Waiting on tomatoes...

 August 19, 2026

I don’t know if summer is waning or not. I do know that we are mid-way through August and I’m not certain what the weather is going to be like from day to day.

I don’t usually care overly much, because I don’t spend a lot of time outside. It’s just not something I tend to do anymore. I remember past years, long walks, visits to beaches and parks. Raking the leaves in October and earning red chilled cheeks for my efforts and loving it. Enjoyed every bit of outdoor time I got to spend with my family. I don’t dwell on the limitations I have now, they are what they are. So, I don’t generally care if the day is sunny or not, sweltering or not.

Except, of course, when I am waiting for the tomatoes that are on the vines to start ripening. They really do need sunlight to do that, and we haven’t had a whole lot of sun over the last couple of weeks.

Here I sit with my stuffed tomato recipe ready to go, but I need ripened beefsteak tomatoes and so far, while we’ve had some of the cherry tomatoes to nibble, the larger ones are still green. Those I live with seem to be on the same page with me, here. They’ve both begun wondering aloud if there was something wrong with the plants we got this year, that they seem to be taking their damn time to ripen.

And because I tend to be a teeny bit perverse at times, their echoing of my thoughts got my attention.
The last summer that we had a really good bumper crop of tomatoes was the summer of 2023. And I do recall at that time, I was so tickled with the bounty of fat juicy red fruit I picked in one day, that I took a few (well, maybe more than a few) pictures of them.

So in theory it was a simple matter to access my camera download file. These photos are stored digitally, and they show the date that the pictures were taken.

I am relieved to report that those pictures were taken between late August and well into September. Hopefully that means there’s time yet for me to eat my fill of fresh picked tomatoes.

Having worried a little about them, my mind skipped ahead to autumn and so has our daughter’s. We have enjoyed several meals of green beans from our garden so far, but we already know we won’t likely have enough from our own garden to freeze and enjoy through the winter.

We don’t grow corn but always get enough from our local farms to freeze. We’ll add a few baskets of beans to that plan, and we thought we’d also buy a few butternut squash—the last more for the convenience of having it on hand when we have a hankering for a supper side dish—or a soup.

I make several soups in the fall and winter, and they are almost always gobbled right up. The family’s favorite by far is cream of potato, or potato/leek, or even potato/bacon. I actually get special requests from our “second daughter” for that, and I usually make it for her. My family also likes a hearty squash soup, and all those soups are easy enough to make. I’ve also made mushroom soup, and a few times I’ve served cream of broccoli, too.

But I’ve always loved a good home-made chicken soup. Chicken noodle, and chicken with rice. And those I make from pure chicken stock.

We purchase packages of boneless/skinless chicken breasts which we then cook up and put through the food processor. Thus ground, we serve it as a supplement meal to the dogs. They get kibble, but at night they each get a quarter cup of ground white chicken meat. Low fat, good protein and the dogs love it.

How I cook the chicken varies. In the summer months, I slow simmer the pieces on the stove top in a bit of water. But in the cooler weather I place the meat in a lidded casserole dish and bake it. There is always a good amount of “juice” remaining, and since I don’t add any water to the casserole, that juice is pure chicken stock. And my how good that tastes compared to anything from a can or a package. I very rarely need to add anything other than salt, some chicken, and either rice and carrots, or noodles.

Daughter and I will schedule the gathering of the veggies for stocking our freezer for either September or October. We considered going to a very large and amazing outdoor market here in our neck of the woods in a community called St. Jacob’s. But I know myself and would be tempted to buy more than I can easily process if we did so.

So we’ll shop very local. Daughter has promised to help because, despite my desire to just do it all myself, I’m no longer able to manage the chore alone.

But those stuffed tomatoes? Mine to make, certainly. And mine to eat, too—as I’m the only one in the house who enjoys them.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 

The power of your words....

 August 12, 2026

I play with words for a living.

It’s true! At this point I’m working on my seventy-second title for my publisher, Siren-Bookstrand. I cannot tell you exactly how many words I have written in my lifetime. I can tell you that, since becoming a published author, and taking into consideration my novels, a novella or two, and of course these weekly essays (since the autumn of 2006, once a week, minus a small handful of Wednesdays missed) the total is more than four million words.

Can you imagine? No wonder I’ve had carpal tunnel surgery twice on my right hand. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that the first time—and it was on both wrists—was due to the office work that I had done in the course of all of my nine-to-five working life. And the only good news there is that’s why it was only on my right wrist this time. Because I play with words only now and not numbers, too.

