It has taken five long years for the kids and I to get back out into the canoe and go camping. A major change in life (moving to Bancroft and building a house) had left us with little time for canoe trips. The last weekend in September was unusually warm and perfect for a fall …

Who didn’t have a rock collection as a kid? Rocks were everywhere: on the driveway, at the beach, in the river, basically everywhere we played outside. We skipped stones on the lake, as toddlers put them in our mouths, we painted them to make a pet rock and eventually we started to collect them and …