The Last Posting

On May 11, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Aging, gardening, gifts, Loss, memories, Wisdom, writingLeave a comment

If you haven’t read my previous post – “The Season of ‘All Done’” – please do so before reading any further. This post is its sequel.

Photo of a white crocus in bloom, against stones and an old log. — *Photo by Jessie Froese*

On January 19, 2019, I began Stones and Flowers with “These Fragments Have I Shored Against My Ruins.” Since then, I have published 109 posts, including this one, the 110^th, in which I want to return to the part of “all done” that I only mentioned in the previous post: the choices made with pleasure but now relinquished because it is the right time.

There was a volunteer position in our church that I loved. For once I was part of a committee in which I truly belonged, where I could serve with genuine pleasure. But then came a time, after about 20 years, when I recognized, reluctantly, that I had by now given the best of my creative energy, and it was time to let someone younger and more energetic take the position. Strange how certain I felt about my decision, and no amount of persuasive argument changed my mind. I was done, and integrity demanded that I say so, clearly.

My farewell to folk dancing was equally certain – yet also reluctant. The Saskatoon International Folk Dance Club had welcomed me and my husband (neither of us had any prior knowledge or experience of dance), from our first hesitant visit onward. Indeed, we were often urged to participate in dances long before we knew enough to do so without making everyone else in the circle stumble. We became fully involved, learning dances from around the world, performing at community events, joining potlucks and parties for refugees who were always delighted to see that Canadians could learn their dances, albeit not always skillfully. I smile to remember the forthright African woman who told us all that we “sure danced white!” I learned to enter different cultures, even different religious feelings, as the steps and the music became familiar.

Two photos of a group of folk dancers in Romanian costume. — Author on the left, her husband in the center

Author on the left, her husband in the center

Nevertheless, there came a time when it seemed right to say, “all done now.” Many reasons played into that conclusion. None of them matter now, more than a decade later. In any case, by now our bodies have told us clearly that neither Romanian foot stamping nor exuberant Jewish turns are a good idea. I am grateful beyond words, though, that those years of folk dancing enriched my world and enlarged my heart.

Without a doubt, there will come a day when I look at our gardens (front and back) and concede that it is time to say “all done.” That might well be the most difficult of all relinquishments. I hope that then I can still comfort myself by growing ever more houseplants.

Two photos of gardens, our back garden of veggies and our front yard with various perennials.

What I have learned over the years is that when we stop grasping, stop hanging on in desperation, our now open hands can receive new gifts. That bit of wisdom has been uttered in many places, but I credit C.S. Lewis for the most vivid image of it: a greedy child in a dragon’s lair, overcome with the sheer quantity of gold (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and then suffering from a golden bracelet that turned him into a dragon and seemingly can’t be taken off. Somewhere along the way, I heard a visiting preacher work through several Bible stories, pointing out the crucial difference between “gift” and “grasp.” I have forgotten his name but not the sermon.

There is so much that could be said about how to live out an awareness of that distinction. It will not be said by me, at least not in this medium. Stones and Flowers will cease to be an active blog after I publish this post. It is time. Seven years is a number of completion in ancient Jewish thinking; I will accept that. At some point, the blog will be deleted. For now I will leave the posts up, possibly for a few months.

Bright red poppies a day before the petals will fall off.

Finally, thank you to all of my readers. I have loved the challenge of thinking through issues that mattered to me. I have had many enjoyable hours with my camera, trying for just the perfect illustration. My special thanks to the few readers who made a point of responding personally, sometimes often, to some post or other, carrying on the conversation that I had begun. Those conversations have been precious.

May many more conversations continue among you and your friends and neighbours. Community is built by listening and talking and affirming what is good and kind. Farewell.

A mostly beige photo with tiny purple crocuses in the dried grass with a lichen-covered ancient rock in the foreground.

Stones contain eternity; flowers flaunt their fragility.

Both are beautiful.

To live well is to embrace both and all that is in between.

The Season of “All Done”

On April 23, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Aging, Choices, Justice, Limits, politics, possibility, reflection, WisdomLeave a comment

Taken April 4 – someone was clearly done with winter, never mind that there were still clumps of snow in the bushes nearby.

Spring in the prairies this year has been a frustrating on-again/off-again affair. Every two or three days of temperatures mild enough to melt snow and quicken buds are followed by yet another snowfall or even snow storm. Even those of us who enjoy winter have had it with snow. Enough already! Our souls are starved for the sight of green leaves and blooming tulips.

That feeling of “I am so done with this” reminds me of our first granddaughters who were taught some basic sign language long before they could actually say words. Simple gestures performed by pudgy baby fingers are unbearably cute, and my favourite was the sign for “all done.” That most useful phrase told parents when baby had had enough to eat and wished to be freed from the confinement of high chair or whatever other equipment can be used to hold a baby in place. “All Done!”: a quick flick of the hands as if tossing something away or warding off some onslaught. That’s the gesture I want to use toward Mother Nature: I’m all done already. Put the snow away until next November, please!”

Actually, these days I could write whole lists of things that I’m all done with. Some of them were once chosen with pleasure and hardly deserve the wilful dismissal of the gesture (those will wait for the next posting). Others, unfortunately, whether I initially chose them or not, I have had, and have, no say in their current presence or their long-hoped for ending.

As illustration, albeit an ambivalent one, take my retirement from university-level teaching. I had certainly chosen the teaching itself; it was never imposed. But at the end, it was not so much that I was truly all done with teaching as that various circumstances combined to make me choose to throw up my hands and dismiss my post. A good friend, now gone (see Stones and Flowers, “The Last Good-bye”) had told me that I would know, deep inside, when it was time to end something, whether a career or a participation in a club or a volunteer position. “If you pay attention,” she said, “and listen to your heart and your body, you’ll know.” And “sometimes,” she added, “it’s only later on that you’ll realize you were really done.” She was right. There came a time when I could acknowledge to myself that I was all done with classroom performances; as for the marking of assignments, that I had been done with long before I actually quit teaching.

