Still Love And Miss You, Renee

I'm a little down today because I just realized that my north of the border homegirl Renee Martin has been gone for a year as of today.

And while I know that she is with the ancestors and is no longer suffering from the cancer that took her life (Eff Cancer), deep down I wish she'd had a little more time to be on this plane of existence with us.  I still have her number programmed in my phone because I can't bring myself to the point of deleting it.

The last time I talked to Dawn Wilson, we both talked about how much we missed Renee.

There are days that when I hear of some political shadiness going down in Alberta, I can hear her saying in a voice dripping with disdain "that wretched province'.   She wasn't a fan of Doug Ford either, and the last time I had a long conversation with her last March we spent a good ten to fifteen minutes dragging Trump and being concerned about my safety as the anti-trans violence on this side of the border hit epidemic levels.  .

I miss those long conversations we had about every subject under the sun from politics to womanism  to Olympic women's hockey.   I miss her talking about the travails of being the only feminine life form in a house filled with masculine ones. 

I even  miss the phone call and the good natured trash talking that would would come from her whenever the Canadian women's hockey team beat the US women.

And yes, we've had multiple conversations about racism, Canadian style, fauxgressives. and white feminist fails. 

I can only imagine what she'd say if she were still here instead of resting in power.   We'd have a lot to talk about in terms of how Orange Foolius has taken us from superpower to banana republic in three years.    Last year's Canadian national elections and the NDP.  How her boys are not so little any more.

There would also be additional barbs directed at the Republican misleadership of my beloved home state she called Baja Alberta

She wasn't a fan of the TERFs, so I imagine that she'd be dragging JK Rowling and the rest of the TERFKarens almost as hard as I have been.

She also would have been hilariously commenting about how Melania was making goo goo eyes at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

And I know she was just as proud of my elevated national media profile as I was proud of her for her multiple published op-eds in The Guardian and speaking before the St Catharines City Council. 



Before she passed she was working on getting me north of the border to speak at an International Women's Day event in the St Catharines area.

This is going to be a rough day to get through.   It also comes just two days before her July 11 birthday.

Still love and miss you,  Renee.