Savouring Saskatoons When It's Cold Out

 

I had no idea when I picked up a displayed copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, that I’d be reading about saskatoon berries. Because I’ve picked saskatoon berries almost every June for decades now, I’m instantly in love with the message of this book. Saskatoon berries are prolific here on the prairies. 

Slow down! More berries!

This past year had a particularly abundant harvest. My aging canine companion could only walk slowly and I benefited by having more time to pick. It simply amazed me that no one else was out here picking. I managed to bake saskatoon muffins for neighbours on Canada Day and was able to re-establish contact with them. We had saskatoon pie for thanksgiving and look forward to more for Christmas. 

Our serviceberries have served us well and I’m grateful that the berry bushes have been preserved in the ever-shrinking patches of wilderness in this suburban maze of development. After reading Kimmerer’s book, my appreciation of wild berries has not grown, because it was already huge … but my appreciation has been validated.

Local serviceberries, aka saskatoons

Connecting foraging to my ongoing novel research is easy. Hunger created foragers in eastern Europe during the twenties, thirties and forties. My mom and her sisters were expert mushroom, berry pickers and linden blossom gatherers. Even lowly weeds like thistle and dandelion offered sustenance. We’re surrounded by abundance.  

Never mind the political message. Walking in nature, picking berries and sharing them with friends feels good!

Local chokecherries make great syrups

Holodomor in 2025

Yesterday was Holodomor Remembrance Day and I remembered by visiting the art sculpture set up on the Manitoba legislative grounds. Flowers, sheaths of wheat, loaves of bread and sunflower seeds were scattered at its base. 

   

Without collectivization, and the 'liquidation' of the kulaks,  there would have been no famine. My kulak mom, born 1919, was 13 when rural Ukrainians were robbed of the means to feed themselves. Stalin sent his men to steal every last seed of grain from the farmers.  He was determined to prove that communism worked and that the USSR could be a world super power. 

It’s often believed that Stalin said, “The death of one (man) is a tragedy. The death of millions, a statistic.” (This has not been proven.)  It’s a powerful insight, no matter who said it. 

My mom and her siblings, considered enemy kulaks, had managed to leave only a few months before the government-ordered theft began. My grandfather’s exit visa, however, was not ‘in order.’  As he fumbled in bureaucratic hell, the famine broke out. I can only imagine what it would have been like for him … a fugitive, always on the run, risking the lives of others who would let him hide on their farms … his wife buried in Siberia, his children cared for by unwilling family in East Prussia. He avoided being a statistic of the famine, but not of the 1937 terror.

Now it’s 2025. Ukrainian people are again targeted. As writers and as readers, we can utilize the power of story to help the world see these deaths as tragedies and not statistics. 

I recommend the following books for anyone interested in learning more about the Holodomor.

Winterkill by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest

The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken

The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh. 

 

Hitched a Ride Once

Funny how the mind works. I woke up this morning with a two-decade old memory stuck in my head. So I had to go through some old photos until I found tangible evidence that I wasn’t just dreaming. 

Back in 2004, I hitched a ride with a Ukrainian farmer and his shepherd dog across some furrowed farmland outside of Zhytomyr, close to where my mom was born before collectivization, near fields that my grandfather ploughed.

Poor Ukraine. Always struggling to survive. Borderland of trouble. It’s a wonder anything grows

on such a blood-soaked land.

I’m a city person, born and raised where streets are paved, dogs are leashed and streetlights keep the night away. But some of that kulak farm blood still runs through my veins.

Peace to you, dear farmer. Thanks for the ride. Thanks for sharing your rich land with a stranger. I still feel the connection. 

Red stone in a field
once the foundation of
my grandfather's windmill

 

About War

I've recently read two memoirs about young people in Germany during and immediately after the Second World War. German Boy, A Child in War by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel came out back in 2000, while Waltraud, A True Story of Growing up in Nazi Germany, came out in 2023 and is written by the protagonist's daughter, Tammy Borden.

There’s an eight-year age gap between the protagonists. Waltraud is born in 1927 and Wolfgang in 1935. Both stories have a ‘happy ending’ when they find their way to the USA. Wolfgang leaves Bremerhaven in January, 1951 crossing  the Atlantic on the USNS George W. Goethals. Waltraud leaves in September of the same year on the USS General R. M. Blatchford. Both arrive in New York. 

My parents also exited Europe via Bremerhaven. They traveled on the Beaverbrae in July, 1953 bound for Quebec. They’d been born in 1918 and 1919 and thus experienced the war, not as children, but as adults who ended up as Soviet POWs.  With Canada’s Remembrance Day on the horizon, once again I feel the familiar mixed emotions. Remembrance Day does not address the horrors of war. It’s about remembering the courage of soldiers, allied soldiers.

It doesn't remember the others who wore no uniform. Those affected by hunger, disease, and loss … loss of home, of family, of careers, of education and of hope.  These two memoirs remind us that it’s not just soldiers in uniforms who have courage. It's not just soldiers who suffer and die. War fails everyone.

Local History with Big Impact

UPDATE:  Launch at McNally Robinson's, Thursday, Nov. 20/25 

Harriet Zaidman showcases the nuanced views about abortion that continue to complicate what should be a straight-forward issue. Our bodies are our own. As teenaged Leesa struggles with her unfortunate predicament, we learn about Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the man who courageously fought for women’s right to choose and about the anti-abortionists, including church-based evangelicals, along with activists like Joe Borowski.

There’s an interesting subplot, focused on a young woman’s murder back in the eighties, where the wrong man was sent to prison. It underlines our city’s convoluted need to appear just without necessarily doing what's right.

Struggling marriages, a woman’s need for financial independence, and the lack of accountability for young men with big egos and sexual aggression are deftly handled by Zaidman.  No wonder her previous novels (Strike, 1919 about the union movement in Winnipeg and Second Chances, about the polio epidemic here in Winnipeg) received national awards. With What Friends are For, Zaidman’s social commentary continues to be spot-on.

Set in my home city of Winnipeg, back in 1983, What Friends are For, presents, with tantalizing tension, the still-hot-button issue of abortion. Told through the eyes of fifteen-year-old, Leesa, I was reminded of the strong emotions this topic brought to media, politics, religious communities and even to my own dinner table. I remember getting up and leaving the table when one of my uncles, a known womanizer who’d served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, began name-calling Dr. Morgentaler.  Yes, the eighties were filled with such characters and such tensions … even here in Winnipeg.  

Zaidman’s protagonist, Leesa, is bombarded from both sides of the issue and as a reader I lived through the stress of her fear and the strength of her conviction. Kudos to the author for re-opening a door to a topic that continues to be contentious.