Lytton, British Columbia, the village where Canada’s highest temperature ever was recorded a couple of days ago, is burning down. The dessicated surrounding forests burst into flames (predictable), and the 250 residents were evacuated before the wildfire could do more than wipe out their property.

Three unmarked cemeteries have been found in Manitoba and Saskatchewan with a total of nearly 200 more undocumented graves.

It’s a nice, quiet day in Stratford, cloudy, with a few mid-day showers in the forecast. I can hear only breeze and birdsong. Both cats are sprawled on my extended legs — the lap is not nearly enough.

I had a visit last night from a fiddle-playing friend who wanted to talk about the children’s graves. She is shocked to the core, as a citizen, a child-care worker and a Catholic, and she can’t quite decide what to do with her feelings. We decided that respectful silence today would be good for us as individuals, followed by a national surge of action to inspect all known sites, locate whatever records might survive in search of other, forgotten sites, and make proper memorials. Then we, as a country, need to make amends.

While the clergy and civil servants responsible for the residential schools were shovelling children underground with little or anything to mark their resting spot, other clergy and civil servants were painstakingly gathering the remains of soldiers killed in the battles of the Great War, going to extraordinary lengths to identify them, and laying them down, one by one, in vast gardens of stone created at huge expense. Grand memorials were built to list the names of all the lost who who could not be identified among the remains found in the blasted ground.

I think about those pitiful graveyards in the bush, and the monument on Vimy Ridge. I cringe with shame.

This thread is supposed to be about decluttering our living space and improving our lifestyles. Deep cleaning and thorough decluttering always turn up evidence of things we did that we ought not to have done, and things left undone that ought to have been done. Canada is living that experience on a massive scale right now.