But I digress.

Words have meaning. I want you to read that again, because that is one of those sentences in life that has become a common place saying without actually being understood. So here it is once more:

Words have meaning.

Or to state it more accurately: words have power.

That’s a truth that has been repeated again and often without being fully comprehended. In some cultures, both historically and in the present day, people don’t give their names out to just anyone. There is a deep-seated, perhaps even intrinsic reluctance to give one’s name, because it’s seen as a giving away of power over the one named.

In the last century, the belief that words had meaning/power was at the heart of the self-help/motivational movements that many people used as their own personal north-stars. And then of course, there is the Bible.

God created the world by speaking it into existence; and then He created humankind in His own image.

Words have meaning and they have power, and nothing annoys me more in this life than when people just open their yaps and let it all hang out. Linguistic inaccuracy and ignorance are not considered sins in the traditional sense. But they should be.

This isn’t voodoo, and before you tell me you don’t believe that words have power let me ask you a question and give you a couple of examples.

If you doubt that words have power, then why do you compliment someone who’s feeling down? Surely their mood has nothing to do with you. And yet you tell them something good about themselves, something nice, and their mood is improved, and their spirit is refreshed.

Your words did that.

Conversely, those of you who are parents, teachers, or bosses, cannot deny that sharp words, words used as weapons, deflate the emotions of the person you’ve hurled them at. They wound. Say the wrong thing and your employee/student may quit. A few careless words, and your child dissolves into tears.

Your words did that, too.

Those are two personal examples that point to a larger, universal truth. We all need to be a little more careful of the words we choose to use. Because there’s one more power our words have and it’s this: our words, used recklessly and with abandon, rob us of our credibility and our integrity.

To the point that we’ll open our mouths, and no one in this life or the next, will take us seriously.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Loving and loss...

 August 5, 2026

Over the last few years, I’m very grateful to say goodbye to the month of July. That wasn’t always the case.

When I was a child, and even into the beginning of my married years, I looked forward to the seventh month every year. We used to call it Christmas in July—both before and post marriage. My brother’s birthday was on the first, and my mother’s was on the fifth. My own birthday was on the twenty-first.

David and I married on the fourteenth of July.  Our first son was born at the end of that year (in December), and all was well until he was three and a half years old. That year, my mother died in April, and I became an orphan at the age of twenty-one.

The next year, our second child, our son Anthony, was born on my mother’s birthday! It felt at the time as if God had planned it that way. The following year, I gave birth to our daughter on the thirteenth of July. This was also the birthday of a dear friend as well as two of her own siblings, and she had begged me not to do it…but really, Diana, I had no choice!

Then, after almost three decades of Christmases in July, of a birthday a week for three weeks straight (5th, 13^th, and 21^st), we lost our Anthony on the thirtieth of July—twenty years ago this year. And my brother left us on the 29^th of February, 2020.

It is natural in life that the older you get, the fewer people there are within your circle. It’s natural but not easy. What isn’t natural of course is having to bury one’s child. All losses forever possess the ability to render us to tears, occasionally. But the loss of a child is a wound that never heals sufficiently to allow one to move on seamlessly.

That’s not to say that I regret being given the opportunity to be the mother of the one I lost. He was a challenge, and the path was twisted, but I did, and I do, celebrate his existence in our lives and in my heart. I loved him beyond words and I still do.  He brought our second daughter into our lives, and together they gave us three beautiful grandchildren…including the first one who was with us for only a few days. I find comfort knowing that the two of them are together.

Love, the kind that sinks deep into your soul and wraps around your heart, is always worth the pain of loss. Always.

I’ve often written in my essays, in one way or another, that the purpose of life is to help us become the best version of ourselves possible. It’s a journey of growth, of disappointment and triumph and yes, tragedy, and those are the refining tools used to shape us.

Oh, one can certainly decide, freely, that they’ve had enough of that pain of loss, and close themselves off to the possibility of more. They refuse to make new friends or adopt new pets and to just stay to themselves.

But then you stop growing. You stop being, in a way. You stop…serving your purpose. You’re no longer living, you’re just …breathing.

There are good memories. There are smiles from looking back and there are even moments of laughter there. Perhaps the tears are always just waiting in the background, but that is only natural, too.

Even the most beautiful of gardens welcome the rain.

Today is the fifth August and July 2026 is receding in the rearview mirror. It’s time to look forward again. To think and to plan and to hope and to dream again. Until the next July.

