Another Controversial Winnipeg Statue

Recent events have initiated a controversy about whether the statue of Queen Victoria should have a place on the Manitoba Legislature grounds. When a statue of Louis Riel was erected on the legislative grounds many years ago it caused a huge controversy.

The statues of Queen Victoria and Louis Riel aren’t the only ones in Winnipeg which have been a source of controversy. Another is the statue of Gandhi which stands just behind the Human Rights Museum. Gandhi was a political leader famous for his acts of civil disobedience against British colonial power during India’s fight for independence.

Statue of Gandhi at The Forks in Winnipeg

His statue was a gift from the Indian government to Winnipeg’s Human Rights Museum in 2004, although the statue was only put in its current place in 2010. The artist who created the statue is Ram Vanji Sutor.

With my Australian visitor Sandy at the Gandhi statue

A Black Lives Matter group in Winnipeg has started a petition to have the Gandhi statue removed. They say Gandhi was a racist who considered Blacks as sub-human, often calling them uncivilized and kaffirs (a disparaging term). According to them Gandhi believed whites should be the predominant race in South Africa.

Some people from the Punjabi community of Winnipeg also have a petition circulating to have the Gandhi statue taken down. They accuse Gandhi of not only being racist but also a pedophile citing an article in The Guardian that states after Gandhi’s wife had died he took to sharing his bed with naked young women in order to test his self-control and commitment to celibacy.

Gandhi strides along a section of York Avenue that guides people into The Forks area. That section of the street was renamed Mahatma Gandhi Way in 2013 by the City of Winnipeg.

Controversy about a statue of Gandhi is not unique to Winnipeg. There have been demands to remove the Gandhi statue at Carleton University in Ottawa for the same reasons outlined by the Black Lives Matter group here. Jagmohan Humar a professor at Carleton and a former president of the Gandhi Peace Council says while it is true Gandhi made racist remarks as a young lawyer in South Africa he later recanted them and championed diversity and fought for justice for all.

The same article in The Guardian cited by the Punjabi community says there is no evidence Gandhi ever had sex with the young women who shared his bed and they bore him no ill will. Ian Jack who writes the Guardian article claims that while Gandhi’s actions were egotistical and misguided it would be a shame if they eradicated his legacy as a leader who used non-violence as an effective means to bring about change, a man who inspired other civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Junior to take up the path of non-resistance.

Family visitors pose with the Gandhi statue during a walking tour

The controversial statue of Queen Victoria in Winnipeg has been toppled and the discussion about whether it will be replaced is ongoing. The controversial statue of Louis Riel was eventually moved to a different location and a new one made to take its place. It will be interesting to see what will happen with the statue of Gandhi.

I have written a number of articles about how we might approach controversial statues and other pieces of public art.

A Possible Alternative to Tearing Down Statues

Time to Stop Honoring People With Statues?

The Great Statue Debate

Power For Winnipeg

Recently we went on a hike to see what remains of the old Pinawa Dam and Generating Station built between 1903 and 1906. It was designed to produce much needed electricity for the city of Winnipeg.

The dam harnessed the hydro electric potential of the Winnipeg River.

There are historical markers around the site that explain how the dam was built in a rough unsettled area with no roads or bridges or railway lines. The construction crew, many of them new immigrants from Scandinavia and England, did back-breaking work under dangerous and risky conditions for around 10 cents an hour, putting in ten hour days year round.

Building the dam was quite an engineering feat

Up to 75 teams of horses were used to haul materials to the site and machines driven my steam power played an important role in the dam’s construction. Equipment was brought to Pinawa over river ice in winter and by boat in summer. Logs placed side by side across marsh and bog provided roads where necessary.

This section of the dam looked like an old Roman aqueduct to me

The Pinawa Hydro Dam cost over $3,000,000.00 to build which would be about 90 million in today’s currency. The concrete dams accounted for a third of that cost.

The Pinawa Dam was one of the first to be developed in such a cold climate anywhere in the world

60,000 volts of power from the Pinawa plant was transmitted to Winnipeg for the first time on June 9, 1906. The facility remained in operation till the early 1950s when it was replaced by a new power plant near Seven Sisters Falls. The town of Pinawa was established in order to create a home community for those who built and operated the power plant. The electricity those Pinawa residents worked so hard to provide made it possible for Winnipeg to grow from a small town to a thriving city.

Trees and vegetation are starting to cover some parts of the old dam

There is kind of stark beauty about the abandoned dam in its lovely natural setting

Other posts……..

The Yangtze River Three Gorges Dam

Getting to Know Thomas Edison

The Chicago of the North

A Firehall That Looks Like A Castle

I actually stopped to take a photo of this old fire hall in St. Boniface because it had the date 1907 on it. That is the year my grandfather immigrated to Canada. I have written a book inspired by his rather incredible immigration experience called Lost on the Prairie.

While the date on the building caused me to stop initially…. as I walked around the more than a century-old structure at 202 Rue Dumoulin looking at it from different angles I became intrigued and wanted to learn more about it.

I discovered the fire hall was built to replace an earlier one constructed in 1904. It was designed by Victor Horwood who also designed the St. Boniface City Hall which stands directly behind the fire hall. The station featured two towers. The taller one was used for drying fire hoses and the smaller one was a bell tower. The tops of the two towers were designed to give the feel of a medieval castle.

The Fire Hall in 1910- with horses and wagons serving as the ‘fire trucks’ of their day– Photo from the Manitoba Archives

The fire hall had a full basement and a two-storey stable for the Percheron horses. The roof was metal and plain beige brick covered the outside. Inside there were fir floors, a tin ceiling, plaster walls and a metal spiral staircase connecting the floors. Originally the building had three arched front doors and the name of the station was above them.

A fire brigade gathers outside the St. Boniface Fire Hall in 1914

The building had a dormitory space for the firefighters, a place to keep fire fighting equipment, a workshop and storage for hay for the horses. There was a traditional fire pole reaching from the third floor where the firefighters slept to the first floor where the wagons and horses were kept. The station was equipped with steam heat, electricity and sewer.

The back of the station

The station was still operational in 1968 when its staff helped to fight the fire at the St. Boniface Basilica but in the 1970s the building was converted from a fire hall to a museum and by 2010 was only being used for storage. This last year spring it was sold despite the efforts of local citizens and history buffs to prevent that from happening.

Postcard of the Fire Hall from the digital collection at the Winnipeg Public Library

The St. Boniface Fire Hall has been deemed a historical building so it can not be demolished.

Other posts…………

Living at the Hospital

Lunch at an Old Train Station

Between Dog and Wolf

Patio For Breakfast

We were so excited about patios being re-opened on Saturday that we decided to try a breakfast place that was new to us. We were feeling pretty confident after getting our second dose of the vaccine but were happy to note all the serving personnel in masks, a sign-in system before we were seated, and tables placed at a generous distance from one another.

We biked over to The Juneberry in Old St. Vital and used the contactless digital menu to choose our breakfasts on our phones.

The Juneberry menu is an interesting mix of more traditional fare and some Asian influenced offerings. Dave went for the classic breakfast and was especially happy with the generous portion of Saskatoon jam.

I tried the breakfast banh mi, a nod to a Vietnamese classic I had enjoyed on our trip to that country. It was served on a fresh fluffy baguette and stuffed with scrambled eggs, housemade lemongrass pork sausage, sauteed mushrooms, zingy pickled carrots and cucumbers, thin radish rounds, seeded jalapenos, cilantro and spicy mayo. It was fantastic but I could only eat half of it.

We opted to share some baby potatoes made with chermoula- a kind of Morrocan relish.

The service was great and it was uplifting to hear the joyful chatter at the tables all around us. One didn’t want to eavesdrop but most of the other patrons were clearly delighted to be going out for breakfast again on a beautiful Saturday morning.

We’ve had a weekend restaurant breakfast tradition for years. It was nice to reclaim it.

Other posts……….

Having a Feast For Breakfast

A Walk to Breakfast in Mexico

Last Sunday Breakfast

What a Woman!

Recently I was walking by Laura Secord School where I attended kindergarten in 1958-1959 and I saw a sign erected in honour of Lillian Beynon Thomas. I had never heard of Lillian. I was curious. Who was she?

Lillian Beynon Thomas

I discovered Lillian was one of Winnipeg’s first newspaperwomen and the page she was responsible for in the Winnipeg Free Press at the turn of the century was called Home Loving Hearts. Many of her readers were prairie farmwives who wrote to her about their lonely and often isolated lives. Some of them had been abused or abandoned by their husbands and many had no right to inherit their family homesteads if their husbands died. Lillian started advocating for them in the paper interspersing her opinions among the recipes, homemaking hints and fashion tips she featured on her page.