As I walk further and further into the domain known as “old age” or “eldership” (if language must be kept positive), I’m recognizing more frequently those moments of “all done now,” not as a moment of choice but as a time of reluctant acknowledgement.

To say aloud, finally, that my body no longer tolerated the degree of discomfort that is intrinsic to camping was bitter. Tenting, at first a financial necessity for us, had become our normal holiday practice, and then a matter of pride as well as pleasure. My soul felt at home in the forests and near the streams, and there was something mysterious and beautiful about being completely, literally, in touch with the earth. I had once felt the aftershock of an earthquake directly underneath my body; I had felt the earth move.

For so long now, the choice to pitch a tent had been part of my identity. It let the world know that I belonged outdoors. Now that I have said “all done” to our beloved tent, who am I? What is it, precisely, that has been declared “all done”?

When held up against the large scale of world events, such questions are not exactly silly, just much smaller than I care to admit. Where I sleep remains a matter of choice; I can now afford other options than a tent. In other words, it’s not an issue of survival as it is for far too many people on this earth.

Here I want to say, loudly and clearly, that I am all done with political lying and side-stepping and excuse-making. I am done with the scape-goating of the vulnerable, the manufacturing of enemies, and the endless grasping for power. I am so done with mere posturing and ego-stroking and face-saving. I will not say that I am all done with death because death is an irrevocable part of life on this planet. However—and this is a huge distinction—we can be done with cruel and unnecessary death, stupidly violent death, undignified diminishment of human beings. Why aren’t we? That’s the question my soul cries out repeatedly, while my cowardly self whimpers that I’m all done with listening to the news.

There is another important hand signal for babies: it is the opposite of “all done.” The signal for “more” is not as dramatic as the disdainful flick of the hands for “all done”: fingers are brought together and then the tips are touched. It is a gathering motion, not a tossing away. And that, in one gesture, is the problem of our society. Babies, seemingly, know instinctively when they want “more”—more food, more play, more hugs, more water to drink—just as they know when they’re “all done,” for the time being, with any of the above. Greed is as yet unknown to them.

All those ugly things I said I was done with? they’re the result of too many people who have totally forgotten that the gesture of “more” should have limits. There’s a point when the floor is scattered with toys, many toys, and nearby rooms are piled high with toys, and no child alive can play meaningfully with even a fraction of them all. “All done” should have been signaled a long time ago. Somehow along the journey from babbling baby talk and happy hand clapping, something happened that sidelined self-awareness and good judgment, and now the adult is looking at power and money and influence and attention and just saying repeatedly, “more, More, MORE!”

Yes, I’m all done with “more.” Not that I haven’t vices of my own for which I haven’t always had the wisdom to signal “all done.” My children would point to my libraries and ask about how many more books I really think I need. They would be right. And I’m working on that. The question that troubles me is this: if I had had money enough early enough to get onto that track of wanting more and ever more, would I have had the discipline to say “all done now”? I should think carefully about that before I judge too harshly the choices of others.

Nevertheless, is it too much to ask that collectively we encourage our governments and our social institutions to teach us all the virtues of refusing the lure of endless “more”?

[I am aware that human societies are far more complex and

interconnected than my simplistic distinction between “more”

and “all done” implies. It will take much more than my helpless

“all done” gestures to bring about change.

For the time being, may I keep my mental picture of a

grandbaby signalling happily “all done!”?]

Convenienced into Helplessness

On March 5, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Aging, assumptions, Connection, Convenience, efficiency, Kindness4 Comments

To be here, on this mountain slope in Yukon, was not easy. Most certainly, it was worth whatever effort was required.

It is true that “convenience” is not a verb, not even an intransitive one. It might well be intransigent, though, in its subtle and unstoppable destruction of a society that once fostered kindness in our simple interactions with those who offered us a service.

I begin with an anecdote from my earliest teaching days. As a new sessional lecturer in the English Department of the University of Saskatchewan back in the days before personal computers sprouted in every office, I was deeply grateful—almost every day—to the secretarial staff in the department office. I told them which textbooks I wanted to use, and they ordered them for me, made sure that I got a free desk copy for my own use, and submitted the list to the bookstore. How that all happened, I don’t know. I do know that we discussed my choices, and I was reassured that all would be well. And it was so. I was free to prepare the actual teaching.

Near the end of the term, I submitted my typed copy of the final exam (some faculty turned in hand-written copies) to the secretaries for transformation into officially printed copies. Once I had finished marking the final exams, I filled in students’ final grades into the paper form supplied by the secretaries and then received by them. How those grade numbers arrived in the Administration Building was not my affair. I could pay attention to whatever student issues came up, such as deferred exams or questions about the next term.

Less than a decade later, during which I did the course work for my doctoral degree, I began teaching again, this time for a different college. I was informed, crisply, that I had to contact book publishers myself for any desk copies I needed, and I was responsible for sending my text list to the book store. After all, everyone now had her/his own computer and email address and could “conveniently” make whatever arrangements were necessary. Besides, the lone secretary in the office had many instructors to deal with and couldn’t be expected to provide that kind of service.

