My Love of History

Dear Friends: My love of the past really blossoms at Christmas! Here are my ten favorite Christmas traditions, for your viewing pleasure.

My thrifting life took an uptick recently, when I found this lovely Early’s Witney Point trading blanket at my favourite thrift shop in Parksville, on Vancouver Island.   My Thrifting Life: Trading Blanket It happened like this: I spotted the bright red blanket across the floor at SOS (short for Society of Organized Services) in Parksville, […]

In my long career as a journalist, I collected memorabilia ranging from hundreds of newspapers clippings and photographs to pieces of historic wooden type like this big E — for Elinor, of course!

My mother’s estate has wrapped up, so I’m disposing of her possessions, which carry many family memories. And that means dragging home no fewer than 25 cardboard cartons filled with photographs, letters, china, books, and keepsakes. In a box of old knitting patterns, I found this original! She knit this sweater for me about thirty […]

In the farmhouse kitchen described in my novel Wildwood, my Irish heroine Mary Margaret receives this Belleek shamrock tea set from her grandmother as a wedding gift when she emigrates to northern Alberta in 1923. * * * * * My Childhood Home I grew up on a farm about fifteen kilometres east of North Battleford, Saskatchewan. […]

Welcome to your very first Letters From Windermere, an old-fashioned letter from my house to yours, a collection of news, notes, and nostalgia where I chat about History, Writing, and Books. From 2013 to 2018, I wrote more than 100 wartime stories, and you can find them all under the category called Lest We Forget. […]

Let the bells ring out and the veteran banners fly! After seeing this program in Ontario, I pitched the idea of honouring our local veterans with individual banners. It meant months of hard work by my partner Sandi Jones and me, but the banners are now hanging downtown in our dear little town of Invermere, […]

As a child, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine the air force ghosts all around me. That’s because the farm in Saskatchewan where I grew up is a former airfield, one of hundreds created during the Second World War through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.