As I contort my body to look beyond my computer monitor at the sunshine and blue skies waiting there on the other side of my office window, I feel contentment. That’s the thing about being shaped and molded by the tools in the Creator’s hands.

There are always a few quiet moments of joy and thanksgiving in between the sessions. Moments of peace and quietly building strength.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Prayers....

 July 29, 2026

The summer of 2026 has so far proven itself particularly unpredictable and unsettled. As I watch the news coverage of thousands of people here in North America being impacted by fires and storms, and even those in Europe facing never-before-seen wildfires, my heart breaks.

Last night the news coverage panned a small town in the Midwest United States. The view was of shells of buildings surrounded by kindling. Lifetimes, solid homes, homes that had been filled with love and laughter, and lives, all reduced to kindling.

That particular tornado strike didn’t claim any human lives, and that is a blessing. Take it from one who knows. Things can be replaced but people can’t. That said, looking at the devastation, I can’t help but think: where do you start?

Some people question the existence of God. They will say, “if there is a God, why does He let these bad things happen?” I know from my own lived experience that there most definitely is a God. But He never promised us that bad things would not happen to us. He does promise to be with us as it’s happening. He comforts us and gives us the hope that we need not only to know where to start, but the strength to work for recovery and the love to encourage us as we do so.

Things seem worse than they have been in years past, weather-wise. I understand that my perceptions may believe that is so, but I’m still anal enough to want empirical data to confirm it. And I’ve seen enough of that to believe that we are on a different path now, we humans on this blue planet, and it’s a path that lacks certainty.

Of course, summer is just a season to us now. We don’t associate this time of year with the concept of vacation. We’ve had vacations enough to last us a lifetime. As one gets older, the lure of going and seeing and doing tends to dim. Especially if one has physical challenges, which we both do.

We don’t feel cheated. It is what it is. One thing we’ve both always been good at is being realistic. We’re in our seventies; moving about is difficult. No one activity or path has ever been so vital to us that it’s the be-all or end-all. The best thing we can do—and in my mind the right thing to do—is to just simply get on with it. I have chores that I strive to complete each day, and while it may not be pretty in the doing, it gets done.

My only bottom line these days is that quitting is not an option. In whatever way I can, I need to keep marching.

I’ve been slightly more successful in applying discipline to my writing of late. For that, I’m very grateful. As long as I can keep doing what I believe I was put here to do, I intend to do so. It’s not as easy as it once was. But then, I’ve never been afraid of hard work.

If you’re in a position to help others who are struggling, please do so. The Red Cross—both in Canada and in the U. S., is a good choice. And if your grocery store provides a bin for your local food bank, a can of soup or two or a box of pasta can mean a lot to someone in need.

One more thing. I’m also advocating good thoughts, and prayers for those who are the victims of storms, fires, and floods.

I get a bit annoyed when people scoff at the idea of “thoughts and prayers”. In my lived experience, prayer is the most powerful tool that we as individual human beings have.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com

 

 

 

 

Another birthday...

 July 22, 2026

Another birthday has come and gone. It arrived with the speed of a thought, but I know that’s only because I wasn’t counting the days. I’m past the age of truly looking forward to my birthdays. But neither do I dread them. They happen. Quickly this time, it seemed, because I was just getting on with it.

I am so very grateful to everyone who reached out to me with well wishes sent to my Face Book page! To know that so many people took a few moments out of their busy lives to do that—well, it’s a powerful blessing.

Thank you to all who took that time. And if any of you didn’t, please don’t worry. You can catch me next year!

I much prefer simple celebrations if I’m the focus of them.  I don’t handle any kind of spotlight elegantly. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of person. Fortunately, when it came to my Birthday, that was never a problem. We’ve always had a tradition in my family (starting from my childhood) that the birthday person gets to choose that night’s supper. My sister, whose birthday was in January, almost always wanted some of the salads and cold meat she hadn’t had since the fall.

My mother was an inventive cook—and a good one—and always trying out new recipes. Some of the “different dishes” she would sometimes make were chop suey or egg foo young, honey garlic ribs or pineapple chicken, all of which she called “Chinese food”. I always opted for some of that as my go-to-birthday supper fare.

