound. The book was titled “If I found a penny”, based on…
Rural Routes, Blog Version 