Lillian Beynon was a school teacher in Morden Manitoba in 1906 when John Dafoe the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press travelled through town. Lillian boldly asked him for a job. He gave her one writing a woman’s page for the paper.

Affectionately dubbed ‘Lilly Kate’ by her family, Lillian Beynon was born in 1874 in the city of Mississauga Ontario. When she was five years old she developed tuberculosis and it left her with a damaged hip which would make walking difficult for her for the rest of her life. Ten years later her family moved from Mississauga to a farm near Hartney, Manitoba.

Lillian went to Toronto to finish high school because with her weak hip she couldn’t have walked to the school in Hartney. She came back to Manitoba when her family settled in Winnipeg and Lillian became one of the first women to get a BA from the University of Manitoba.

Alfred Vernon Thomas Lillian’s husband – photo Manitoba Historical Society

In 1911 Lillian married Alfred Thomas who also wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press. He encouraged Lillian to become a part of the Manitoba Political Equality League in 1912 as they fought to get women the right to vote in Manitoba through a variety of tactics including a satirical play called A Women’s Parliament which was staged at the Walker Theatre in 1914. It was Lillian’s idea to stage the play and she had a role in the drama which helped achieve voting rights for Manitoba women in 1916.

Lillian in the back to the left with cast members of the Women’s Mock Parliament.

Friendly and with a warm personality Lillian also started a literary club in Winnipeg and was an active member of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. When World War I broke out her husband Alfred was fired from the Winnipeg Free Press because he refused to support the conscription effort. The two of them moved to New York where Lillian did charity work and took writing courses.

Lillian’s novel New Secret was published in 1946

Alfred got a job at the Winnipeg Tribune in 1922 so they moved back to Winnipeg and Lillian kept on writing this time successful plays and novels. She won a short story prize sponsored by Macleans Magazine for a piece she wrote called Five Cents for Luck. In 1961 when she died at age 86 she was trying her hand at writing episodes for television dramas.

Actors from the Winnipeg Masquers Club recording a radio version of Lillian’s play Jim Barber’s Spite Fence in Toronto for a coast to coast broadcast

I was happy I had made the effort to get to know Lillian Beynon Thomas. I was inspired by how she overcame the physical challenges she faced from the time she was a child to become a pioneer as a newspaperwoman and a suffragette and then as an author and playwright. She was always ready to try new things. What a legacy!

Me setting off for kindergarten at Laura Secord on the first day of school in 1958 with book in hand

I’m glad Lillian Beynon Thomas is recognized on the grounds of the very first school I attended. I can only dream of leaving the kind of legacy she did!

Other posts………

Finding Nellie’s House

International Women’s Day

Kindred Spirits

Cattail Skyline-Personal Connections

Joanne Epp’s new book of poetry Cattail Skyline

If you are like me you have a kind of love-hate relationship with berries. I LOVE eating them but childhood memories of picking them in prickly heat amid clouds of mosquitoes are also vivid. Joanne Epp captures the two sides of the berry experience perfectly in five poems about berries in her new book Cattail Skyline.

Joanne made me recall the discomfort of….. branchfuls of prickles that scrape the forearm skin

but she also brought to mind the…… sharp sweetness…… of newly picked berries and the way berry jam…….. eaten on a fresh bun after school ……tasted…. cool and tart.

Photo of Joanne Epp from the Canadian Mennonite University blog

I so enjoyed the tour of rural Saskatchewan Joanne gives us in her How far can we follow part of the book. Many happy days of my childhood were spent on my grandparents’ farm near Drake Saskatchewan so Joanne’s experiences and evocative descriptions rang true for me.

Red Winged Blackbird on a Cattail- photo by David Driedger

Lanigan Creek from this section of poems gives the book its title

Swaying on cattails, the blackbirds—

yellow-headed, red-winged—see it all:

their domain and one intruder.

I sidestep down the bank, crouch low.

Blackbirds whistle. I wait.…….

Below the cattail skyline, time

becomes elastic. The silence hums.

