journal features

thanksgiving in Niagara

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

St. Catharines, 2012.10.06

We picked up a car today and did some errands. Then we headed for Niagara, with Mari ooing and ahing all the way about the vivid Autumn colors all around us.

In fact, we left the highway in Oakville and took the Lakeshore route to Hamilton. Then in Fruitland we once again left the QEW and took highway eight across to St. Catharines, stopping to see the wares at a road-side vegetable stand where we bought some of the season's last corn.

Mari couldn't get enough of the reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows. We discussed just why it was that she was so surprised when last Autumn had been so picture-perfect, and we realized that it was because she'd been so sick with morning sickness last year that she'd missed the whole thing!

(Our rental car was a Chrysler 200; I don't know how the things are still on the market when every one I get has vicious shimmy and roll whenever it hits the slightest thing on the highway. Awful!)

rand()m quote

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov