Paula Dunning Posts

[Apologies to some of you who are getting this twice. I’m having trouble with the interface with facebook…] Home is where the heart is. That’s what it used to say on a neighbour’s mailbox, ornate blue letters surrounded by a pink heart, stencilled on the flap that opens and closes…

I am standing on the edge of the Echo River, watching it flow upstream, seemingly determined to find its way back to its beginnings, to retrace its steps and revisit where it’s been. The locals here say—with understandable pride—that this is one of only two rivers in the world to…

The time has come for the grand confession. I’ve been putting it off, embarrassed into silence. But the silence weighs on me as heavily as an untruth. And so here it is: I am the owner (okay, co-owner) of three homes. Yup. Three. Of course, there’s the  home I am…

Here’s how downsizing is working for us. We now live in an 1800 square foot house, a storey-and-a-half with a big country kitchen, a spacious living room, a bedroom, a tiny downstairs study, and a narrow “front room”—a converted sunporch that has been put to various uses over the years—currently…

I’m sitting at a table in front of my computer in someone else’s house in the little town of Thessalon, an hour and a half east of Sault Ste. Marie. It’s an unlikely place for a lively writing community, but it’s become home to a group that calls itself Stories…

I think I’ve given myself a lot of leeway by saying from the outset that this blog would be about moving on in time and space. It’s hard to imagine anything that couldn’t be justified under that umbrella. The house hunt is on hold for a week, though not all…

We’ve been looking at some houses, potential homes. Then we come “home” and I simply can’t imagine any other. So, what is home? It’s about as hackneyed a question as I can imagine. “Home is where the heart is,” it says on a neighbour’s mailbox, the ornate words surrounded by…

Time. It’s passed just as my mother said it would, as her mother and grandmother told her it would. Faster and faster, until finding those lost years is like trying to identify a hummingbird from a speeding car. First you’re twenty, ten years later you’re thirty, forty rushes to meet…

I’ve been waking up in the same place for more than forty years, and what meets my eyes is home. Familiar fields with familiar names—the trefoil field, the far field, the barn field—farmed by someone else, now, but still mine and comfortingly familiar. A yard and garden that have evolved…