Clara Leask is a woman with a foot in two camps. A teacher by profession, Clara also was a young mother during the era when every mother stayed home. There were no fast food restaurants and people just didn’t eat ‘out.’ Moms cooked, three meals a day. Moms made lunches and kids went off to…

During the rest of June and all of July, John Hunter will be extending his generous hand to link his family of patients to their new optometrist. It’s important to Dr. John Hunter that the 2000 people in his practice are personally introduced and connected to the young woman who will become the caregiver of…

Let’s go back, if you will, to 1974. Yikes, indeed! That’s 33 years ago. Well, I was 26, and my first husband and I had just bought our first house, a 900 square foot poured concrete palace on Penetang Street. We loved it and our neighbours and the east end captured our hearts. I was…

When the Midland Fire Department reached the scene on Tuesday, May 8, most of the landmark Huron Ouendat [Indian] Village was in ashes. The village, situated near Little Lake, beside the Midland Museum, was a completely wooden village… it has been a landmark since it was built 60 years ago. Literally hundreds of thousands of…

I’m certainly a believer when it comes to the immediate threat to our planet of Global Warming. After hearing Al Gore and watching the incredible supporting graphics offered through An Inconvenient Truth, I was swayed. When the film ended with Melissa Etheridge’s title song, written especially for the film and bearing the same name… well,…

When my sister and I were little our grandmother made us Nurse’s Uniforms. They consisted of Nurse’s Hats, white with two black stripes; aprons with a red cross on the bib; a thermometer and a stethoscope. We played for hours, closing off the bedroom hallway of our bungalow, each of the three bedrooms becoming a…

You just never know about people you’ll meet. There I am, skipping into Second Cup for a couple of lattes to take to a meeting. And there, quietly sitting at his little G4 titanium Mac PowerBook is a young man. Well, Mac users tend to gravitate towards each other so while my milk was frothing,…

Darlene Corkett is a registered shiatsu therapist and acupuncturist. For 12 years she’s been in private practice near Craighurst. She has a number of clients in their senior years and she loves their spirit. As she said to me this week, “I haven’t heard one of them say they just can’t wait til they get…

A few months ago Kid Two brought home An Inconvenient Truth, the movie that won Al Gore an Academy Award. As we watched it, two things hit me like a ton of bricks. The first: why am I truly just taking the enormity of this issue to my heart now? Why has it taken so…

Last fall, I was walking a Caribbean beach with a group of business people. We were on a Small Business Cruise and had the day to roam sandy beaches together. Terry Coles, one of the cruise organizers, turned to me on the beach and said: “If you could be walking here with any famous person,…