Prompt #17 - Toys

Prompt #17 - Toys

I am the first born, and the only girl, of three children born within four years. Although today I'm not a "fluffy" kind of person, not attached to "stuffies" as the kids today call their stuffed toys, as a girl I loved my panda and my dolls. My first doll, Betty Ann, had a pink dress with madras plaid trim at yoke and hem. Years later I realized that she was named after my mother's two sisters, and was a sign that I wished for sisters of my own which never happened. She met a sad end, a mysterious fractured skull which I always suspected that my brother knew something more about than I did.

The doll I remember most is Sally, my bride doll, who arrived from Santa one Christmas probably when I was about six. I probably named her Sally because that was the name of the baby sister in the Grade One readers from which I was just learning to read. Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, and Puff. Back then, Bride with her white mary-janes, her white taffeta gown with net overskirt, her white net veil, stood for all brides, girls becoming young women becoming wives, making that transition from child to adult, from maiden to matron. Around that same time I had a chance to be a flower girl when my aunt Olive was the Bride so weddings were a big deal. A walking bride doll was one way society trained us female children to focus on our future as bride/wife/mother. I sort of grew out of that, accepting the revolution of the Sixties which implied freedom of choice and the expectation of independence and self-support promised by a career and a life outside a house which, through housework, we would still be expected to transform into a home.

Later, on that seminal trip to Ireland, I kept hearing the phrase "Bridget slept hear" and I did not know what or who they were talking about. My ears were piqued because Bridget was a nickname some friends gave me as a child, a shortened version of my surname. Bridget, the Irish hosts explained. Aka Bride. One of the three patron saints of Ireland. That was how I discovered my namesake, and that Bride was actually a goddess, one of the incarnations of the Celtic goddess of peace, patron of poets, smiths, cowgirls and cattle, with a cauldron of cream which never emptied. This meaning has remained closest to my heart. Goddesses represent the divine and the spark which resides within us all, which role models like Bridget keep alive for us everyday. So now, my dolls, my Bride doll, is recognized for what it is, an icon, and her resting place, for what it is, a shrine. Places where the divine lives and reminds us of our own divinity. I wrote a poem about this Bride, a poem which has been published in Canada, the United States, and Ireland.


I still have Sally, in the ancient family trunk which looks like a treasure chest. She is wrapped in silk, keeping the dismembered limbs together, awaiting the day when a doll hospital can reattach her arms and legs. I still have her white shoes, and also a pair of moccasins that fit her, and she still has the dress (minus the veil) although various kittens have not liked the net (at least that accounts for the shreds and tears in my mind.) She rests with three teddies, one in overalls made my an aunt, another a knitted bear with skirt made by my mother, and a calico bear I bought in Seattle when I first moved to the West Coast. They snuggle up with Brenda Jean, my last, a "teen" doll who arrived just before "Barbies" were invented. And a Quatchy, a Sasquatch "stuffie" from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Not that I'm a “stuffie” kind of person (did I say that already?) But there is always hope that some children may visit.

PS

I see I missed part of the prompt. Games. Our family were card players. 52 Pickup. Go Fish. Old Maid. Rummy. Crib. Crazy Eights. Canasta. 31. Bug Thy Neighbour. Hearts. 500. Euchre. And Poker and Bridge, which I have not permitted myself to learn because of the time involved. We also played board games like Steeplechase, Clue, and Monopoly which I hated then and which I still hate. I think it was the idea that in order to prosper you had to make someone else suffer. We also played Scrabble which I still play at least once a week, and constantly on my computer. We also played Crokinole which is a round board with a target design. By flicking your finger, you shoot wooden “rocks” like curling rocks or shuffleboard pucks at the opponent's or the opposing team's rocks and you try to finesse a “twenty,” which is sinking your rock in the centre hole on a deflection or directly, if there are no opposing rocks to get rid of. I have the old family crokinole board but it only comes into play if my brothers visit. I Googled this to check the spelling and to see whether the Canadian roots of the game are true. Wikipedia say yes, with a picture!

