First Prize Winner of 2008 Elora Writers' Festival Poetry Award

For the record: Here it is, my first ever poem that won a prize...

If Love

Sustainable Fruit Fly Trap

Are you looking for a way to reduce the fruit flies hovering around all that great summer fruit sitting in your kitchen without having to use pesticides????

Well, after several years of trial and error research, I have a solution for you that actually works! Plus, you can make it at home with on-hand materials:

• An empty jar
• An elastic band
• Two squares of aluminum foil sized to cover the top of your jar
• A poking instrument, e.g., skewer
• One inch of an old banana with the peel

To assemble your SFFT:

1. Place the banana in the jar
2. Mold both squares of aluminum over the top of the jar so that when you remove them you have a rough cup shape.
3. Poke holes with the skewer in the bottom of each aluminum "cup", leaving 1/2 of the area without holes.
4. Use one of the "cups" to cover the jar - position so that the bottom of the "cup" is below the lip of the jar





5. Position the second "cup" upside down over the first "cup" so that the holes overlap the first "cup's" unholed area. There should be a space between the two pieces of foil, making a small antechamber to the jar.
6. Secure the two pieces of foil by wrapping an elastic band around the outside of the jar's lip.
7. Place trap near fruit

The holes will allow the scent of the banana to attract the fruitflies into the jar. If a fruit fly wanders back out of the jar, it will find itself in the small chamber at the top of the jar. While in the chamber, the fly will be drawn back into the jar by the banana scent. The only way it can escape is by choosing to walk or fly across the luscious rotting banana smells to the holes that exit to the outside world. Think about it - if you were a fruit fly, what would you do?

I usually leave the trap for 3 - 5 days - once it is satisfyingly full, I kill the fruit flies by running water through the holes in the top until it is full, then, in case some are clever enough to try to escape (and some always are), I upend the jar in a plastic container filled with water. Let the whole thing sit for a few hours, then dissassemble and flush the banana, water and tiny fly carcasses down the toilet or pour them over your compost pile outside and start again.

Conversations with S. - God, love, freedom, evil, suffering

Well, folks, the other day S. and I were sharing a muffin, sitting outside on a humid Spring day, pondering stuff. As often happens with us, the conversation drifted into the topic of God, the universe, creation...considering such questions as: Is God good? Why do we struggle so much to believe this? Is God really love? What does that love look like? Both of us have had experiences that we've had to dub supernatural, and were discussiong what they could mean. I have chosen, for reasons I like to think are "reasonable" (hence the term:-), to believe the Christian version of these experiences. My friend is not sure that any religious tradition really captures the essence of what she has experienced - but it has grounded her through the years with incontrovertable evidence of the existence of love - personal, light, accepting and unconditional. The truly challenging part came when we tried to reconcile the evil in the world with this idea of a loving omniscient presence. I offered her my take on things - namely, that love requires freedom, so, if love is the foundational spiritual truth, then it necessitates free will. A will fully free to choose to acknowledge, accept and return the divine lovers' love, or to turn away from it. My friend added that if this is the case, then God has chosen to suffer with suffering mankind rather than undo the premise upon which God's essence is founded - love and the freedom it requires. What do you think?