If I had thought that having to order my own books was a nuisance (yes, I know this smacks of privilege), that was because I hadn’t yet discovered that I was now also responsible for submitting grades directly to the Administration Office, using whatever software program had been designed for that exam period. My last phrase is deliberate: seemingly every time I had to submit grades, whether at Christmas or in late spring, the program had been changed and I had to learn a new interface. Hours and hours in the busiest season of academia were spent attempting to figure out what miniscule error I might have made that prompted the computer program to refuse my submission yet again. I thought about the hundreds of faculty on campus, each one sitting alone in front of a computer screen, swearing helplessly because the IT department had imagined that more “upgrades” were needed.

I will spare my readers the details of the day that my word processing program was updated, without prior notice, just as I was in the midst of writing a conference paper, with the deadline looming. For one entire awful afternoon, I couldn’t figure out how to access any of my files. I wished all kinds of horrible disasters upon the tech people responsible for my terror that I had lost all of the work of the previous weeks. Which one of them, I wondered, would submit willingly to have some stranger enter their home in their absence and rearrange, totally and irrevocably, their entire kitchen with all its contents—dishes, food stuffs, appliances? Would they not protest such a violation of their space in the name of “convenience”? Yet we poor, un-technically minded teachers and researchers had to submit not only to the monumental inconvenience of learning how to manage a new program but also to subtle implications that we were foolishly resisting progress or that we simply weren’t very clever.

I am grateful beyond measure to be retired now and freed from the tyranny of supposedly convenient technological enhancements to the act of teaching.

On the shores of a lake along the Alaska Highway, content with being there.

Unfortunately I am still repeatedly learning helplessness because of the illusory goal of convenience. And here I move from the classroom to the city street. As a farm girl, I had learned how to parallel park using strategically placed straw bales (the small rectangular ones, not the humungous ones that now dot the prairie). What was much easier to learn was how to pay for downtown parking in the big city.

Every car I ever drove, for decades, had a coin purse readily available. Putting coins in a meter was simple, even on cold winter days. Discovering that someone else had left time on the meter was delightful. If a meter was stuck and refused to accept more coins, that was not a problem for me. The meter reader would discover that malfunction before issuing a ticket.

Such simplicity is now gone. I still remember the day when I, now newly retired, planned to meet a friend on campus for coffee and discovered that new parking meters required me to use my phone to pay. There was no slot for coins. I did have a cell phone by that time, but it wasn’t yet a “smart phone.” And if I had had a smart phone, I doubt that I would have been equally smart in its use. I had no choice but to get back into my car, drive away to some neighbouring residential street that still had free parking and then walk back several blocks, now late for my meeting.

That helpless feeling has recurred repeatedly in the last years, as one form of “pay station” gives way to yet another version. In winter I loathe taking off my gloves to try to punch in my license plate number on an icy screen of some sort that half the time doesn’t work in the cold. That’s after I have walked a half a block in the opposite direction I wanted, just to find that pay station. Some of them still take coins, thank goodness, but I foresee a time when that option will also disappear. I will either cease going downtown altogether (go ahead, City Hall, whine about how people don’t come downtown enough) or simply refuse to pay for parking. At some point, I will doubtless get a ticket. Perhaps then I can actually find a person in City Hall and speak out against the relentless drive to keep changing technology in order to keep the tech dept. busy, and be damned to the vulnerable in the population.

I knew, at some intellectual level, that getting older would have disadvantages and that I would face an accumulation of losses. I had not reckoned with the soul-destroying helplessness that would accompany seemingly minor losses. Because the relentless drive for “convenience” (don’t ask for whose) inevitably eliminates personal interactions (think about the soullessness of online shopping or the maddening experiences of self-checkouts), the helplessness felt by the left-behind people is all the more acute. It’s one thing to have to ask someone for help. It’s another to find oneself alone with no one around to ask for help. No one, that is, except a disembodied voice from another country who finally speaks to me after I have listened through several menus and pushed numbers on my phone. And then I may not even be able to understand that disembodied voice.

If I once imagined that the elder years would be spent thinking about huge questions about meaning and focusing on deepening relationships, I have been disabused. We are instead called upon, repeatedly, to learn new technology in order to accomplish once simple tasks. I don’t even want to contemplate what it will be like to try to negotiate complex health issues when every institution has been incorporated into some rats’ nest of online documentation. All that “convenience” of being able to book an appointment online (instead of speaking directly to a kindly receptionist) comes at a high cost.

I suppose that I can look forward to hiring a young person with some suitable training to be my personal guide through the coming, hyper-convenient world. Oh, wait, that won’t be a young person, will it? It will doubtless be a robot, of inscrutable age.

“Convenience and efficiency are not virtues: efficiency is a tool to make money, and convenience lures us into spending it, often foolishly and for no good purpose.”

Photo of a car and a small backpack tent next to a picnic table. It is a camping site in the forest next to a lake. — Neither the getting here nor the staying here was convenient, yet the beauty and stillness of the place lingers in my memory.

The Last Good-bye

On February 6, 2026February 8, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Beauty, friendship, Grief, memories, Stones, Wisdom4 Comments

A winter scene in the prairies with deep snow drifts, an evergreen windbreak and willow shrubs, all casting shadows across the snow.

I had a friend.

The past tense is like a knife in the heart. Not the kind of ragged-edged knife of a friendship fallen apart for reasons that could have been avoided had we each made some effort. No, not that kind of knife. Such jaggedness could not have happened between us. It is instead the apartness of finality and inevitability – Death wielded the knife.

Our friendship began when we were both past the life stages in which bosom friendships usually take root. She was older than I, by a decade, and already retired. Normally those are years in which old friendships (those that have survived) are tenderly nurtured, while newer friendships hover just past the level of acquaintance. It is not easy to build a solid relationship when so much of life has already become memory. Yet within months of our first meetings in the context of a church which both of us had newly joined, we were meeting for long, animated breakfasts, hearing each other’s history for the first time, learning the names of family members we’d probably never meet.