The first actual birthday party that I ever had was thrown for me by my parents when I turned eight. There were a few kids in our rural neighborhood, and we had games and sandwiches and Kool-Aid—and cake as well as some gifts. It was many more years after that before I had another. When I was a child, the lack of parties mattered. Now, when I think back, my memories are mostly good. I can’t find any resentment within me for a life lived frugally. It was what it was. Looking back, I can honestly say that there were some moments of sunshine and bliss.

Such moments are to be cherished, because they are not the norm in life for anyone. They are the highlights. I am lucky enough to have had a few highlights.

So now I am officially 72 and working on my 72^nd title. Since my first book only came out in 2007, in my 53^rd year, that’s not too bad. We’re not rich, financially speaking. But we’re not sinking either, which is what’s important to me. I don’t need a lot; I just need enough.  

My carpal tunnel hand is healing well after the surgery, and I’m beginning to try and build up my stamina when it comes to chores around the house. The last couple of months have been difficult. I don’t like sitting and doing nothing. I never have. It’s always been important to me that I do my share. More than, if I’m being honest.

I’m not kidding myself. I’ll never be able to do what I could easily do even ten years ago. But I can do more than I have been, and that is my goal for each day. Do a little more than the day before.

Today has been pleasantly cool compared to the last few weeks. Yesterday, my birthday was really quite rainy, with a few thunder-boomers thrown in for good measure. I didn’t mind that too much, except for the resulting ache in my arthritic joints. And our daughter, who was preparing the foil chicken packets to go on the barbeque, didn’t mind the rain, either.

She’s a formidable woman, and Mother Nature was wise enough to ensure the rain was done in time for her to cook our main course.

It was a wonderful meal shared with some of my favorite loved ones. There was laughter, and there was love.

I am blessed and highly favored.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Coping...

 July 15, 2026

When I was a child there was one thing that I learned, very early on, not to say to my mother. Two simple words that now, as a fully grown adult I understand are words spoken, at one time or another by every child who ever lived. But at the time, the shock of some of the outcomes of expressing those words left a scar on my psyche that is still there.

Those two words? I’m bored.

Yes, if I ever said them within my mother’s hearing, you could bet your cute little tushy she would find me something to do. And it wasn’t a fun something to do, either. I learned as much about parenting from my mother’s successes as from her mistakes (though she would never admit to having made any mistakes, not ever). She was as stoic bordering on ungiving, when it came to anything emotional, as I believe it was possible for a person to be. One of the outcomes of her demeanor was that, growing up, I felt unloved. My answer to that experience was that my children grew up suffering my hugs and words of love and affirmation every day.

Now friends, I can tell you here and now that when my children said those two words to me, my response was to suggest they find something to do. To play and use their imaginations. Not that I didn’t expect chores from them. I certainly did. But I didn’t look at them as a source of free labour. They were children. They had the right of free speech as well as the responsibility that comes from being a part of a family. They had a right to say they were bored if that was how they felt. I wasn’t going to punish them for that.

I do credit my mother’s influence for my attitude toward boring jobs. Not just jobs around the house, either. When I worked outside the home, it was office work I performed, mostly in the field of accounting. Talk about boring? Hundreds of invoices to process every month, very little that was unique; all the long tasks of clerical work required to produce financial statements…that can be boring, let me tell you. So, I would play mental guessing games. How many invoices could I process in the next half hour? How many would be in this category of expense, as opposed to that one? Re-reading those last few lines, I may have to split the credit for my reaction to boring tasks. Half for mother, and half for Mary Poppins and her spoonful of sugar.

I still use that tactic today whenever I’m faced with something to do that requires attention but little thinking. When I’m preparing the laundry, there are literally piles of things to be sorted, sprayed with pre-treatment solutions, separated into actual baskets. You get the idea. I don’t need to use any sort of mind games to get the dishes done. I simply was them (by hand as I have never had a working dishwasher). Doesn’t take long at all.

It took more than my mother’s influence for me to master the art of waiting for appointments—or during them. It also took the wisdom that comes with age. Here, I can tell you my cell phone helps. I do have three games on my phone, and when I am waiting, I tend to turn to that little device for diversion.

From the menu of life, sitting and doing nothing is not a combo I order—unless I’m under the weather. And then, like it said on that old poster one used to be able to buy and hang, if I sits, I falls asleep. Hopefully that sleeping happens at home and not out in the wider world.

Apparently, I snore.

The whole point of today’s essay is this: Growing up, one learned coping mechanisms, because life didn’t always go as planned—and few children were allowed to believe it ever would. Crap happening is as eternal as the sun rising in the east. The person with the best chance of getting to old aged relatively unscathed was the one who not only learned that lesson but mastered it.