Prompt #16 - Message In a Bottle

Prompt #16 - Message In a Bottle

Where I live is 150 kilometres (100 miles) from the ocean, with a fantastic mountain view. I am not a "water" person. Water makes me nervous. Water, open water, is threatening and I do not think of it as linking or connecting me with anything, least of all with adventure or rescue, which the phrase "message in a bottle" seems to evoke for me. So I couldn't think of anything connected to this topic. But then, as I prepared for my birthday party on the 16th, it hit me. Bottle.

I had purchased a huge "bottle" on the plane en route home from my bucket list visit to England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Wales. A bottle which became the focus for this special Kittens and Cream party. The cream. An Irish cream. Which I had first lapped up in 1978 on my first trip to Ireland. When friends who were travelling and stopping the Winter Solstice holiday weeks with relatives invited us to join them in Clara, County Offaly. Airport line-ups. Hand-frisked luggage and body pat-downs. Durty Nelly's and Bunratty Castle. Clonmacnoice. Mullingar. Tullamore. Dublin. How two inches of snow shut down everything--roads, taxis, airports. Peeling fresh shrimp. Picking brussels sprouts off tall stalks growing in front gardens. Bare trees in green fields, ivy everywhere. Guinness and Harp and lager and lime. And this delicious concoction of cream, whiskey, with mystery undertastes (I'm still not sure what--chocolate?)

When I returned home to Canada those many years ago, whenever I found myself in an LC, a Manitoba Liquor Control Board outlet, which was much more often in those days than now, I asked if they had this cream. Finally, someone had an answer. They had investigated. They had researched. They had tried. They had contacted Ireland but had been told: because of the cream content, the liqueur did not travel well. They were working on some way to stabilize it and as soon as the scientists had devised this precious formula, Irish cream would be ready for export and Manitoba would be ordering it. Yes!

I'm not sure how long that took, but, true to their word, the cream arrived and has remained a special treat ever since. Although, when I ordered my duty-free bottle on the plane this past summer, I didn't realize it would be a 40-ouncer (one litre, along with a750 ml 26 ounces of vodka for the house-sitter.) All the more to share, I told myself. Clink, clink, clink, as I dragged my way through customs. I left it unopened for six months (Best before November 2014 it says on the bottle) so that it would be there for my special birthday. I did enjoy it, this message from the past in a large brown bottle. And I do believe my eight or ten special kitten guests did enjoy it too. I resisted the temptation to brag to them about how I thought that one of the greatest achievements of my life is the fact that I am responsible for the arrival of the original Irish cream in Canada. Bottles, bottles, and more bottles. Bottles of love from the cows of Ireland.

Prompt #15 - Snow

Winter Solstice

 *

 

 

 

Saturday night after the hockey game a blizzard blows up across the prairie and when the wind finally rests, our farmyard is transformed. Mounds and drifts of pristine crystal blanket the lane, cover the snowfence, bury the woodpile and willow windbreak. The bare black boughs of submerged scrub oak stitch the sky to ground.

 

The snowplow will take days to work its way to us; there is nothing to do but surrender and snuggle into the warm cocoon of home. Turning our backs on bold boys busy at snowforts and battle we dress our dolls for the expected journey. Babe in swaddling cloth and downy bunting. Bride in robes of cowled velvet, covered with flowing chamois cape; moccasins laced to the knee. Tinsel to halo her wild curls, to circle her tunic, keeping net of crinoline like folded wings, concealed. Swan-necked staff of crumpled tinfoil to assist her long march down shimmering diamond path.

 

Word arrives--the plow has made it through. If we walk to the main road, we can catch a ride to the Christmas Concert. We bundle in layers--toques, gauntlets, cloaks, scarves--and, just after supper, we three set out. The clean cold touching the bottom of our lungs creates a strange buoyancy.

 

Our flashlights pale in the moon's silver. In the days we have huddled inside, sun and wind have crusted the drifts. Now we are spared the breaking of trail. We walk atop the frozen crests. Mock desert dunes and we the magi pageant. Our star is the moon in whose caressing light soft landwaves glisten and glow--a white satin comforter.