With a teacher at the Goldstone school in Phnom Penh where I worked as a volunteer

I have spent a fair bit of time in Cambodia and so it was Joanne Epp’s poems about her visit there that perhaps resonated with me most as she described the country’s ambience with lines like

the monks in orange yellow robes some of them just boys

the air’s too thick to wade through

Buddha looking down from his dais pink and smiling

sticky rice and cans of Coke for sale.

Photo taken during my visit to the Tuol Sleng high school in Phnom Penh

Like Joanne, I visited Tuol Sleng a former high school turned interrogation centre during the Pol Phot regime. Thousands of people were tortured and killed there and Joanne’s words captured the scene graphically

In the bare room, an iron bed,

shackles, chains.

Photo on the wall verifies

the bloodstain on the floor.

On the footbridge in Omand’s Creek Park

I have biked through Omand’s Creek Park more times than I can count and have picnicked there while canoeing down the Red River. In her set of a dozen poems Joanne takes us through a whole year in the park telling us what is happening there each month. On my most recent visit I noted things from Joanne’s April entry about the park.

Welcome the warbler, the mourning dove,

startled wings rising from footpaths.

Welcome the prelude to leaves, red

stamens clustered on maples.

Welcome the footbridge rising from water,

the creek receding, fish odour of mud.

My grandparents’ tombstone in Winkler Manitoba- photo by Al Loeppky

Cemeteries are one of my favourite places to visit so the eight poems about cemeteries in Cattail Skyline were very meaningful. For me the lines where Joanne best captures the experience of a cemetery visit are…..

you range back through decades, reading grey limestone

obelisks, concrete pillows, slant markers in granite. A

marble tablet, date of death: 1908—the oldest stone your

haphazard search has discovered. Almost ninety years

before your son’s birth—your grandparents were children

then. What else was here? Wagon tracks, pine seedlings

in rows, houses small against the horizon—straight lines

scratched into the landscape. You look up: against the tall

hedge, a cloud of tiny flying things. A shimmer—

I am not a poet so I always appreciate it when a poet can bring to life experiences of mine in beautiful and memorable ways. Joanne Epp did exactly that for me with Cattail Skyline.

The poems in her collection which will resonate with you might be quite different than mine but you are sure to find them.

Other posts……..

The Tree of Life by Sarah Klassen

Two Poets on Prayer

Poetry and Teenagers

I Live in A Piece of Winnipeg History

At the front door of The Ashdown Warehouse with my friend

The condo where I live is located in a building that is a Winnipeg historical landmark.

The Ashdown Warehouse on Bannatyne Avenue was built in 1895 by James Henry Ashdown, also nicknamed “The Merchant Prince.”

The warehouse, the largest in Winnipeg at the time, had sections added to it in 1900, 1902, 1906 and 1911.

The Ashdown Warehouse in 1903

It served as the headquarters for James Ashdown’s retail empire that made him one of Winnipeg’s first millionaires.

The ghost sign remains on the old Ashdown Store

At the turn of the century, our condo building was a warehouse used for keeping all the things sold in the Ashdown Store, which was located at the corner of Main Street and Bannatyne.

Once the rooms where we now eat and sleep and read the newspaper were filled with housewares, dishes, cutlery, sporting goods, paint, automotive parts, plumbing and electrical supplies, tools, agricultural equipment, furniture and wood stoves.  

Railroad tracks at the end of our block

Mr Ashdown who was a charter member of the Winnipeg Board of Trade used his influence to have a railway line spur built right near his warehouse so it would be easy for him to move things back and forth between his other warehouses in twelve different Canadian cities.  

An old Ashdown catalogue

He devised Canada’s first catalogue and used it to advertise his products across the country.

A set of scales that must have been used for weighing goods still sits in the front lobby of our building which was designed by S. Frank Peter and J.H.G. Russell.

The Ashdown Warehouse in 1970- photo University of Manitoba archives

The fact that the exterior of Mr Ashdown’s warehouse has been carefully preserved means our building is often the set for filming movies from past eras.

Mr Ashdown who was instrumental in Winnipeg becoming incorporated as a city and served as its mayor for two terms did not live in his warehouse or store but in this beautiful home at 529 Wellington Crescent. He shared it with his wife Susan and their five children.

My husband and I once enjoyed a wedding anniversary meal at 529 Wellington. The former home of the man who built our condo is now a restaurant with a fabulous reputation.

James Ashdown was born in London and came to Winnipeg in 1868. He first worked as a tinsmith before beginning to establish his hardware empire. Perhaps this is why there is still evidence of tinsmith work in the back lobby of the Ashdown Warehouse.

