Can fingers move quickly enough across the keyboard for authors to keep the past from falling into oblivion? With authors like local man, Larry Hicks, there is hope.
Time moves quickly, but the world Hicks came from was important enough to him to want to pass it on to others.
Everyone who has had a good childhood wishes they could convey to others something of what made it so special, but not all of us know how to tell a story in such a way as to capture its magic.
Hicks held on to the stories over his life, shared them with his children, crafted and re-crafted them over the years. When he retired he was surprised that there was no one left around from his childhood days. This made publishing his stories vital.
There was something special in the life he had in Bell Rapids. Where is that, you ask? (I had to Google it too.) It is down Siberia Road, roughly halfway between Barry’s Bay and Combermere, westward toward Bark Lake and Papineau Lake.
In a way it was lucky that Hicks did not get to spend his whole life in the woods there, on the family farm. Having been compelled to spend his working life in Toronto seems to have made him extra appreciative of the childhood he had all those many years ago in Bell Rapids.
What he has left behind is a warm, humorous and very readable account that, I suppose, many older readers who grew up in this area would find familiar. Younger readers would be amused, and perhaps even startled, by the simplicity of life ‘back then.’
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