 

In shoes of priestly ancestors we assemble round candlelit Tree to celebrate the glory of this longest night and herald, in concert, the magic, slow return of Light.

Copyright J.M. Bridgeman

* Michael Eudenbach photo used with permission. jmb

Prompt #14 - Family Dinner

Prompt #14 - Family Dinner

My mother. My father. All four of my grandparents. All eight great-grandparents. This is what happens when you delve into genealogy. All those questions you wished you had asked when and if you had had the chance. Just this fall, I worked on a timeline for my maternal grandmother Winifred Joan Hayne Bubar and I have one whole page of Unanswered Questions/Brick Walls:

 

Who is the man in the locket?

Who is the woman with the necklace?
How do I access the ancestral links between 18th and 16th centuries without spending money?
Who is the boy in the marine coat photo? Did you have a second brother? If so, what happened to him? If not, what does the Feb 1900 refer to in the Family Bible?

After your father died, where did the children live when mother Anne moved in with her mother?
Is the address where brother Moreton sent letters and the telegram from the Palace announcing his death the address of the cottage? If not, what was your mother doing there?

With whom did you live (a doctor in Kaslo in 1913) and what did you do while you were there?
Why were you married in Nelson, BC?
When was the Kettle Valley WI formed? How was it different from the Fireside Circle?
What date did your sister-in-law Norah Bubar die in 1952?

When did your half-sister Georgina Hayne Godding die? ( b.Georgina Fanny Sarah Hayne, June 20, 1860)
If Georgina's son Frank Cane Godding was wounded in the war and died later (1919), what happened to Georgina's daughter?
When did you move from the ranch into the Midway house? How did you get it? Did you inherit money &/or jewels when the last aunt died?
What year and day did your youngest son marry?
Would you have liked your life to have been different in any way?

Some of these are basic and could be uncovered at the proper research centres, but some may never be answered to any satisfaction.

I expect it would be the same if I did the timeline for each family member.

Prompt #13 - Icons Picnics

Prompt #13 - Icons Picnics

 

Prompt #13 - Icons Picnics

 

A dinner party with 12 guests. Well, first of all, that would never happen. Thirteen at a table is unlucky and would never be permitted. I'm sure it was not my grandmother who invented the "kids' table" to avoid this problem. And you thought it was just to confine the noise to one corner!

 

Second, I'm one of those slow people, introvert and proud, who much prefers one-to-one to large group interactions. So, I'd set this challenge up as an interviewing process, and I'd get to talk to each applicant one at a time, a private screening of sorts. In order to free me to talk without having to play hostess, to serve, I'd bring a picnic basket, a "cooler" of Proudly Canadian foods to share and to honour my guests: smoked salmon cream cheese on Manitoba rye for starters, moosemeat tourtiere, rhubarb chutney, mashed potato salad, cold asparagus with vinaigrette, BC wine, wild strawberries, Nanaimo bars or butter tart bars made with dates and pecans (gifts from eastern and southern friends).

 

Choosing the Famous/Special/Iconic People to be my guests will not be difficult. The challenge will be to come up for each with one open-ended question about which I am curious. Apologies for the heavily weighted Canadian heroes and heroines, although I do hope that my questions will be relatively universal. Let's start with the women.

 

Ann Boleyn: "Five hundred years later we still talk about you. Of course, I want to hear “Anne's version” but in context. So, would you talk about what is/was the impact of your parents and their time on your life, early and later?"

 

Emily Carr: "You have made us proud to be female and British Columbian Canadian. In what ways was being born in Victoria a benefit to your career and in what ways was it an impediment?"

 

Marilyn Monroe: "Some Like It Hot is my all-time favourite movie. In what ways do you feel your personal background influenced your career and in what ways was it affected by the prejudices and mores of your era?"

 

Margaret Laurence: "You are the 'great mother/wise crone' of my life. Did/do you feel that your Canadian readers failed you, didn't get what you were doing with The Diviners? Or, with hindsight, would you have changed the way you did it?"

 

Alice Munro: "Congratulations on your well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. You make us all so proud. What kept you going in the early years? Were you ever tempted to abandon writing? Was there a shift from “telling” stories to “selling” stories? If so, did it change your writing? If so, in what ways?"

