• Christmas used to be so simple

  December 18, 2009 - 0 h 43

  Ask folks raised in the countryside about their childhood Christmas memories, and you’ll get as many variations as there are different shapes of snowflakes. Joan Rathwell remembers like it was yesterday the annual concert at S.S. No. 10, the...

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• A rare visit to Utopia

  December 6, 2009 - 13 h 00

  Wound up tighter than a ball of baling twine, I stiff-legged it out of the house earlier this week for the morning dog walk. Family turmoil – the type that children of aging parents encounter and significant only to those caught in the emotional...

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• A rural education

  November 8, 2009 - 9 h 16

  Problem: column due, make that overdue, and not an idea in sight.

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• The Pit

  October 24, 2009 - 10 h 28

  We were horrified. Our idyllic country life – well, maybe the 80-year-old farmhouse was a little drafty in the winter, and the lawn a tad shabby come July – was about to be shattered.

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• Peeking into Cumberland’s past

  October 11, 2009 - 8 h 13

  No wonder insurance companies are a suspicious lot. In the early 1930s, a couple of Cumberland Township farmers, William J. Larocque and Emmanuel Lavictoire, cooked up a get-rich-quick scheme involving the murder of local folks with insurance...

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• Fall ushers in new possibilities

  September 27, 2009 - 12 h 14

  Welcome as this September’s sun and warm days have been after our non-summer, fall remains an often melancholy time. That seems especially true in the countryside where fields of corn and soybeans look tired as October approaches, as though...

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• Restoring the balance

  September 14, 2009 - 15 h 52

  If you are a corn on the cob fan, you'll have noticed how little local stuff there is this season.

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• A lesson in honesty

  August 28, 2009 - 10 h 00

  If a farrier tells you he – or she – knows everything about shoeing horses and caring for their hooves, that person is b.s.-ing you, says John Edwards.

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• A bartender’s view of the Navan Fair

  August 15, 2009 - 8 h 54

  You wonder how their night ended. Did the couple having the heated discussion near the Navan Fair’s beer tent last Saturday night – she leaning into the argument, he pulling back defensively – settle their differences before heading home?

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• Upcoming Navan Fair brings back memories

  July 31, 2009 - 10 h 25

  It's been close to 20 years since I served on the Navan Fair board of directors. New folks have taken over from most of us who volunteered back in the day, proving that no one is indispensable or knows the best way to do things. But this time of...

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Other news

• July 18, 2009 Navan’s Little Market well-stocked for summer
• July 5, 2009 Stories hidden in country graveyards
• June 21, 2009 Vacant land and development
• June 6, 2009 Thank God I’m a Country Boy
• May 23, 2009 The hamlet of Leonard: a lesson in patience
• May 10, 2009 Boarding a bus filled with adventures
• April 25, 2009 The price of raising food
• April 11, 2009 For love of horses
• March 28, 2009 Sam’s sugar bush
• March 15, 2009 This little piggy
• March 1, 2009 Storytelling is just human nature
• February 14, 2009 How the Larose Forest grew
• January 31, 2009 Dog tales
• January 18, 2009 Pausing to smell the roses
• January 3, 2009 Then and now