Marion Agnew

Last month I mentioned that I have had a bunch of things to take care of and doing so would require me to learn and make mistakes and generally feel like a fool. Air quality 8 Yup, still happening. And also, summer has arrived (mostly with June 21 on the calendar), and with it, fires. We've had air quality of 11 (giving me a ghoulish giggle in a Spinal Tap "the dial goes all the way to 11" way), which is not optimal.  Worse, we were experiencing a heat dome, with temperatures above 40C (which is a lot in Fahrenheit), with humidity. Homes and other buildings (and most people) here aren't prepared for those temperatures.  Add in the smoke, and we've had some stifling days. The kinds of days when you watch the grass growing and you're antsy to take out the trees (more and different ones!) that are blocking paths, but that type of outdoor work is definitely not advisable.  As I travel to and from town working on those "boy I feel ridiculous" projects, I...

Oh, May. What a month.  This is what luck looks like. Many things happened. Mostly spring-related. In spring, our driveway becomes a viscous (and also vicious but mostly viscous) mixture of mud and snow. To keep the driveway from developing deep ruts (and to ensure that my Corolla can get out safely), I park near the end, where it joins the asphalt street. A neighbour suggested (correctly) that I shouldn't park directly IN the driveway in the (unlikely) event that emergency vehicles need to come in. Fair enough. So I didn't. I found a grassy spot and parked in the grass, under a tall spruce. When my husband and I ran errands one Monday, we noted that the driveway was fairly firm under our boots, and we chatted about the huge woodpecker holes in the trunk of the spruce. I looked up: "Yeah, but it's hanging in there--cones at the top, and the needles are green." He agreed it would probably hang in there until an autumn storm.  You can see where this is going, probab...

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...