 

Louis Riel: "You are our Nelson Mandela. You are now acknowledged as the Father of Confederation for my home province even though when you left it and went into exile, there was a warrant out for your arrest. You stood up for your people against racial, religious, and geographic prejudice and were rewarded with the label “traitor” and a hangman's noose. Some still insist that your religious mysticism and questionable political choices indicate insanity. As if only an insane person would challenge colonial power! What really was the enemy you were fighting against? Would you do anything differently, if you were leading the Metis people, speaking to and for all Canadians today?"

 

Big Bear: "You were right, Old Man, Honoured Elder, and you are still right, and there is no one standing up and saying that, and no one willing to hear. Did you ever lose faith in your visions? What would you recommend for First Nations leaders today? What would you say to the rest of Canada?"

 

John A. Macdonald: "We acknowledge you as the Father of Canada. Without you, we would not exist as a nation. You were a man of your era, of capitalism and imperialism, Christianity and white supremacy, an immigrant from impoverished urban Europe. From what you have seen since, from up (or down) there, what are some of the negative impacts of your certainties, especially on “outsiders” or "others"? In other words, have you learned anything, Old Man? Do you repent?"

 

Thomas Hardy: "My grandmother's name was Woodland and she came from 'Wessex' too. So your stories are about 'my people'. What gave you the confidence to celebrate them, local, marginalized, hard-working, downtrodden, including strong female characters like Eustacia, Tess, and Bathsheba?"

 

Ernest Hemingway: "Determined not to be intimidated by your macho persona, I would like to say how much I enjoy your work, especially the Nick Adams stories. What would you have wished had been different in your life?"

 

Winston Churchill: "For every important event in Western history in the 20^th Century, you were there and somehow involved. When you were eight years old, what life did you imagine for yourself and how close was that imagined future to the life you achieved/created?"

 

Leonard Cohen: "Ever since I attended my first Leonard Cohen concert when I was seventeen years old, I have loved you. 'I love you in the morning, your kisses deep and warm.' What impact do you think Montreal and Canada have had on who you are and what you have created/achieved?"

Prompt # 12 - The Year I Was Born

Prompt # 12 - The Year I Was Born

Research tells me that the year I was born, the tape recorder, transistor radio, 33 &1/3 RPM long-playing record, fax machine, and zoom lens were invented.

Louis St. Laurent replaced William Lyon Mackenzie King as Prime Minister of Canada. Newfoundland became a province and Joey Smallwood its premier. Tommy Douglas was already premier of Saskatchewan. Harry Truman was re-elected president of the USA and he desegregated American forces. In Britain, London hosted the first Olympics since Berlin in 1936, the Labour government implemented the National Health Service, and Charles, Prince of Wales, was born. In Europe, the Berlin blockade was followed by the Berlin airlift. In the Middle East, the British withdrew from Palestine and the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It immediately went to war against aggressive neighbours. In Asia, rumblings began in Korea, Mao Zedong was marching in China, and Gandi was assassinated in India. The International Court of Justice opened in The Hague. And on December 10, the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Popular songs that year include: I'm Looking Over A Four Leafed Clover, Buttons and Bows, My Happiness, Now Is the Hour, and The William Tell Overture (which I suspect has something to do with the popularity of The Lone Ranger.) Movies made that year which I have since watched include Olivier's Hamlet, Key Largo, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. George Orwell wrote 1984. James Mitchner and Tennessee Williams won Pulitzers, Hugh MacLennan, A.M. Klein, and Thomas H. Raddall won Governor General's Awards for Literature, and Paul Hiebert won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, for Sarah Binks, Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan. T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature. No Peace Prize was awarded.

In our family, my parents married on Easter Monday (the minister made them wait until Lent was over.) In December, my cousin Lew was born in Peace River, Alberta about twelve hours before I was born in Rivers, Manitoba. Borne in rivers.

