Letters from Rona / Sort by date

We were dressing for a party while a summer storm drenched the city. Trees swayed and creaked in the wind; rain lashed the bedroom windows. It pelted down with such noisy, wall-beating force, I could have sworn someone was draining a bathtub on the third floor, where no tub had ever existed. "What a stinker!" I said to my husband as I clipped my favourite earrings into place. "Couldn't you swear you were standing in the middle of that rain?" [more]

This time last year, my husband and I had 10 nieces and nephews---a full complement, we assumed. With our respective siblings well past 50, we'd begun buying onesies for the next generation. Then a couple of months ago, my sister Joyce adopted the two lively and loveable girls you see with me here ---effervescent Birtukan (left), who's just started kindergarten, and watchful Almaz, in grade four. I knew right away, with disarming force, was that these two sisters from the other side of the world---born in a mud-floored hut, raised until now in an orphanage---had already claimed their place in my life just by being their resilient and endearing selves. [more]

Until this morning I didn't know anemones from amaryllis and never even heard of camas, but I have the good fortune to be in Victoria as spring gardens come into their own, and to be walking its leafy streets with my hostess and friend Maxine, who has ensured that I don't miss the last Easter lilies or the Monet intensity of massed bluebells seen from afar. We've mostly been talking about serious things: the eternal complications of family, the vulnerability of loved ones we once trusted would always be part of our world. One minute we're pondering about some devastating illness or other. The next minute it's "Look at those rhodos!" [more]

Assignment: delve into a $12 million sex discrimination case for Toronto Life magazine. Writer: young woman with no agenda or interest in gender disparity. Result: a feminist conversion and a story that says what older women with big jobs have been saying for years over a second glass of wine. However the case unfolds, that's news. [more]

No matter what field you're in or how accomplished you are, there will be times when you find yourself perplexed by a challenge you've never faced before. So you turn to a trustworthy pro with the contacts or the know-how to point you in the right direction. A person like my friend Leslie, a busy self-employed consultant who gets a buzz from sharing what she's learned. [more]

"I love the word 'affair'," said a friend who's had many more illicit escapades than I will ever know. She had just made her way, with a walker and great deliberation, to the favourite armchair where she sat draped in white terrycloth. She looked through me as if to the scene of some long-ago tryst. Then she looked straight at me with a smile that was equal parts mischief and maternal concern. "You should have an affair," she announced. [more]

I dismissed Earth Hour as an empty symbolic gesture. Why sit for an hour in the dark when the real challenge is breaking wasteful habits like running the washer for a single pair of jeans? I figured I would break those habits---someday. Then my home lost power for more than 15 hours. And I learned how emotionally dependent I've become on electricity at my command. [more]

When I was a child, my memory was like a kid's closet---I could pretty much eyeball the works. Now it's a crazy jumble of milestones that no one else alive remembers (the time, to the minute, of my sister's birth in 1953) and stuff you'd think no reasonable person could remember (jingles for defunct cleaning products). [more]

Sometime in her 50s my mother happened on a dusty box of Tampax that she'd tucked under the bathroom sink God knows when and thought to herself with no small degree of puzzlement, "Hmm, it's been eons since I had any call for one of those." If there's a gene for a menopause from heaven, the kind that tiptoes in unnoticed, she didn't pass it on to me. Yet in midlife I too lost a part of my psychic self while thinking of more important things. I used to be one of those people who are always fretting over some imagined illness or other. I figured I was stuck with the hypochondria habit that had dogged my steps like a persistent panhandler with a fake hard-luck story. Then one day I turned around and it had vanished. [more]

So there you are, a grownup with at least a couple of the following: job, mortgage, vet bills, kid. You have friends who laugh at your jokes, colleagues who ask your advice and may even think of you as their mentor. You also have a family. And when you're with them, you're not your usual assured adult self. You revert to the child you used to be as if pulled by invisible hands. At least you're not playing this game by yourself---your siblings know all the moves and share your wild delusion that someone can win this contest. [more]

It's my firm conviction that no one should call me "Sweetie" who has never shared my bed or at least a life-changing confidence, but I make an exception for Sarah, who owns one of the few stores around where it's still fun to shop. Sarah sells every kitchen gadget you can possibly imagine, plus hundreds of other mysterious gizmos you had no idea you needed---until she explains, with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old and the authority of Oprah, how a piece of cleverly engineered plastic saved her all kinds of time and trouble. [more]

It's been seventeen years since a piece of my prose inspired a week or so of headline-making fury. A Toronto Sun columnist accused me of "pathetic, whining, whacko, feminist claptrap." A radio host denounced my "evil, vile pamphlet dripping with slime." Irate callers lambasted the Ontario Women's Directorate for having the temerity to publish a 35-page booklet on non-sexist language, anonymously written by me. I've never felt more reviled---or less visible. I would read the morning paper in my bathrobe, wondering what new slurs were coming my way from people who had no idea I existed. [more]