Novel Readings

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving today. If you aren’t Canadian (or even if you are) and you’ve never understood why we celebrate Thanksgiving (“isn’t that an American thing?”), here’s a really informative post by Andrea Eidinger at “Unwritten Histories” on just that topic.

I was industrious last week and returned two sets of assignments, plus with today off, I don’t have to fret (much) about class prep until tomorrow. My weekend has thus been unusually free of the typical haunting sense of guilt. I took advantage of that to spend a nice couple of hours in the Public Gardens on Saturday: the fall colors are only just coming in, so the park had a lovely muted green and gold ambience:

The planters are still overflowing with glorious abundance:

In the formal flower beds you can see the last roses of summer, beautiful yet inevitably poignant:

It’s my favorite spot in the city, and it won’t be open that much longer (it shuts completely during the winter), so I was happy to wander around soaking in its orderly loveliness. It’s also dangerously close to Bookmark, one of our remaining independent bookstores, where I stopped and picked up Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers. It’s sad and often harrowing reading, and it seemed like an appropriate choice for a weekend when we spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be “Canadian”; I expect I’ll have more to say about it here when I’ve finished it.

Our traditional holiday meal is roast pork with various fixings–cranberry sauce (homemade, of course!), mashed sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, apple crumble–so I have a lot of cooking to do! Happy Thanksgiving to you all.