Late September
It's a frosty late September morning: I have made a fire in the woodstove for the first time in months. Joe is off hunting again, the kids are still sleeping and I'm curled up beside the stove reading Wayne Johnston's "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams". What a wonderful read! It's a novel about Joey Smallwood and newspaper columnist Sheilagh Fielding (who I don't believe existed in real life - Sheilagh that is, not Joey). The writing is powerful and speaks to this kid from rural Atlantic Canada. For instance, here on pages 211 and 212, when Joey returns home after five years in New York:
It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions, but strange and real as towns seem when you pass through them on your way to somewhere else, towns that you have never seen before but that seem remindful of some not-quite-remembered other life. A kind of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no subject and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn't.
That was me, exactly, in the spring of 1978. My thoughts and feelings during that drive home have never left me and to have them reflected back to me with such precision in a book astounds me.
9:05:58 AM 
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