Toronto's association with Valentine's Day stretches back nearly two hundred and fifty years, to a time before the city was even founded. In fact, it goes back to the very first Valentine ever sent in North America.

The founder of the city, John Graves Simcoe, was a dashing young officer back then, fighting on the British side of the American Revolution. He was stationed outside New York City, billeted with an American family on Long Island. It was there that he fell in love with the family's daughter: Sally Sarah Townsend.

When the spanking new Toronto Jail, that grand “palace for prisoners,” opened its doors on the east side of the Don River in 1864, George Littleton Allen, the man who had governed its bleak predecessor, moved into a suite of apartments in the jail’s central administrative block.

I first stumbled across rumours of a woman accompanying Wolseley’s expedition to Red River in an appendix to George Stanley’s 1989, Toil and Trouble. There, Stanley points to Chief engineer Simon Dawson’s observation that was made in his official report on the Expedition: “I may draw attention to the fact that…a gentleman who had his wife with him, passed over all the rapids, portages and whirlpools of the Winnipeg without its occurring to their occupants that they were doing anything extraordinary.”

Tony and I are writers, so when life lobbed us a hardball, we went to our desks and wrote it all out: the fears, the doubts, the questions. Four Umbrellas: A Couple’s Journey Into Young-Onset Alzheimer’s is the result.

It was a three-year project, and in many ways the process helped us cope. Tony explains:

I’m a tired parent right now. I’m fatigued from trying to figure out what inside activity to do with the kids each weekend. I’m worn out from booking a COVID test every time one of us gets a cold. And I’m burnt out from trying to figure out how to be okay and raise kids that are okay while the world feels so scary and out of control. What makes this even harder is that us parents are trying to navigate this within what I call the culture of impossible parenting.

The culture of impossible parenting works hard to convince parents of six core (and annoying) messages.

Musician Hayley Gene Penner grew up sharing the stage with her father, renowned children's entertainer Fred Penner. Now she has just released her debut solo album and published her memoir, both titled People You Follow. In her deliciously entertaining memoir, Hayley traces her career as a songwriter moving from Winnipeg to L.A., along the way digging into her past relationships to unearth stories that delicately straddle ethical and unethical behaviour, self-protection, and self-destruction.

My father's death in 1979 at the age of 65 sowed the seeds of my recently published biography.

When I’m writing this, it is a flawless day on Pender Island, one of 200 breathtaking Gulf Islands nestled in the Pacific off British Columbia’s coast. I’m hiking through an enormous old-growth forest where time has stood still with majestic pine trees that have stood undisturbed for centuries. I’m awed by this impossible silence with a sense that uttering a solitary word would be a terrible trespass.