Summer report card
It’s been an active summer. All kinds of events have occupied our weekends and long holidays throughout our communities and this is all good. I got in a few feasts and weddings, voted in an election and briefly showed my face here and there.
It’s nice knowing that a nation can have some fun and its people can take their minds off what lays ahead for our new leadership to tackle. In many ways, I’m glad that things are turning out the way they are. Potholes and mouldy homes are soon to be a thing of the past.
Aside from that, dodging tornados, evading wildfires and witnessing a solar eclipse makes Mother Nature the all-time entertainer. There’s nothing like seeing hail pound down on your windshield and black clouds emitting lightning and rain which create impassible currents on highway, then minutes later emerging into the sunlight and rainbow-filled skies. This eternal battle with the elements comes to a glorious end. And that, my friends, is exciting.
Thousands of years ago, a solar eclipse elicited a different tone. If fact, the Aztecs had a gory way of celebrating solar eclipses with human sacrifices, tearing out hearts and throwing them into a bloody heap atop a sacrificial pyramid. They would sacrifice mainly their prisoners of war, who were kept for this very occasion. Although there many reasons for human sacrifice – for example, to guarantee a good crop or to appease an angry god – these days it’s frowned upon and weather forecasters do a fine job of telling us when it’s going to rain on our crops.
Up north, on the sparse forests of the taiga, the rainfalls don’t come as often as they should, and wildfires cause concerns for nearby communities. But for many, the fires create new growth, especially for berries, which should be ripe for harvest just about now. So, back to this summer – it was a good one, except that it didn’t get hot enough to hang out at the beach. That was the only bummer this year.
Like the summer ending with a smooth transition to fall, so do our habits of summer fun. In exchange, we get to harvest the land and hang out with the fattening bears and marauding wolves. It’s fun, hanging out on the land, but when the dollar starts getting slim, social housing sounds good enough for me. Housing being a priority for our new leadership, well, it would be nice to get housing built to last long enough to foster a long-term healthy family.
Back to school is a time for change for many of our children. They will have to be prepared to run things soon, as many of our Elders are now former leaders, the ones who built the foundation we stand on as a nation. It’s something that I am proud of, to be someone who took part in our change from the early years and help in the growth of our nation. I hope my children and their children will continue being positive contributors to our growth. I’m writing like this because I’m hearing a lot of good talk from our regular broadcasts of our meeting in progress. At times, it seems like I’m listening to CPAC – but in Cree.
The world didn’t end in any apocalyptic fashion and the eclipse, forever burned into our retinas, didn’t caused mass panic. That is, except for overheating servers around the globe and almost causing Facebook to melt down. Overall, the summer of 2017 was a good one.