Part of the joy of growing this new friendship was the repeated surprise of discovering strange commonalities. None of my previous and current friends had listened to stones speak (sometimes bringing them home). We both appreciated art, although her taste was more whimsical and eclectic than mine; it was enough for us to recognize in one another a similar eye for the line that seemed initially “off,” the color or shape that surprised, the slant of light that provoked thought.

A few small stones laid out on a small white cloth which rests on dark grey fabric.

While our ethnic origins were totally different—I had only recently learned that there was this whole other kind of Mennonite who had never heard of Wurst and Kielkje—we shared a deep interest in Mennonite history as well as an aversion to the pietism that had changed Anabaptist principles into evangelicalism in many branches of the multi-limbed Mennonite family tree. She’d grown up with that aversion; I had acquired it in the recent decades.

Our family dynamics, both past and present, were very different. Our reading choices overlapped barely half of the time. Yet we met happily in small coffee shops and restaurants, in each other’s backyards, and once in very early spring at Saskatoon’s Forestry Farm to huddle in warm jackets and share a thermos of coffee, just glad to be outdoors. We met also in church committees (good ones and challenging ones), and we knew one another as kindred spirits. We both loved fruit, loved picking berries, loved gardening. We both delighted in dance, a joy she had had all of her life while I’d had to begin learning in my 50s, stubbornly undoing decades of misguided forbiddings that she could scarcely comprehend.

In her presence, I learned to think about spiritual geography and understood that souls breathe freely in different spaces: I sense the Divine Presence in mountain scenes, the higher the better; she needed wide-open prairies. I cower in the presence of wind—it is alien to me; she smiled with acceptance and possibly a recognition of kinship.

Anemones gone to seed against a dark green background.

These days her non-presence is everywhere. I look at an ailing wee plant and wonder if she knows how to make it live well, before recalling that I can’t ask her that. I read a delightful poem about gardening and think, “I’ll send that to her,” only to remember that I can’t. Where she is now is beyond email reach. Someone asks me a difficult question and her words slip from my lips, “I’ll have to think harder about that.”

Although she never identified herself as a writer, as I do, she knew the power of language. She had always loved words and wielded them with care. Like me, she had kept journals; unlike me, she could separate herself from her written processing of pain and simply destroy what was no longer necessary. She could choose art (paintings, music, poetry, pottery) that nourished her without becoming a collector. There was a minimalist elegance in her home that was warm, not chilly. A guest belonged instantly and felt at ease.

For many years, she functioned for me as a kind of intuitive editor. Well, she said she was no editor, didn’t know how to do that work. Despite that, I often sent her drafts, sometimes with specific questions about something I knew was off, sometimes with no instructions at all except “please read this.” This blog has come about partly through her encouragement and many a posting has gone to her email inbox before it ever became public. Some times I rejected her suggestions (she didn’t like my stylistic experiments), but more often than not, my writing benefited from her tentative “that paragraph didn’t quite work for me.” I shall always be grateful for those conversations.

Was she a perfect friend? Of course not. No such entity exists. She would have been the first person to insist that she had flaws, weaknesses. It is strange that we did not agree on what those weaknesses were, at least not often. Is that not what friends are for? to tell us that to which we otherwise remain blind? She was my wise woman friend, yet ironically, her final gift to me has been to point out, by omission, what processes of good-bye are essential.

I shall light some farewell candles with other people, despite your prohibition, my friend, because grief in solitude and in private is a stifled grief. I shall bring flowers to share with others who were blessed by your presence because flowers matter to the living, not the dead.

And I hereby offer these words to the world in your memory.

A memorial of some kind on black steps, with several candles, three teddy bears and two long stemmed roses.

Leave No Stone Unturned

On January 16, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Grace, memories, Secrets, StonesLeave a comment

All three photos in the blog are of single large stones.

My steady diet of murder mysteries in the last few months—yes, it is escapism, pure and simple—has led me to ponder secrets: the keeping of them, the revealing of them. A typical detective story praises the thorough work of a detective, who, if he or she is any good, “leaves no stone unturned” in the search for truth. That means, as Reine-Marie, wife of the famous Chief Inspector Gamache (Louise Penny’s main character), points out, when a murder is investigated, no family or personal or even political secret will remain hidden. All will be revealed. From embarrassing childhood nicknames to a surprising parentage, everything will become public, relevant to the case or not.

In popular culture, in our day of the ascendancy of psychology and self-help, not to mention talk shows and group therapies, secrets are bad. Trauma must be talked about openly, skeletons shaken out of closets, family secrets exposed. No stone left unturned.

In literature, my chosen field, discovery is crucial. How many novels depend on the revelation of some long-kept secret? Most of them, I think. The important discovery may be the protagonist’s new awareness of his/her self-deception about something. The secret might be a long-term affair or a missing love-child or sibling. The possibilities are endless as are the consequences of the revelation, which are often far-reaching. Usually, though, authors make certain that the consequences, however dire, are worth the trouble. It’s almost always a good thing that the secret finally came out.

The truth sets people free, it seems. Indeed, the Gospels record Jesus saying, “The truth will make you free” and the Apostle Paul wrote enthusiastically about the “mystery” that God had finally revealed to humankind. We are hard-wired to seek to know, and what is hidden or forbidden is thus sought all the more diligently.

We are also hard-wired to live in community, to require the companionship of other people, not only for outward success but for inner wholeness. Thus, keeping secrets is difficult, if not impossible, and when it comes to keeping secrets for others—well, soap operas build their tangled plots on betrayed secrets!