James Ashdown founded the University of Winnipeg, the city’s first YMCA, the St. Charles Country Club and established the city’s public school system. He led the drive to open Assiniboine Park, was a director of the Bank of Montreal, the governor of Winnipeg’s General Hospital and it was his initiative that got an aqueduct built to provide fresh water for Winnipeg and make typhus a thing of the past for its citizens.  

James Ashdown’s former warehouse was turned into 106 condo suites in the late 1980s. It was one of the first residential buildings in Winnipeg’s Exchange District.

Photo from the Winnipeg Free Press

The building has wood post and beam construction, and the Selkirk stone and brick walls are visible in all the condos.

Photo of the lobby taken in 2009 when we first bought our condo. The lobby has since been modernized but here you can see the original stone and brick walls.

Additions like this beautiful rooftop patio have made the Ashdown Warehouse a modern place to have a home but there are still plenty of things to remind residents that we are living in a piece of history.

Other posts………….

Celebrating Our Marriage History in a Historic Building

The Street Where I Live

A Woonerf In My Back Lane

What’s In A Park?

Did you know the very first children’s hospital in Winnipeg was located on the grounds of the current Michaëlle Jean Park? I have driven through the park on my bicycle many times but yesterday I decided to stop and look around. The park is at 65 Granville Street.

I found this monument which marks the spot where the city’s first health care facility dedicated to children was opened in 1909.

The first Winnipeg Children’s Hospital was in the home of Manitoba’s former Lieutenant Governor and his wife Sir John and Lady Agnes Schultz. (Photo from the Manitoba Archives. )

In 1905, the Winnipeg health officer counted 513 infant deaths. One in every eight children born in the city died before their first birthday. The need for a children’s hospital was clear. Staffed largely by female volunteers the hospital outgrew its early quarters quickly and in 1911 a new Children’s Hospital was built on Aberdeen Avenue.

I also found this stone in the park placed in the memory of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, Men and Boys and members of the LGBTQ community. The memorial mentioned a bur oak tree but I couldn’t find it. There were pines, cedars, and cottonwoods nearby but no oak. I wanted to know what had happened to the tree.

This art piece is another feature of the park. It was created by Becky Thiessen and Gabrielle Funk as part of an art project sponsored by the Norquay Community Club. I was curious how old the girls were when they made the mural and how old they are now. Do they ever return to visit their colourful artwork?

There’s some colourful artwork as well on this concession stand. An elderly gentleman who looked somewhat disorientated was seated at the picnic table you can see here in the shade of the building. He took out his watch and asked me when the Victoria Day barbecue would start. I told him I was sure there wouldn’t be any activities in the park today because of the pandemic. He looked so disappointed!

You can find all kinds of playground equipment for kids to enjoy and a splash pad but of course yesterday no one was there due to pandemic restrictions.

The park is located right on the river and there are some beautiful views from its banks. I watched a pair of Canada geese swoop down for a spectacular noisy landing while I stood there.

Michaëlle Jean plants a tree at the park named in her honour in 2010.

Michaëlle Jean, the park’s namesake, was the Governor-General of Canada from 2005-2010. She was the first Haitian Canadian and Black person to hold the office.

What’s in a park? In the case of Winnipeg’s Michaëlle Jean Park all kinds of interesting things!

Other posts……….

Discovering Peanut Park

Go To the Park

Wild Grasses- A Love Story

My Dad Was A Train Porter in the 1950s

My Dad in the 1950s when he worked as a porter for the Canadian Pacific Railroad

My father was a porter for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the late 1950s . He was a medical student at the University of Manitoba at the time. During the academic year my mother took in three or four university students as boarders in our house on Home Street in Winnipeg. The students rented a bedroom in our home and Mom cooked and cleaned and did laundry for them in order to bring in the cash necessary to maintain our family of five.

Dad had several part time jobs to support his family during his university years in the 1950s. Here he is with three close friends who shared an orderly position with him at the Misericordia Hospital.

Dad augmented our family income with a variety of jobs during the school year, initially working as an orderly at the Misericordia Hospital and later driving a Winnipeg taxi cab in the evenings after his classes. He would come home from his shifts and study. I am not sure when he slept.

