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Tag: R.C. Highcroft - page 2
Exploring the woods behind the cottage was the ideal way to prospect for discoveries to record in Grandpa’s ledger of annual revelations. And Granny and I never missed an opportunity to contribute. “At first, we used to walk side by side along the footpath near the Wash. But our practice … changed … [when] Granny..
“On Friday afternoon, Grandpa was already sitting in the veranda when I reached the top of the steps. He had arrived from the city while I was out fishing. In one hand he held a bottle of Old Vienna. An expertly slanted glass was in the other. Everything looked right, but he shot me a..
“From age seven I was the only anglophone, adult or child, Janine permitted inside the house. Yet extreme poverty was not the cause of her reticence. As I stood awkwardly on her threshold for the first time, she made the situation plain. ‘Outside, we’re polite. We speak English in Port or with city folks. But..
“I was out for a pensive afternoon on my own. Fishing would be little more than a pretext for laying claim to a moment of solitude. I looked around the tranquil inlet where I found myself. The clouds were high, and the sky was still bright. A few other watercraft were visible far across the..
The setting of Grand-père Évariste’s waterside farmhouse calls to mind this striking evocation of the region from the Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve website – https://georgianbaybiosphere.com/ – “The Bay is an amazing resource we must share; seasonal cottager, transient tourist and year rounders… and we must all respect the Bay to ensure the next ‘seven generations’..
Here is Providence Point as it looked by the time Rob had grown old enough to begin imagining it might one day be his own. But in fact its surroundings and appearance changed little from the earliest days. “A local couple had first started to build what later became the Point. It would have been..
“Granny’s craft was a nimble dingy twelve feet long. Its enamelled canvas skin was permanently watertight. There was no need to moor it at the dock until it “took up” in the spring. In May, Granny could go straight out for a row without waiting. This was her chance to spread her wings after a..
No peaceful activity rivals fishing for twenty minutes on an isolated bay in a boat of one’s own. Unless of course life gets too hectic, in which case wisdom prescribes at least an hour! And so as soon as Robbie took possession of his first rowboat, he would set out to spend … “… most..
It was agreed by all that Granny had weathered some kind of adventure on the boathouse dock one afternoon long before Robbie’s birth. A rattlesnake had reportedly been involved, but the details of the story were hazy: “In my parents’ version, my grandmother had frantically shooed it away with an oar from her rowboat. In..
Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science) warned us in the 1990s: “Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.” Her view picks up on Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century concept of an “invisible hand” that may bring about results that bear..
The word gigil (sounds like ghee-gill) is a term from the Philippines’ Tagalog language, recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to an intense feeling that makes us clench our hands, grit our teeth, or reach out to touch something that is irresistibly adorable. Gigil seems to be the perfect word to describe Robbie’s..