Given what we have learned in the past decades about the deleterious effects of hidden trauma and denied PTSD, and given what we have seen in the dangers of denying huge historical sins like genocide and slavery, it seems perverse of me to question this widespread assumption that keeping secrets is unhealthy, bad—unless, of course, you’re a spy on behalf of your country.

Nevertheless, I want to return to that metaphor of leaving no stone unturned. I’m intrigued by the literal details, which have long since been left behind in the usual manner of good metaphors as they become embedded in everyday language. What actually happens when you turn over a big stone? Unless it was placed there just yesterday, something lives there, a something that will be deeply disturbed by a sudden invasion of light and space. The insects or larvae or lizards or slugs now have their relatively short lives upset. They are changed by our observation and we may be changed by our seeing.

Are we sure that’s always a good thing? The upended stone metaphor came to be, no doubt, because far too many of us, me included, are disgusted by the kinds of beings that live under rocks. Hence, the assumption that we should overturn rocks and get rid of the creepy-crawlies. Biologists would disagree. What lives under rocks is part of the ecology just as much as what lives around and on the rocks. We need those various species that grow in the dark.

So I’m wondering now if sometimes not knowing might be a better, healthier option. Privacy in our day is rapidly becoming rarer. All manner of trivial detail and once-private information is now broadcast online to friends and strangers alike. I think that has changed us all and not necessarily for the better. And that’s just the personal information that we choose to share.

What about the private information that we didn’t choose to make public? The info we submitted to private or government organizations so we could access their services and that has been snatched through a data breach. The info that we never chose to share at all but that was “harvested” in various nefarious ways. Surveillance takes many forms in these days, from the sneaky collection of our data through our shopping habits via rewards programs to the outright spying through ubiquitous cameras. It seems that the all-consuming profit motive truly leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of our dollars—and our attention. Because in the online world our attention can be monetized. No, let me amend that statement: our attention is almost always monetized.

(And I am aware of the irony that while I do not pay anyone for the privilege of posting this blog, my readers are subject to ads that yell for your attention. I’m sorry about that.)

I want to return to the secrets that we can still choose to keep secret, or not: the private stories that cause us pain, the ugly habits that we’d like to get rid of and can’t, the corrosive feelings that would cause so much hurt if exposed to the light. Is it always true that it is better to reveal all? Aren’t there times when outward courtesy and discretion can lead, in time, to a change within, so that the inhabitants under the rock have become part of the earth that supports life?

In Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds, as Reine-Marie Gamache goes through boxes of documents and keep-sakes left behind after a death, she discovers truths about a mother that her children have never known. On the verge of revealing their mother’s awful experiences, Reine-Marie chooses instead to allow the adult children to keep their memories of a loving mother. No good would have followed from the knowledge of what their mother had endured. The secret remains. The stone, unturned, contributes its share to an ecology that fosters more caring, not less.

“On earth, if God is good, you can sometimes forgive a few things long enough so you don’t have to drag them after you all the way into heaven before the Throne of Grace. And anyway, . . . God already knows. God understands it all, why should we turn over and over in our hearts the little we know and the more we don’t? Let it rest in the sand, there’s enough sand for all of us here. ” (Rudy Wiebe in Sweeter Than All the World)

Choosing to See Kindness

On December 20, 2025December 21, 2025 By ednafroeseIn Choices, Christmas, Gratitude, Kindness2 Comments

The stores that sell Christmas, in whatever guise suits their products, would have you believe that you can buy your way to good feelings—however you define those. That is a seductive narrative. There are days when I am briefly lured into imagining that a lovelier tree top (ours was old a decade ago already) will be able to counteract the dread and anger created by daily news bulletin. But only briefly.

I hereby admit that I have always approached Christmas with ambivalence: a tincture of cynicism and a dollop of reality along with the hope. Expectations are always so high, if not in my mind then in the minds of people who greet me happily, and promptly ask if I’m ready for Christmas. They clearly expect plans for a gigantic family gathering and mountains of gifts and plenty of parties, and so on. Whether I am “ready” or not, I should at least be giddily suffused with the “Christmas spirit.”

If I have any lingering uncertainty about what the “spirit of Christmas” might be, every streaming service available has a multitude of “seasonal” movies that offer lashings of sentimentality. No matter the difficulty—loneliness, break-ups, estrangements, poverty, illness— within 90 minutes, the entire cast will be standing next to a fabulously decorated tree, singing Christmas carols, and wiping tears of happiness from their eyes.

Yet experience and observation make it clear that problems are not so readily resolved. In real life, to use that tired phrase, life offers its measure of aching bones and aching hearts. Our family is surely not the only one with anniversaries of death in December and January, to name but one factor among many. Darkness is not only a matter of how early the sun sets and how very late it returns to view.

So, once again, I attempt to find words with meaning deeper than the sparkle of a glass ornament (which does give me delight). The year 2025 has been a tumultuous one, and the sheer amount of grievance and outrage online with its inevitable spillage into actual consequences is frightening.

Last year, in my Christmas posting, I stated my intention to make gratitude a specific discipline. I have indeed kept a gratitude journal for the entire year, finding time almost every day to write down at least one thing for which I was grateful. It became a genuine antidote to the news headlines, making me feel not quite as helpless. Even if all I could find to be grateful for was the glow of a candle and the shadows it threw on the kitchen wall, it was enough to make me remember that I had a kitchen, a decently stocked one, at that. I saw colors anew, I noticed the comfort of routine, I paid attention to the warmth of the bed in the early hours of the morning, I made a point of looking at people I met in the day for whose presence I was glad. I shall continue the practice of gratitude and pray that it eventually eliminates an old tendency to complain.

This year I suggest a different discipline, also one that has to do with seeing, but the seeing is more outward-directed and calls for more careful observation. In a world that is increasingly characterized by more rudeness, more tribalism, more naked self-interest, I want to see kindness where and when it occurs.

