Summer arrived on cat's feet Spring had already overflowed its banks and Summer merely crested carrying trees and stirring the silt whether it also had nine lives I'm not sure but even after an early frost and leaf drop the humidity returned a few times so that's got to be a few lives right there but who's counting and it's too early yet for an Indian Summer but then there's the phenomenon of false Fall to consider a near cousin to a false Spring and when it got cold again the squirrels shivered their acorns so many diamonds as they sang Well I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happened to call a sure sign was probably the tomatoes whose stalks had browned but the garden still produced pumpkins and there were a few cucumbers still so all was well and all will be well until the cold takes Summer's last life and we desce...

Starting out in Ottawa--not my first time away from home, but the first time truly living far away from where I was born with no chance of going home without considerable expense in terms of my career and anyway I couldn't support such a plan with my pocket book--I wrote home to my undergraduate honours thesis supervisor that I was homesick in the worst way.  He replied by telling me to read Thomas Wolfe, not the author of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , but a book with the inconsolate title You Can't Go Home Again .  This was the beginning of book ending things I couldn't understand with cranial looking stops made of petrified wood. I think I got the basic concept--and tried to think how I brought home with me in my heart when I moved and could return to its real comforts anytime, but somehow the dressed stone of Canada's neo-gothic capital were nothing like the Rockies, and culture invaded, the way nature had for Auden in Oxford. When Barry Coo...

No one warned us that starting university was going to be such a strange experience.  Well, perhaps not strange, but certainly an essay in sociology or anthropology.  So, it was with some relief that our Anthro 101 prof suggested that we each undertake an anthropological study on campus, partly to acclimatize ourselves to postsecondary life, partly to begin to learn a discipline whose goal was to help you understand the weird and the wonderful. Among the topics proposed by our prof were: A"content analysis" of iron-on T-shirt transfers spotted on campus; Stitch designs on the back pockets of blue jeans; First words spoken by profs by discipline; Elevator behaviour per building; Graffiti on the risers of stairs in the Social Sciences tower; Graffitti on the backs of fiberglass chairs, also in the Social Sciences tower; Subjects, authors and titles featured in low traffic areas of the library; Reception of persons with amputations; Faculty and student satisfaction...