Sunday was my annual trip to Niagara Region to get asparagus from Redbud Farm. I returned with 20 pounds - enough for me and to fill orders from other grateful urbanites. After a wonderful day with my Redbud friends not to mention the great spread they put on for lunch, I wasn’t really up to cooking. However, I had to get some more asparagus into me.

Each army marshals its troops underground during winter, preserving energy while working out strategy for their four-way struggle for supremacy over stolen land.

The established colonizer of this land calls itself the ground elder. At the seasonal dawn, its soldiers bore exploratory tunnels in every direction, wringing life from anything in their earthy path. Warmth and moisture lure underground warriors skyward. They burst through the surface on recon missions, looking for space to settle. Their first taste of CO2 is jarring, but like defecting spies, it’s not long before none of these invaders contemplates a return behind the soil curtain. Instead, they don the green and white camouflage uniform of other aboveground armies and continue their menacing ways, choking the locals and other settlers seeking control over the same plot. Not content to dominate underground and on the surface, they erect sky-high flashy flag-flowers, a propaganda assault to remind others of their importance. The locals rename them goutweed, demonstrating disdain for their conquerer. Ground elders, though, are as oblivious to the slight as the English are to Canada’s Indigenous populations.

Law is a tool. Lawyers and judges have a responsibility to talk and write clearly so that others can effectively use the tool.

In my effort to eat as much asparagus as possible while it’s fresh, here’s another take on it.

Tomorrow, and for the four days that follow, I will rise with the sun to raise money for Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).  If you’d like to contribute, please click here. 

Why am I doing this? Read on. 

Not going to lie - at 58, I find myself starting over again socially. Oh, there are exceptions - good friends who’ve hung in with me through it all - the relationship with Jack, his long illness, my COVID response, my changing life since. I’m grateful for them. But all my life events, coupled with everyone else’s life’s events, have me with open spots on my dance card.

If you know me at all, you’ll know I take action when action is needed, so I’m working hard to fill up my Favourites spot again on my car phone.

If you find yourself in the same position, here are a few tips.

If you know me at all, you know that May begins my annual asparagusathon. I don’t eat the stuff any other time of the year. But for a month, it’s about the only vegetable I want.

You can join me as I enjoy the bounty of my asparagus-growing friends’ farm soon but for now, I bought some of the green gold at the grocery store. I was also excited to see whole cooked PEI lobsters on the shelves of my little Metro and decided the perfect dinner would be lobster tacos with fresh Ontario asparagus.

Here’s how that all got to the plate.

Friday marked the best day of spring for me - I saw the first gaggle of goslings on the Humber River.

Both goose and gander are remarkably attentive to their charges. But it is short-lived. At three to four weeks, the goslings are mostly self sufficient, although they don’t reach reproductive maturity for a couple of years.   

How lucky, though - they parent for one month in every twelve and have the rest of the time to hang out as a couple and travel with their friends.

On this mother’s day, I think of my own mother and her prolonged parenting duties. Forty years ago this September, she burned rubber leaving me standing in the parking lot at McMaster University. She’d been a full-time mother for - wait for it - 34 years!

Hydro polls at Pape and Danforth began 2025 screaming“How to Fold a Fitted Sheet.” For your $10, in one hour, you could wow yourself and your friends with a new skill. I imagine an event in someone’s living room, all 10 attendees sipping wine from stemless glasses to avoid spillage while whipping bedlinens into submission. Other than the wine, which is my embellishment, I cannot think of anything more tedious. And less useful for me.