Just in the last week, I watched children perform a Christmas drama that cleverly turned the infamous innkeeper who sends Joseph and Mary to the stable to sleep—and have their baby!—into the same innkeeper who takes care of the wounded man that the passing Samaritan chooses to help. It was an interesting conflation of two famous stories that have not, in my recollection, been brought together before. It transformed the innkeeper into a kind and generous figure who does his best to meet whatever needs are there.

No one said out loud, “Go and do likewise,” yet I suspect that many did indeed think harder about doing exactly that.

Recently, I saw a young man standing patiently near the entrance to a public bathroom. He was waiting for his elderly grandmother, making sure that she would be alright and that when she emerged, she would immediately see a known and well-loved face. That is kindness, I thought. True, it was between two people who loved each other. Yet it was kindness.

It happens also between strangers: the clerk who took the time to make sure that I could actually manage the weight of my purchase before she moved on to the next customer. Had I not been able to carry the box, she would have carried it herself to my car. She was kind. Even if that was company policy (in other words, part of her job), it was still kind. I have no objection to seeing kindness as part of company policy. An excellent idea, in fact.

I anticipate that my intention to pay attention to kindness, to look for it, and to make a point of saying thank you when I am the recipient of that kindness, perhaps even say thank you on behalf of someone else will make me more aware of the abundant kindness that is everywhere present and always has been. And I hope that it will make me act more kindly. Yes, that is my hope.

“It’s all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.” (Charles de Lint)

The Grace of Little Libraries

On November 20, 2025 By ednafroeseIn books, Generosity, Grace, LibrariesLeave a comment

We consider ourselves lucky to live within walking distance of perhaps a dozen little libraries, including our own (pictured above). Since we live on a relatively busy street, our library gets a lot of visitors, both walkers and drivers. We’ve watched drivers pull over to drop off park an entire bag of books to share with the neighbourhood. Walkers pause for a glance, some stay to browse. Often they leave with a book in hand and a smile on their face. If we happen to be working in our front garden, there’s a chance for conversation. Always we hear gratitude for the library, for the possibility of a serendipitous discovery of something new, something unexpected.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” (Cicero)

I frequently function like an art curator, making weighty decisions: this book is too tattered – it’s destined for the recycle bin; this book has been here so long it’s obvious nobody wants it, so out it goes; this pamphlet is full of conspiracy nonsense – definitely out of here. To the occasional person who assumes that a little library is also a used clothing depot, I say, “we’ll schlepp your stuff to the nearest drop-off bin (a mere three blocks away) for you this time, but next time do it yourself!” I’m still puzzled by a huge sack of white towels that once appeared at the foot of the library. What on earth was that about?

Many times, as we ourselves check out the neighbourhood offerings of free books, we return home empty-handed. Once again we’ve seen the same titles, the same genres we’re not interested in. Or we’re just not in the right frame of mind for what is there. Choosing books is an idiosyncratic act, guided by some will of the universe that wishes us well. The very randomness of any given collection of roughly 20 books means that nothing may spark our interest or, equally, that something will suddenly demand to be read, a book we hadn’t known we needed, hadn’t ever thought of looking for. We too delight in serendipitous discoveries, whether from our library or someone else’s.

We provide no small journal with a pencil so visitors can list the books they’re taking or returning. We make no effort at all to track books, except to notice if some stay there too long. Passersby are free to take an armload of books or only one or two; likely those books will never come back to our library. They will end up in someone else’s little library or find a new home on someone’s living-room shelf where they now belong. Give and take. No obligation, no fee. One might call that grace.

Certainly, graciousness and generosity is what I sense as I regularly straighten out the contents of our little library, making sure that all titles are visible. I don’t know for whom any particular book is intended. Perhaps this or that book has already given its all and is simply ready for retirement. So be it. I like to think about its history of passing through multiple hands, sharing its ideas with keen minds, as evidenced by multiple marginal notes.

Sometimes I read personal inscriptions on the front pages. Clearly these books had been given as gifts, on some important occasion. They were carefully chosen and lovingly given. I imagine the pleasure of the recipient. These books mattered once upon a time. Now they’ve been set free to wander the world. That, too, is grace.

The Perfect Lunch Spot

On October 12, 2025October 20, 2025 By ednafroeseIn family, food, Gratitude, hiking, memories, Mountains2 Comments

*Author on the banks of Athabasca River near Jasper*

Never mind that I once hated packed lunches. Not surprising, given that school lunches meant eating at my classroom desk, mostly without friends and with the fear of teasing and taunting from other kids. That I once felt ashamed because of my homemade bread sandwiches with egg salad or left-over roast meat strikes me as rather stupid now, but back then white Wonder Bread with bologna was the sandwich to have. Neither of which was ever in our farmhouse.

Lunches on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan were significantly better. Now I had complete control over what went into my rumpled paper bag. And I was usually not alone. My friends and I perched on the ledge of some window in the halls of the Arts Building, or secretly snuck bites in the library, back in the days when food was forbidden among the books. The excitement of learning and the thrill of having a boyfriend, besides the pleasure of good friends (roommates, classmates), meant that the lunch food itself was a minor matter, not worth fretting over.

What truly changed my mind about packed lunches was the first hike I took with a good friend up in the mountain slopes of the Pyramid Bench area, just north of Jasper, Alberta. We were new summer employees, grateful to enjoy our surroundings on days off. And we had no idea what we were doing. We did have wit enough to take a bottle of water each and an awkward-to-hold paper bag with sandwiches of cheap bread spread with lemon cheese (all that we could manage in “B&B” accommodations (bed and bathroom access – nothing else), store-bought dry cookies, and apples (the only real food in the bag). Seated on a fallen log, high above the town of Jasper, we thought we were in heaven. Could life get any better than that? or lunch taste more delicious?

Yes, to both those questions. In the subsequent 50+ years of hiking that my husband and I have enjoyed, we had many fantastic lunches, tucked into comfortable backpacks designed for hiking.

We have chosen lunch spots aplenty, some with amazing comfort (a flat rock next to a larger rock that served as back rest, or a ledge covered with deep moss), some with views that we had earned with work and determination (the top of Mt. Rundle in Banff, the top of Fairview Mt. overlooking Lake Louise, Nigel Pass, Sentinel Pass), some at the edge of lakes of unsurpassed beauty.

Our lunches have been varied. In early years when our bodies were young and resilient, a small bag of GORP (good old raisins and peanuts) with the addition of dried mango pieces, beef jerky, caramels, chocolate, cashews and almonds was good enough. Later on, we began making super sandwiches, with hearty bread (rye or pumpernickel), sliced ham, all the veggies I could stuff in (cucumber, sweet peppers, lettuce or sprouts); or, as our cooler got emptier, peanut butter and alfalfa sprouts. Always we packed fresh fruit and homemade granola bars or energy cookies. Always we packed out every little scrap of garbage. We were lucky enough to have been taught good hiking manners early in our adventures.

My memories of these lunches are rich with more than food. These perfect spots were shared by others, a sibling perhaps, then our own children, and now our grandchildren. We need bigger spots now, more than one good rock for sitting. (And I’ve been known to pack along a small cushion!) The edge of a lake is marvelous because children can play while adults appreciate the chance to rest. High ridges and the tops of peaks are now beyond our ability, but we still appreciate a good view.

Along the way, I have learned some things about the context in which food is eaten. Those bygone school lunches were miserable, not because of the food itself or even the monotony of the menu, but because of the tension and uncertainty within me. I can also remember meals at a fine table set with abundant deliciousness, yet the food tasted of straw and stuck in the throat on the way down because the very air was thick with judgment and anger.

I remember all those marvellous lunch spots along all those many mountain trails, not so much for the food – good as it was – but for the deep inner peace I felt. The surroundings were beautiful, majestic. I had been expending physical energy without tension and was truly hungry. I was with people I loved and who loved me. Plain bread and cheap cheese would have provided gourmet pleasure.

That I still—all these decades later, all those many, many tasty and joyful lunches later—think of those awful school lunches baffles me. That is garbage that I should have left behind. But memories are a mystery and we do not always choose what surfaces and when. I can, however, and shall choose to treat the memories with graciousness by noting that I was given healthy lunches to take to school. Indeed, I was given lunches. That in itself is reason for gratitude when I remember that far too many children in our cities come to school hungry and are lucky if they are fed there. And to think that I have had the privilege of hiking in some of the most beautiful places imaginable augments my gratitude many times over.

Learning to Say Good-Bye

On September 16, 2025September 16, 2025 By ednafroeseIn Good-byes, Love, memoriesLeave a comment

Fall scene of forest near the Saskatchewan river.

The end of summer is itself a good-bye in the Canadian prairies where I live. As the weather cools, and leaves turn orange and yellow in terror of the nasty winds to come, it’s time for students and teachers to head off to school again—a collective good-bye to what had been the year before.

For elementary and high school students, this is a good-bye to the freedom of holidays, but not to their immediate families and homes, unless they’re off to boarding school, which is not common here. Some will face the excitement of entering a new school, never without at least a ripple of anxiety, but the good-byes that preceded this big step happened back in June when the previous school was left behind.

A more momentous good-bye will be said by all those young people leaving home to begin college somewhere else, perhaps in the nearest city, perhaps halfway across Canada. This is the good-bye spoken over suitcases and boxes, often with the gut-felt knowledge that home will never again be home in the same way. For the parents and guardians of these young people, the good-byes are mixed with memories of their own launching forth into the world. The memories do not lessen the ache of now.

Thoughts of such wrenching good-byes have preoccupied me in the last days, as we think of our first grandchild, now in college, living away from home. Such a big step this is. Never mind that there have been small steps toward independence since the little one took her first shaky steps all by herself across the living-room. All those many small steps (some of them bigger ones like going off to camp for a week) happened within the context of the familiar home and the immediate prospect of returning to that home. This move is different.

Bright red shrubs against a cloudless sky.

I have begun to think that our whole lives are a process of learning to say good-bye. No doubt, my status as the youngest child (by 6 years (that’s forever for a child!)) introduced me to saying good-bye earlier in life than for many. Memory snapshots come to mind: my mother crying in an empty upstairs bedroom, because my oldest brother was away from home at Christmas, for the first time; siblings packing to go away for school, leaving me now essentially an only child; the Saskatoon airport lounge where I said good-bye so many times, sometimes knowing it would be years before I saw that sibling again. Always I was the one standing at the window, waving.

Of course, my parents were also swallowing tears, pretending to be strong, but I was then too young and consequently too self-centered to grasp what it must have been like for them. I always knew—well, hoped—that soon I would be the one with suitcase in hand. I would not always be the one left behind but would be able to do the leaving. I imagined that that would be easier. After all, I would then be in control of when good-byes happened.

Well, we can imagine all we want. Some time, sooner or later, we will say good-byes that hurt far worse than we ever imagined possible. Because of my status as the youngest child of older parents, I was almost the first person in my peer group in our church community to say a forever good-bye to a parent. I had already attended funerals of grandparents and an aunt and uncle or two. Indeed, I had said good-bye to a high school classmate, not a close friend, killed in a motorcycle accident. The death of my father was different.

