Category: Alberta

Pandemic Journal 12-29/8/2020 — The necessary tedium of writing home improvement uplifted by a visit to a lake, market, garden, river — & bleak news — in short, August

janice williamson1 Comment

I am so very fortunate, I tell myself. Retired and on my own. Not to mention a lifetime of white privilege, class privilege. Location. Location. Settlers have more than a leg up. And now I’m out of the loop of daily care for a young child. I don’t know how I would manage single mothering during COVID. Probably badly. Now I have no one to send to school or not. Home school or not. No classes to prepare. No papers to grade. No schedule to adhere to. The end of summer approaches and I’m writing less, hanging around outside, walking more, leisurely weeding the buckets of thistles and pesky plants that rise up in all this rain and sun.

Pandemic Journal 21/7/2020 – Please Sign My Petition: IMMEDIATELY MANDATE MASKS IN EDMONTON

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Sign the petition here: https://www.change.org/EdmontonMandateMasks2HelpStopCovid19 IMMEDIATELY MANDATE MASKS IN EDMONTON.WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER AND MUST CARE FOR OUR COMMUNITY. Albertans face an uptick in cases of COVID-19 in mid-July. The majority of these new cases cannot be traced to a particular source. Therefore contact tracing is impossible in many instances. We are all… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 21/7/2020 – Please Sign My Petition: IMMEDIATELY MANDATE MASKS IN EDMONTON

Pandemic Journal 23/4/2020 – Lockdown

janice williamson3 Comments

A compendium of dreams, encounters, observations, poems, and questions.... I: Two Pandemic Dreams 21 April, 2020 I awoke early imagining the heads of ducks and geese close up in front of my eyes. Their blunt beaks gnawed gently at my lips and face. I was on the ground looking at the sky. Was I dead?… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 23/4/2020 – Lockdown

Pandemic Journal 22/4/2020 — Earth Day Walks

janice williamson1 Comment

What Brings You Down? Alberta's other contagious and deadly disease - the UCP virus.

Our Alberta provincial government is failing. Unsurprisingly.

They are killing people.

Doctors are fleeing the province. Rural clinics are closing leaving the UCP voters high and dry without medical care. All the better to create a vacuum that will be filled by Kenney's plans to privatize healthcare.

Pandemic Journal 1/4/2020 – of unicorns and contagion

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A meditation on a pandemic life of privilege. As a fairly recent retiree, I was an early adopter of staying at home having followed the sorrowful and ruthless pandemic's progress through China and Asia and then Italy and Spain and Europe and now the hapless USA and Canada and Mexico and on through India - and well all around the globe. Such a long and torturous road. In the hope that poetry is contagious (we know it is therapeutic) -- here is a poem by one of my very favourite poets Phyllis Webb, long-time resident of Salt Spring Island on the wavy west coast edge of Canada's Pacific Ocean. The poem in the video is voiced by yours truly. Behind the voice, you will sense the pandemic hum of the oven baking salmon for dinner, the whirr of the computer cooling down, the whirr of the furnace heating up as the temperature drops to -22C shortly after a snow storm. Such is a lucky life at latitude 53.

Pandemic Journal 27/3/2020 – only connect

janice williamson2 Comments

This pandemic, like a dark bird of history pierced the thin membrane of our personal world. Ripped open we feel the call of friends lost and and found. Their voices sound in our dreams. We bear witness to our loss. Our bounty. And reach across to others. ...In this new era, COVID-19 time, this impulse to connect, an essential element in our well-being, is enabled by our digital technology. Isolated in our homes or wherever we find ourselves, connections stretch out the minutes of our day into a zone of contemporaneous aliveness. We humans peer at each other through machines. Our bodies relax or contort into awkward postures scrunched down on a chair - or standing, our weight on one foot, at the sink.