Marion Agnew

As I said earlier this month, spring feels especially reluctant to show up this year .  And yet, when I look, I can see the signs around me! We're feeding birds again (in spite of the mess they make on the deck) because there's nothing more tragic than a wistful junco on the deck in the morning. They're moving through on their way north, and we want to give them the wherewithal to get there.  Speaking of morning, the sun is coming up to the left of the Pass Lake Gap. We're one month into the season, and the sun will continue to move left until the summer solstice. It's so fun to be able to watch it, even though the sunrises still reflect on lake ice instead of a liquid version of Lake Superior. This morning I heard my first white-throated sparrow! It's also "park the car at the end of the driveway" season. Our driveway is unpaved, so lakes appear as the snow melts, and as I have whined before, this year there's PLENTY OF SNOW TO MELT. A cause for c...

I don't really think of the year in terms of quarters, since I am not living squarely in the world of business and revenue targets and all that. So this is really a fancier way of saying, "How can March be over already? And we're in April?" which I have said many many a time before. Part of my feeling that it must still be February or March is the relentless nature of this winter's snowfall. Luckily my husband recently was setting out on a not-really-necessary tidy of the driveway with the snowblower and discovered a malfunction involving spark plugs, which we got fixed. I mean, the fixing was the lucky part--because the temperatures are stubbornly stuck just below freezing and the storms keep swooping across the continent. And now we're prepped. Part of my feeling of "when is it again?" is from being ill. I caught the flu and an infection and had a dental procedure and my body has said, "Just one thing a day." Now that I'm on the mend,...

I’m incredibly proud that Shawn Mooney, of the BookTube channel Shawn Breathes Books, included Making Up the Gods in several categories as he shared his reading highlights for 2025. His Most Unforgettable Main Character was a tie between Simone and Chen. And Shawn’s comments helped me see how their interactions help illuminate their best and worst qualities. Making Up the Gods appears again in the “most touching passage category,” and in Shawn’s best books of the year. What a humbling honour! ( Here's a link to the episode .) It’s so lovely to keep hearing from people who are getting to know Simone. The book world pays a lot of attention to book launches and that early flush of “latest greatest” publicity. But (I’m learning), books are meant to keep living beyond that short timeframe. I’m very grateful to readers who keep discovering and enjoying my books and recommending them to others. Shawn’s an avid reader, and his channel is a wealth of information about title from many eras. ...

I've mentioned UK writer Iain Robinson before ( here, in relation to notebooks ). I subscribe to his Substack, "This Party's Over," where he keeps a country diary far more extensive than the few observations I write in the morning. He's an activist and teacher besides being writing, and his posts are always thought provoking. It's interesting to see differences and similarities in nature-minded people writing nonfiction elsewhere in the world. Recently (meaning the past few months), of course, global relationships among countries are shifting. In his Country Diary #51, he laments being able to create big changes. Instead: “Going out into nature and responding to its truth feels like the only thing I can do in this troubled, broken age.” drifts Below is a version of the comment I left. I read this six weeks after he wrote it, right around the turn of the year, and I still feel this way. Sometimes I have to force myself to the page, but I need to write. It's...

I posted a shorter version of these thoughts on Instagram a couple of weeks ago and meant to post here, too, because I do like notebooks. Like these. New Notebook Season may be  my favourite season of all Well, yes, it feels mildly ridiculous to post about notebooks when—oh, you know—all this is happening everywhere. However, every Sunday evening I read what I wrote the previous week and I’m astounded at what happened—a forgotten horror here, a small (or even large) joy there. These notebooks bring me, joy, however varied their contents. The notebooks are from Paperblanks, ordered through our local bookstore, Entershine Bookshop. The planner is Hemlock & Oak. All Canadian companies. The one on the left, with robins, is a five-year notebook in which I'm recording nature observations. I got the idea to use a five-year journal from a UK writer I follow on Substack, Iain Robinson. I've been writing these observations for years, and I try to notice more than the temperature. The...

It's still 2026. Early February. Just in case anyone else wondered how many years long January was. Yep, it's hanging over the wire I've had occasion to learn a couple of things recently, and I'm sharing them in case they're also new to you. First. In Ontario at this moment in this Premier's administration, your license and health card expire on your birthday--not every year; every five years. Unless you're nearing 80 (this is not my personal learning, but adjacent learning), in which case, go to Service Ontario. Yes! They expire! And yet! You no longer receive mail or email reminders that your identification is expiring. Or at least you didn't in the autumn of 2025, which is when my IDs expired. I learned all this from a friendly (he really was) Ontario Provincial Police constable whose plate-reader told him that the owner of my car, which I was driving safely, (roughly) under the speed limit on snowy roads, was an unlicensed driver.  Anyway, the frien...

Already mid-January. It's been eventful, but not so much of the interesting kind. More of the workaday kind in my life (and horrific in the world), and talking about those types of events isn't especially helpful.  twisty snowy branches But one thing that I've understood in a different way, after experiencing of those events, is the need for a foundation. In a literal sense, like a foundation for your home, and a figurative one, like something you really need to make your life possible (or okay, that lets you live your life with the ease to which you have become accustomed).  Side note: here's a brief invisible-to-you pause while I searched a couple of things and got sidetracked learning about foundation garments. Sometimes it's interesting to be alive long enough to see times changing. (In the global sense, not so much, but we aren't talking about those events.) My point is that in rural northwestern Ontario, we need a car that does well in snow and icy conditi...