I am old enough now to have said forever good-byes to close friends, and siblings. We have given countless good-bye hugs to departing children and then grandchildren, as yet another, oh-so-welcome visit comes to an end. Whether it’s standing at a window waving at the car backing out of the driveway, or doing the driving away ourselves, those good-byes remind us of the fragility of love. No, I’m not saying that good-byes are a closure to love, never that.

It’s not possible to love without also hurting. I had not really known that until I fell in love (I didn’t actually—I grew into love, friendship shifting so gradually that I almost missed it). Saying good-bye, repeatedly, to siblings had hurt, of course, yet I never quite put that into the language of love. My family of origin didn’t readily speak of love. Not until I had finally learned how to say, aloud (imagine that!), “I love you,” did I truly begin to grasp that love makes us vulnerable, lets us get hurt.

Would I have it otherwise? No. Never.

Do I imagine that life – and love – would be better if we all lived forever and never had to say good-bye? Absolutely not. The rhythms of our universe are built on birth, and life, and death. Beingness includes not-being. So be it.

Let me learn to say good-bye with love and gratefully accept the pain. That is better, much better, than not having learned to love.

A path leading into the background, framed by trees, some still green, some already yellow.

“There Has to Be Something Better”

On August 9, 2025 By ednafroeseIn family, memories, evaluations, HumilityLeave a comment

Photo of a homemade pencil case, an old geometry set, and a package of 16 crayons on a red background.

Those words were first uttered in my hearing by a small boy, shopping with his mother for school supplies. A tight budget meant that this was an annual ordeal. I wanted to provide what our children needed. I also didn’t want them to be mocked or disdained by other children for their failure to meet whatever standards were in place that first week of school before the usual breakages and losses evened out differences. I had myself once endured the scorn of classmates and of the bigger bullies from the higher grades.

“There has to be something better” struck a nerve deep down and made an already fraught task downright awful. As I recall, my patience was inadequate. I can only hope now that my frustration didn’t cause lasting emotional damage. What crayons or other tools of education we eventually bought, I don’t remember.

Photo of scattered crayons, an eraser, and a small ruler on a flat gray background.

Why this particular small incident has stayed with me is puzzling. There were enough other conflicts along the way that my memory could have preserved, other heated exchanges, all the normal trials of parenting three small children. Was it that that one querulous sentence prodded me into some creative thinking about how to teach children to make decisions and then live with the consequences? That would have been a positive outcome. Or was it that our child had unwittingly named a flaw in my own character?

If I didn’t recognize then how familiar that attitude was to me, I certainly have since. Making decisions has always been my Achilles heel. My childhood was rigidly controlled, and the only way that I could practice the art of choosing was by going against (most often in secret) what was already decided for me. Not until I earned my first paycheck, post high school, could I choose any of my clothing, with the result that for years every purchase was made only after endless dithering and intense anxiety. It was like learning to swim by being tossed into the pool’s deep end with no flotation device.

Recently, as that memory of “there has to be something better” surfaced yet again, I connected it with something besides the difficulty of making decisions. That problem I had more or less understood long ago and learned to manage, admittedly with the help of a more flexible budget. Were I put back into circumstances of financial distress, I daresay that shopping would once again become a horror instead of just an unavoidable nuisance chore.

But that childish complaint was a signal of something more troubling, in the long run, than not wanting to make decisions. Our child was mimicking a character trait of mine that I had not seen for what it was until probably many years later. Perfectionism: that’s the underlying force that drives “there has to be something better.”

I have neither the knowledge nor the will to explore fully the sources of perfectionism, certainly not here. However, memory provides me with snapshots of perfectionism in action. I remember watching my mother in the kitchen over many years, fussy about techniques, forever gathering more recipes, experimenting, re-doing old favorites. When I sorted through her store of recipes, as part of cleaning up my parents’ estate, I found multiple recipes for pancakes: always there had to be a better way of making them. I remember also her reluctance to serve guests, her repeated apologies for a meal that wasn’t absolutely perfect. And the meals were never perfect, in her view.

Was it insecurity? Possibly. Was it that she had so often been judged herself and found wanting that she couldn’t avoid spilling the same displeasure over others? Very likely. It is not my place to play counselor/evaluator for my ancestors.

What I have learned over the decades—yes, my age is making me reflective—is that what children absorb of the atmosphere in a home is longer-lasting than we might imagine, perhaps much more so than whatever conscious, verbal teaching is given. Without knowing it, without wanting to do so, I had unwittingly and unwillingly absorbed my mother’s perfectionism and doubtless, I let it spill over onto others, especially our children.

Awareness of one’s attitudes matters, and behaviors can be changed, although it takes much work and persistence, not to mention some painful apologies and the disciplined practice of gratitude. If behaviors and attitudes couldn’t be changed, we would have little hope. Fortunately, we are all exposed, not only to our families of origin, but to many other influences, from friends, work places, books and education, and especially from our partners who cannot help but see our weaknesses and are close enough to help us change. I will be forever grateful to my husband (and his family) and to various friends along the way, who taught me that the mantra of “there has to be something better” needs to be managed with care and often dismissed altogether.

On the other hand (isn’t there always that ‘other hand’?), I will declare that precision in our work and a desire to do well are assets, not a disadvantage. Conscientiousness doesn’t have to turn into perfectionism. Also important is the ability to recognize when it may, indeed, be time to say, “there has to be a better way to do this” (whatever “this” might be). In my mind, though, there is a difference between “something” and “a way.” That is a huge discussion on its own, which I will leave for another time.

Photo of pencils and a homemade pencil case on a red background.

Meanwhile, my warmest thanks to the small son who held a mirror up to my face somewhere in the school supplies aisles.