And now that I am older, I know something I never even considered until very recently. The person who doesn’t learn how to cope with the dross of life not only guarantees themselves a miserable life experience; they tend to spread it around so that they don’t suffer alone.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer adventures...

 July 8, 2026

I don’t often take the time to think back to the summer days of my childhood. Those glorious days of playing outside all day, not a television or cell phone in sight. I was seven, the last summer in the little house on the paved road (all the crossroads were gravel). The next year, we moved across the field into the “big house”, and yes, comparatively it was big. The little house had only two actual bedrooms (and a kitchen with an eating nook, a living room, and a bathroom). When my paternal grandmother moved in with us, she had one bedroom, and my brother used a make-shift space just big enough for a bed jammed into the front entrance of the house, in what we called the vestibule. While it was his room, of course, that front door wasn’t in use.

I can’t recall if we used that door much after my grandmother passed. I can tell you that it was my brother who took over her bedroom. And the other bedroom? Mom and Dad, my sister and I. I was moved out of my crib and into the three-quarter bed with my sister when I was five.

The big house had four bedrooms. Three upstairs, one for each of us kids, and the larger one downstairs for mom and dad.

A whole bed, a whole bedroom, to myself! That, my friends, was a very big deal. Outside our bedrooms was a common area, about eight-foot square that we dubbed the hallway. It held a bookcase, and a couple of chairs, had its own window, and of course the protective railing surrounding the stairs.

Our houses—both the small and the big—were situated in a rural area, not even a named community, within our township. There were, on our stretch of the paved road, eleven houses along about a mile of road, between the two concessions. Some of the houses had a tree of two in their yards, but most of the trees extended behind the houses and away from the road. The bushland hid a couple of old trash dumps and one small structure that might have been either a hen house or a rabbit hutch at one time. It didn’t carry any signs of past animal habitation. But there were neither glass nor signs of glass in or around the two small windows, and neither was there a door—just the three openings.

I recall at least one occasion when we sheltered there during a sudden cloud burst. The roof kept the rain off us. Walking farther away from the road through the trees and such, one eventually encountered a privately owned stone quarry. The same one where, some decade and a half later my husband would be employed for nearly forty years.

There were five or six of us kids who would trek around together and make our own fun, back in the day. We even tried our hand at building a fort out of twigs and small branches. Someone would bring a couple of towels, and so we would have a roof, of sorts. Just country kids out playing in the woods, yet close enough to home that we could hear our parents call “supper”.

Wintertime didn’t bring an end to outdoor fun. The land on the other side of the paved road, all during my early years, was marshy at best, and sometimes sported an actual, large pond. Skating fun was ours, and it was a learning curve to avoid those places where a few mostly dead yet stubborn weed stalks pushed out above the ice.

David and I spent our first year of married life in a large city. But I’d been a country kid all my life and didn’t feel well near the end of that year breathing in the industrial pollution. Mom still owned both houses. When her tenant left, she rented the little one to us. Then, a couple years later when she died unexpectedly from a heart attack (just thirteen years after my father died), David and I “swapped” houses with my sister so we could have the “big house”.

My kids’ version of being kids in the country was playing in the field between our house and my sister’s. And in the winter, since our marshy pond on the other side of the road was long gone, I would make an ice rink in that field. One year, especially, I got it in mind to build as good an ice rink as they would ever see. That year, they were still skating on it in early April.

All good memories, except of course for the loss of my parents.

Those days seem so very far away.

Our children didn’t get to repeat our free-roaming experiences. Each summer we would take them on a few picnics to the “lakes”—we had two conservation areas with man-made lakes not far from us, as well as both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie within an hour or two drive.

But they didn’t get to form their own memories of just heading out each morning and adventuring the way we did (David steered a similar path to mine in his youth).

The rhythm of life changed from the days of my youth to those of my children’s. Our lived experiences became a part of who we were, and who we grew up to be. As our children grew from their own summers.

I do wonder about today’s children. They don’t seem to get a whole lot of outdoor time. And I think they have more screen time than can possibly be good for them. As for making their own fun? I have the sense that’s something they’ve never had the chance to do.

And maybe it’s not as strange as I at first thought when I realized that I don’t envy the kids of today at all.

I pity them. And I worry, a little, about what their lack of daring and imagination will mean to them as adults.

More rhythm of life changes, and not necessarily in a good way.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury