If blizzards bluster outside your window, steal a moment from the chill to remember that the sun will return, pouty old revenant that he may seem now. In this bit from the title story in my latest book, As The Canoe Tips, I try to capture what happens to us when we are re-sunned. If you like the passage, I hope you'll think of adding my book to your Christmas shopping list. You can sample more of it by clicking on the book's cover farther down this page.
What is it about some Ontarians sunned under the first hot day late in a Canadian spring? Warmth gongs a deep bell in us and calls us North. Life’s pulse comes again and asks again like summer. A keen flute thrills in our blood and one day we smell pine resin and wafting lake wind right at the corner of Yonge and Bloor. If ever we have spent vacation days “up North,” its magnet never ceases to draw the iron of our joy. We flock north to sandpiper away summer afternoons, pertly trotting narrow beaches, hiking Georgian Bay’s wind-swooned rocks, inspecting scooped-out inlets along Lake Superior, paddling beeperless canoes along granitic shorelines sculpted by a hand far defter than Brancusi’s. Come, says camp or cottage. Come, my chilly, winter-weary ones. Come, and I will lull you warm in the lap of my days. Come, there will be spans of sun on cheeks and little arms, and running, hallooing plunges off the end of the boy-screaming dock into the water-fighting, girl-kersplashing waves. Freckles will come out to play and so will your heart.
© 2005
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“Casselman’s Monty Python Universe of Erudite Silliness” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Sat. Nov. 12, 2005
A Holiday Gift of Laughter in bookstores across Canada or buy it online ................................................................................................................
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