Prompt # 11 - Service

Prompt # 11 - Service

This year's poppy was grabbed by the wind and blew from my shoulder across the driveway. It lodged in tall grass in the neighbour's field, buried under pellets of snow. My efforts to retrieve it failed. Grieving my poppy, needing ritual on this cold November day, I returned forlorn to my empty house. I scanned the radio to find a service, the television for the wreath-laying from Ottawa. I turned at last to the piano and my stiff fingers stumbled through:

     O valiant hearts who to your glory came

     Through dust of conflict and through battle flame . . .

 

Old Dave Mason used to bring the poppies to school every year to sell to us there. Wearing his Legion blazer and crooked beret like my dad. Walking with an old soldier's pride. His eyes were watery; his ears were shot; his hands trembled as he pinned the poppies to me. On the last year that I saw him there, when he asked me about my trip to Quebec, I told him how much I had loved Montreal. He had not liked it one bit, he said. “They made us march,” he said, “from Union Station to the other depot. I didn't like it at all!”

     “Was that on your way to France?”

     “No,” he said. “On our way to South Africa.” France had been later. I reached to touch his hand that day—this man who, as a teenager younger than I, had fought in the Boer War, and again, as a young man, in Europe.

     Proudly you gathered rank on rank to war

     As who had heard God's message from afar

     All you had hoped for, all you had you gave

     To save mankind, yourself you scorned to save.

 

Dave and my dad were in different wars but in many ways their experiences were similar. Rank on rank. The troop ships. The different campaigns and battles. They respected each other. They knew things that the rest of us did not know, and they tried to protect us from those horrors—to shield us from stories of inhuman deeds and shattered wasted lives. They never questioned their own participation when the winds of war had howled. And every year they pinned their medals to their shoulders and marched with the ghosts of their comrades who had not returned. As Dad read out each name on the Roll Call of the Dead, Old Dave's failing hands pinned a poppy to the white Celtic cross until it stood at last blood red.      

     Splendid you passed, the great surrender made;

     Into the light that nevermore shall fade;

     Deep your contentment in that blest abode,

     Who wait the last clear trumpet call of God.

“Let us ree-member,” Dad said, as if by remembering, we could put the pieces together again. Before the bugle sounded, grown men wept. And row on row of children with poppies on their shoulders, in silence, listened to the cold wind blow.

(Words to the hymn “O Valiant Hearts” by Sir John Stanhope Arkwright.)

Prompt # 10 - Unexplained Memory

Prompt # 10 - Unexplained Memory

 

My friend Elisabeth says that her recurring nightmare is that the restaurant is full, a bus load of tourists has arrived, she's taking their orders as fast as she can but at the same time tearing out her hair and crying: "There's no one in the kitchen!" She recognizes this, every waitress's worst nightmare, as stemming from the years she worked in food service. I worked for years in federal corrections, minimum, medium, and high security, and I don't have nightmares about that. Maybe I should, but I don't. But my own recurring nightmare, my unexplained memory, also has something to do with a kitchen. Although I was never really sure whether it was memory or premonition.

 

Everything is white, painted white. The counter is high and covered with old-fashioned kitchen tools--wooden bread troughs, a whole round of cheese, woven baskets, and things hanging from the ceiling. Red things. Black things. (Love that this dream is in colour.) And they're dripping. Dripping blood. A brace of something, like pheasants or fowl in old genre paintings. I am looking, but I cannot force myself to go in.

 

This dream recurs over the years. I try to parse it. Dead chicken? Blood? The day my mother chose to tell me the facts of life, as she eviscerated chickens, prepping them for winter food, and all I could do was try to keep control of the gag reflex. Kitchen dreams? Nigella I am not. A galley kitchen? My very first apartment, a studio with a galley kitchen so small you had to choose your task and turn to that side before entering. It was in an old building at River and Osborne in Winnipeg which has since been renovated into a trendy upscale shopping mall. I shared the bath, which was outside in the hallway, two separate doors, with the apartment next door which appeared to be occupied by a tall redhead in a raccoon coat who was only home when she brought "friends" up with her. Once I had a break-in but I suspected the druggie friend of a friend who knew when to target me. But why would this place haunt me? Perhaps there was danger lurking of which I was not sufficiently aware? The meaning remained a mystery.

