Thursday was an almost-blue-moon night. I was at a soccer game on the outskirts of town and got to watch the lunar rock slowly change from a pale white to a shiny silver. The more the sun faded, the brighter the moon became. It was quite the show.

In between the moon and sun there was me and the dog watching a soccer final.   (Maybe this isn’t quite true. The dog was more into sniffing than watching  And I don’t want to know about those bones I heard him crunching.)  As the sun set in glorious prairie fashion, a swarm of Canada geese, who’d been feasting in a nearby field of recently cut wheat,  rose up into the pink and purple sky.  It was all quite soul-stirring.  Makes me think of this great prairie song.

Throughout all this, of course, is the soccer game. The green team against the blue team, and I guess in the end, on the eve of a blue moon, the blue team had the advantage.

Prairie skies are special places - add a blue moon and it’s quite surreal.

I hear the next blue moon won’t happen until July, 2015. I plan to attend.

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was a gift - not sure I would have picked it up on my own. However, I did enjoy it very much. There was a touch of Marilyn French in there - one of my all time favorite authors.

It's a spiritual book. I found myself copying out the forty rules as a sort of life-guide. It's not meant to be a fast read. Highly recommended.  I'll have to read her other work, too.


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Happy 145, Canada!

Happy 145th birthday, Canada. How grateful I am for the gift of being Canadian - a gift that my parents gave to me. I was born within the first year of their arrival in this country - back in the fifties.  They were newlyweds - both in their mid 30s - both homeless and grateful for the new opportunities that Canada offered. My little parents - each only about five feet tall - were the proudest Canadians around. They loved everything about this country. The freedom, Trudeau's multi-culturalism, the lakes, the fishing, the mountains, the distances,  and the wonderful friends and neighbours they made along the way.

Canada is my home because my parents chose to move and start their new family here. They never took its gracious compassion to the homeless for granted. I hope Canada continues to be a refuge for the homeless - a place with room for families to grow.

I saw the EuroCup Final on TV this afternoon. My kids didn't care to watch because Germany had been eliminated. On the one hand, I think my dad would be proud of that German gene in his grandkids, but on the other hand, he'd have happily watched Spain beat Italy in Kyiv.  A soccer match is so much better than war.  

I've finally managed to plough through Andreas Kossert's book, Kalte Heimat. This book is a companion to his other book, Damals in Ostpreussen. The books have only whetted my appetite to learn more about this place. I want to go there. In fact, I'm thinking that retracing the steps of my mom's life would be a great retirement project. The towns of my mother's youth have all been renamed - whether in the former Soviet Union or in the former East Prussia. No wonder her new home here in Canada became so important to her. And me - I just wanted to be a plain little Canadian girl. I was so resentful of my parents' hidden past. I wanted grandparents to visit and English spoken at home. But now I'm starting to get it and to appreciate who my parents were, and therefore, to understand more of who I am.

Interesting memoir

The Remains of War: Surviving the Other Concentration Camps of World War II by G. Pauline Kok-Schurgers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was a real page turner. It's a memoir of a nine-year-old Dutch girl's survival during WWII in Sumatra, Indonesia. I had no idea that Dutch civilians lost their freedom over there. But then, I had no idea that the Dutch even had their people in Sumatra. The book is published by iUniverse and is very well written.

For me, even more interesting than the historical setting, is the psychological tension between mother and daughter. What's needed is a follow-up. How did those horrible years affect the children as they became adults?

A memoir doesn't get better than this. Highly recommended. Here's a youtube clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URZfwU...

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Larry Warwaruk's Bone Coulee

Couple of days ago, I spent close to six hours in a hospital waiting room while my daughter had all four of her wisdom teeth pulled out. It was some great, mostly uninterrupted, reading time for me. (Not so great, for my daughter.)

I got to finish up with Larry Warwaruk's novel Bone Coulee. The book's been nominated for a Saskatchewan Fiction Award. He received the same award back in 1998 with Ukrainian Wedding.

I guess I'm prejudiced to like this book because I lived in Saskatchewan during the 1980s (two of my kids were born there) and I love the place. Didn't start out that way, though. I went there prepared to hate it. But my narrow mind was expanded by that glorious sky, vast fields, and the open-hearted people. Saskatchewan's license plates read, "Land of the Living Skies." It really is a magical place.

But Saskatchewan, like other Canadian places, has a dark past which still muddies the present.

After all, the prairies weren't empty when the Europeans arrived.

Warwaruk's book plays with Saskatchewan's assets: the people, the landscape, the history, even the politics. Reading his book made me want to jump into a car and drive out to the prairie to appreciate the quickly disappearing past.

The buffalo, the farming hamlets, and the grain elevators are all gone. Like the quilts in the book, Warwaruk pieces together parts of the past and creates story. And, in spite of dark moments, he offers healing and hope for the future.

My favorite scene happens right in the middle on page 116.

Angela wakes to the sound of a siren. At first she thinks there must be a fire somewhere. She hurries out of bed to join her mother, who's already at the front room window. It's a fire truck. Sid Rigley drives, holding a megaphone out the side window.

"Get out of bed, Esther! Pancake breakfast in the Lion's Den beer gardens."

"He wakes up the town?" Roseanna says.

The siren sounds a second time.

"How about you people?" Sid's voice blares from the megaphone. "Pancake breakfast! Sausage! Eggs! Hash browns! We've even got Kwok Ming at the grill."

Warwaruk's novel captures that small town feeling. It's all there - the First Nations, the East Europeans, the Chinese restaurant. Everyone trying in their own way to survive. Recommended reading for all prairie folk - and those who wish they were.