At the end of December, as the longest night of the year slowly seeps into the room, I light candles and make a Didukh. I weave this keeper of ancestral stories out of dry wheat stalks and distant memories of a sheaf that my grandfather brought into the house on Christmas Eve. “Didukh in the house, trouble out of the house,” he would say as he placed it under the icons framed by rushnyks, embroidered towels that decorated the walls of every room at my grandparents’ place.
Winter and spring have been playing a game of musical chairs lately. Some days winter seems to win. All that pent-up energy, unreleased during the past few months, keeps erupting in mushy clumps. They swirl toward the ground in slow motion as if trying to postpone their inevitable demise. But their fight against gravity is … Continue reading Becoming Spring
I turn off the alarm clock on my phone and burrow deeper into my sleeping bag. I can hear my husband do the same next to me. It’s shortly before seven on the second day of fall and we are on our impromptu canoe trip in Algonquin. After a beautiful misty sunrise paddle the previous … Continue reading Foggy Morning
Stories of Entangled Life 