The Canadian wildfire smoke is awful!

Unrelated: I find the people in the Good Feet Store ads so irritating!!

Toward daylight early this morning, I dreamed of my father again. It was a wonderful dream. I woke up afterwards, which is why I knew when it was. In this dream, he spoke to me. He said my name. When I saw him, I said, "Daddy, how are you?" That's when he said my name, and that he was all right. He was dressed in a light jacket or sweater, as if it was fall. He was wearing glasses. He looked great.

I'm reading this book right now. I'm seven chapters in, and so far it is a good read. My only issue with it, and this isn't really a criticism, is that it's a young adult novel. In recent years I prefer fiction for people like me (in other words, OLD). LOL. Regardless, it's well-written and engaging. I discovered it because everyone in my school at the university is being encouraged to read it, with the suggestion given to faculty to include it in class. Initially, I was reluctant, because the last university-recommended book was awful.

 This story in the news captures my imagination, in a terror-filled, creepy kind of way. I keep thinking, the Titanic claims five more.

An excerpt from my "Mimmie book" that I wrote in 2003, ten years after she died: 

Mimmie didn’t like to go many places, but she did enjoy strawberries picking; in fact, she even liked it more than she feared snakes. In my mind’s eye I can see her, wearing sneakers and a house dress, carefully navigating the rows, carting quarts of perfect berries, making sure that she didn’t step on any plants. She looked frail, but somehow strong at the same time. Mimmie never gave into temptation as the rest of us did, by sampling the berries while out in the field. That was due more to the fact that insects may have been on them at some point, than to a concern about pesticides. And if she discovered later that a bug had gotten into one of her quarts, she’s have to throw the whole thing out.

“Next spring, if I’m alive,” she’d say afterwards, her blue eyes sparkling as she looked off into the distance, as if she could see all the way until the following June, “I’m only going to pick medium sized red-orange ones, instead of ripe ones. They’re rotten by the time you get them home.  And the big ones look nice but they’re tasteless.”

 Strawberry season! They are so good this year!