Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all, from snowy Edmonton. In addition to the 22 trick or treaters who came up our front steps on Halloween, here are three other things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.                                         1. Franciscans   The dark season is upon us in Edmonton, and the red eyes out there are watching the days get shorter. The red eyes I mean are the stop lights at intersections in the evening, the taillights of the cars lined up on Fox Drive, the aviation lights on top of university buildings on Saskatchewan Drive.  These red lights remind me of Jawas, the miniature, humanoid scrap dealers from the sands of Tatooine.   All we know of the faces of the Jawas are the glowing eyes set in the recesses of the cowls of their rough habits. They look like little Franciscans. I pedal by a house on 102 Avenue with five, metre-high cypres...

  It's the end of the week as we know it, friends. Here is this week's Three Things podcast. 1. Jars Apparently, I am also from Chortkiv in western Ukraine, and not just Delwood in northeast Edmonton. Thanks to my mother’s record-keeping, I can trace my family back four generations on her side to the small city of 30,000 people, which is where my great-great grandparents Maria and Dmytro lived and where their son Yosyp was born. It’s close, 100 kilometres or so, from a recent Russian missile strike. I don’t know if I still have relatives there. I have never visited or done an ancestry search. For me, the old country is St. Basil’s Ukrainian Cultural Centre on 109th Street. The siege on Ukraine has brought back flashes from my youth. Ukrainian dancing ribbons for my sisters’ hair. Perogies and cabbage rolls pronounced “pedaheh” and “holopchi.” Borscht made deluxe with spare ribs. The sweet smell of hot wax for Easter pysanky. A blue-covered book on conversational Ukrainian by Y...