Short Tails from Canada

There was only one way to end the trip of a lifetime: a visit to Gander, Newfoundland, and the world’s most legendary airport. I was going to be a come from away. Gander International Airport, with a runway of 3,200 metres, had been built for the purposes of experimental trans-Atlantic flights in 1938. The timing…

I knew that Tina was a karate black belt and had owned her own dojo for 20 years, which was already enough to establish her street cred. Then, one evening at home, she casually dropped into the conversation that she used to work as a private investigator. ‘What was it like?’ ‘Not as exciting as…

“DID YOU KNOW THAT IRELAND JUST WON THEIR FIRST EVER TEST MATCH?” I hollered at two equally soused revellers in the bathroom of the Biltmore Cabaret. It was 3:30am at the Biltmore’s 70s and New Wave Disco. Aoife and Orla were vaping; I was cleaning my teeth. It was this that had attracted their attention.…

I was delighted to find that my street had a resident skunk. His black and white cartoon stripes popped out in sharp contrast against the greenery as he trundled along. Thankfully, I only sighted rather than smelled him. “I had a pet skunk once. But he was de-scented,” said Tina when I relayed my discovery…

Zander, an intense little neurodivergent being who seemed to have shot up a few more centimetres since autumn, could always be relied upon to have an attack of curiosity about, say, the orbit of Jupiter at the exact time he was supposed to be getting his socks on to leave the house. It was impossible…

On the first of December, right on cue, the snow arrived. I woke to my first ever full-blown Bing Crosby winter wonderland. By the highway, a guerrilla decorator had strung lights around a random tree on the mountainside, and on our evening grocery runs, it loomed out of the mist like an Advent beacon. ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦…

Halloween had come early this year for the farm’s chickens. Now 5 months old, they had reached their full size and were consistently producing small and delicious eggs. However, their numbers were depleted. A determined black bear cub had muscled through the electric fence and the locked coop door, and massacred the chooks in their…

Kathy’s ringtone was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, with a creepy voice over the top going MWAHAHAHA! — an indication of Kathy’s feelings about phone calls. “I thought about changing it,” she said. “When my father was dying last winter, it was a bit awkward when I was sitting in the palliative care…

Autumn started with a bang, with a big fat gay Iraqi-Canadian wedding, and a canine guest of honour ready to sow chaos at every turn. If it wasn’t for my dear friend Lyna, who I’d spent the best of my uni days living with in Leichhardt, I would probably never have visited the province of…

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. It was a motto I had always hung my hat on — until I started picking blueberries. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring in the volumes that the others could, even after a month’s practice. Cathy was tearing her hair out underneath her proverbial tinfoil…