In summer our university boarders who came from rural Manitoba, left the city and so did my Dad. He had a job as a railway porter. He usually worked the Winnipeg to Vancouver route through the Rocky Mountains.

I wish I had a photo of Dad in his porter uniform but I do have some pieces of memorabilia from his porter years which I found among his things while packing for his recent move to a personal care home. One is this menu from the train’s Skyline Coffee Shop. Dad will have delivered passengers items they ordered from it’s menu.

Check out the prices on the menu. You could have a hamburger for 55 cents and a tongue sandwich for 35 cents. Coffee or a doughnut were only 15 cents.

The CPR menu back

Another thing I remember Dad having was a state of the art shoe shining kit. One of his jobs on the train was to polish passengers shoes at night. This was a service offered if they had rented a sleeper compartment. They left their shoes outside their door and during the night Dad polished them. He used the same kit to polish our family’s shoes on Saturday nights. Sunday morning we would find them lined up by the front door all polished and ready for us to wear to church.

Dad’s work as a porter on the train helped bring in the income he and Mom needed to care for our family of five while Dad completed medical school. This photo was taken in 1958 one of the years Dad was a porter.

Another memory I have of Dad’s porter years are the special things he would bring home from the train. One of Dad’s jobs was to clean up all the cars and compartments when the train returned to Winnipeg. Sometimes he would bring home things he found that people had left behind.

One item I discovered among Dad’s belongings recently, was this cookie tin. I distinctly remember him bringing it home because I so admired the ballet dancer on it. But the real treat was that the tin was nearly full of delicious shortbread cookies. A passenger had only eaten one or two and left the rest behind.

I have been reading with interest about the new eight part television series which is being filmed here in Winnipeg called Porter. It will focus on the Black porters who worked on the trains in Canada and their historic efforts to establish a union. I am also hoping the series will give me more of an idea of what was involved with the job of being a porter.

The CPR station in Winnipeg where my Dad got on the train in the 1950s- Photo from Canadian Transport Sourcebook

Summers when Dad worked on the CPR trains was also the time Mom could take a break from running her boarding house for university students so she would go on a train trip as well with her three children.

CNR Station in Winnipeg circa 1950s- Photo from the Canadian Transport Sourcebook

We went to the CNR station in Winnipeg and took the train to my mother’s parents’ home in Drake, Saskatchewan for a long visit. I loved those train trips and especially the CNR station with its high domed ceiling and model train set you could watch for hours.

Trains played an important role in my family’s life in the 1950s.

Other posts…….

Station of Tears

My Book Has A Cover

My Dad Was Once a Teacher

Do You Have Reasons For Buying A Book?

I just purchased the book Treasures of Winnipeg’s Historic Exchange by George J. Mitchell. I had four reasons for buying it.

The first reason is because I live in Winnipeg’s Exchange District and I am always trying to learn more about our area. Mitchell’s book did not disappoint as he looks at the history of the Exchange District as well as its ethos and activity in the present day.

George Mitchell author of Treasures of Winnipeg’s Historic Exchange – photo from the Heritage House website

The second reason I bought the book is because it was published by Heritage House in Victoria, the same publisher for my novel Lost on the Prairie. I have been trying to buy books by other Heritage House authors to lend them my support and become more familiar with the different kinds of materials my publisher prints.

The third reason I bought the book is because Harriet Zaidman did a very positive review of it in the Winnipeg Free Press. I was introduced to Harriet by Beryl Young another Heritage House author last June. I am so pleased Harriet will be the guest author and interviewer for my book launch with McNally Robinson Booksellers on June 16th.

One of the themes George Mitchell pursues in his book Treasures of Winnipeg’s Historic Exchange is fire escapes. You need to buy his book to check out the other amazing fire escape photos he has included.

The fourth reason I bought the book is because I am a photographer, although not a professional one like George Mitchell, and I too have taken a host of photos of the Exchange District. Many of the photos in George’s book have been digitalized in a unique style and so they look more like paintings to me. George focused his camera on some interesting themes that I’d like to pursue as well.

Sometimes I buy a book on impulse but this one was purchased because someone I knew recommended it, I have a connection with the author, it is about a subject I’m interested in, and I thought it would inspire me to try something new.

What are some reasons you buy a book?

Other posts……….

Autumn in Winnipeg’s Exchange District

Cocktails in a Stable

A Woonerf in my Back Lane