I have vague memories of watching Mom and Dad using rifles to shoot tin cans in the forests of Leaf Rapids. This would have been before Sean...

 

Sometimes customers from the Ruttan Mine would bring Mom and Dad interesting little keepsakes, like this serpentine core. It's smooth an...

Mom would have been 84 today. Here she is with Dad, on the road to Leaf Rapids in 1974.   

Mom, Dad, and Sean, summer of 1976 or possibly 1977 at the Suwanee River campground near Leaf Rapids I only lived in Leaf Rapids for seven y...

Among other Woods/Etsell losses in 2026, our Uncle Gordon Newton passed away earlier this year, and I just realized I haven't written an...

 

  This is my official grade one class photo, taken at the Leaf Rapids Education Centre. Mom made the vest and the pants that went with it. N...

Young Earl was a much less casual dresser than Old Earl. Does that outfit scream 1970s? I think it does.   

Sometime in the mid-1970s, we travelled from Leaf Rapids to Thompson to buy an electronic organ. Mom or Dad shot a Polaroid of us playing wi...

I tried to get Gemini to create a photo of the time infant Sean jumped off our couch in Leaf Rapids into a glass-topped coffee table, shatte...

  I stumbled across Keane last year--late to the party as always when it comes to music--and I fell in love with two tracks: "Somewhere...

Ever since Sylvia and I moved to our current residence, I've been decluttering and sorting all my stuff into compact storage. During tha...

In 2014, we went back to Flin Flon and shot a photo of our old house.  A few years ago, not long after Dad died, I asked Mom if she remember...

I picked up this wall-hanger thing for sixteen bucks and used it to display about 75% of my collection of buttons and pins dating from the 1...

At long last, you can drive virtually to all the way to Lynn Lake on Manitoba 391 using Google Street View. This route takes you through Lea...

It's Sean's birthday! Here we are in Leaf Rapids. He's older now, and no longer wears jumpers. Happy Birthday, younger brother! ...

For a few years in the 1970s, during our time in Leaf Rapids, we had an Arctic Cat snowmobile. I don't have any photos of our Arctic Cat...

Golden light forces its way through the forest's defences To paint a brave, solitary ray across the foaming surf Of an undiscovered rive...

Replay , Ken Grimwood's 1986 novel, keeps crossing my mind even a couple of decades after I first read it in the early 2000s. The premis...