Recently, I've been having a longing for books I read in early to late childhood and have experienced both the desire to reclaim them again, and the fear that they won't be the same as they are in my memory. One of the earliest stories that hooked me on mysteries was Peggy Parish's Key to the Treasure, but now of course, I'll read it with an eye to how it interprets and represents native American culture and history. I once read an extremely creepy story called The Tibetan Box, but I can't recall the author's name--I only remember the nightmares, and the desire to be scared like that again. Why? What was in the box? I can't remember! And then there was a story about a dollhouse that came to life and the characters who lived inside it. I could never get the story quite right in my memory, but after a gap of decades (!) I remembered the author was Andre Norton and the story (book?) was called The Octagon House. Wrong. It was actually Octagon Magic. I've tracked several of my old favourites down through Abe Books, and I'm about to find out whether childhood is better left alone. Wish me luck!
I spent a cold couple of weeks in Toronto, hearing news about how cold it was in other parts of the country and around the world. The famous frozen bubble experiment was conducted in the prairie province I grew up in - Saskatchewan. I was once accustomed to bracing prairie winters, but the mildness of the Colorado winter has eroded my ability to face those once-familiar temperatures without complaint. I swallow my complaints as I think about winter coming to the refugee camps I wrote about in A Dangerous Crossing: Souda, Moria, Kara Tepe. The UNHCR stretched to the limit as it attempts to winterize tents and inadequate shelters, tents catching fire from camp stoves used for heat. And families waiting in the cold for a future that promises only uncertainty and greater suffering. And as Esa and Rachel discover on the Greek islands, the welcome that waits for refugees around the world is as cold and brutal as the winter. That's the story I tell in A Dangerous Crossing.
Image is of Petra camp at the foot of Mt. Olympus, taken by Paul Carr in 2016. UNHCR efforts in Greece I was a teenage fan of the band U2, and this was the first U2 song I fell in love with, but certainly not the last. I remember the New Year's Day video, the cold, blunt, wintry landscape, and I lived in the Ravenscroft house where the nearby park suggested something similar. I had teenage angst to spare and even then was more likely to look back than forward. I think this comes of having moved so much. You're always looking back at the place you left, as a means of settling into the place you've now arrived at. I lived in the Ravenscroft house longer than I've ever lived anywhere and many of my happiest memories are memories of growing up in that house with my three siblings. A tv show called The New Music had just launched and U2 was all the rage, and New Year's Day had that wonderful solidly pinging piano that felt like it was knocking against your head and your heart at the same time. Without having the slightest idea what that song was about, it became about my own life. I associate it even now with a time and a set of circumstances I can never get back. Instead of resolutions and vaulting ambitions for myself, New Year's Day -- the song and the time -- always makes me think of the Ravenscroft house. And the view from my sister's window looking out at the snow all the way down to the neighbourhood creek. It's something that Esa might have felt in the silent snowbound vastness of Algonquin Park in The Language of Secrets. I try to make myself -- and Esa -- turn the page, move on, accept the forward motion of life. But I love the intangible, bittersweet happiness that New Year's Day recalls. And sometimes, there's a quiet grace in looking back.
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