 

Then, this summer, on my return trip to Portsmouth, UK, I was touring HMS Victory again, taking my digital camera and my tablet this time, because for some reason the first time I went (24 years ago) I didn't take pictures. And I didn't know at that time that I had relatives who had worked on the Victory. So back I went. Obediently following the one-way signs, middle, upper, top decks, gun decks, and below. Pausing to breathe. Hyperventilating. Accepting advice from concerned fellow tourists. And there it is. Literally. My nightmare. And it is, literally, a galley kitchen (although this is far from Winnipeg.) And there are dead chickens (mock, I hope) hanging. And old-fashioned kitchen utensils, wooden bowls, a wheel of cheese! So it was not a premonition, nor an admonition. My recurring dream was a memory, and the panic attached to it is the panic of the claustrophobia of this cramped vessel, once home to 800 souls at a time. I had been too upset to stop to take pictures back then. Too upset to recognize why. Too young to understand what my brain, my blood, had known. That I would have to return. That I would return.

 

 

So it's strange that this topic should come up just when the meaning of the recurring nightmare has been revealed as a memory which is no longer a mystery.

Prompt #9 - Hallowe'en

Prompt #9 - Hallowe'en

Halloween to me means the one time a year I purchase candy. And because I never know how many Trick or Treaters to expect, anywhere from 0 to 20, which is small, I know, but it's a cul de sac, and the firemen put on a party at the school, for safety's sake, so fewer revellers wander this dark end of town. Just to be safe, I only buy candy which I like, on the theory that I may be forced to eat it later, if too few kids arrive.

About being a kid at Halloween, I remember the dread of trying to come up with costume ideas and being jealous of the kids who had access to the figure skating costume closet, or to older siblings or parents who had this sort of imagination. And I remember the weather. As we lived on a farm, we costumed up and then were driven into town to go Trick or Treating. I remember that in the seventeen years I lived there, there was perhaps only one or two years when there was snow on Halloween. This could be disastrous if you were using a paper shopping bag as a collecting tool, and the bag dragged on the ground, got soaked, and released your precious collection in dribbles or in one big tragic drench.
 

The best Halloween I remember was at university, the University of Manitoba, in Fort Garry, Winnipeg, (Manitoba, Canada) in the late 1960s. Many "gangs" went around campus streamering the bare trees with toilet paper. But if you had the good luck to be dating an engineering student, you could get invited to their own imaginative Trick or Treating. Just bring an empty beer mug, and hold it up when someone answered each door bell. We gathered on campus and then walked into the surrounding suburb, Fort Richmond, where many university people resided. Of course, as we were walking, we were not creating a driving hazard, and, as we were in larger groups, we were not making ourselves obvious targets for victimization. I believe the only costumes we wore were the famous brown and gold Engineering Faculty team bomber jackets, and probably ball caps. Most of the people who answered the doorbells just laughed and came back with brown bottles to pour, emptying them into our proffered cups. It was a trick which garnered a well-enjoyed treat. Chug-a-Lug. And I still have my mug.

Prompt #8 - Time Capsule

Prompt #8 - Time Capsule
I'm passing on this prompt for now.

Prompt #7 - Grandfather #1

Prompt #7 – Grandparents

I had a wealth of grandparents, three of whom I knew fairly well. The fourth, my maternal grandfather, Stanley Livingstone Bubar, was born in Hartland, New Brunswick, on April 9, 1876. The Bubar family had lived in the New Brunswick/Maine area since before the American Revolution. We do not know where they came from, before moving to one of the thirteen colonies. When he was four or five, Stanley's parents, Charles Wellington Bubar and Sophronia Day Bubar, migrated to what had been the Red River Colony, and was, since 1870, the province of Manitoba. CW's brother George had been in Red River since before the rebellion and had been confined in Lower Fort Garry by Riel's provisional government. Rumour has it that GB's initials are carved on the tyndall stone wall near the main gate of the fort. The brothers, George Bubar and Charles Wellington Bubar, SL's father, ran a paddlewheel riverboat freighting business out of Selkirk, Manitoba, hauling produce from St. Paul, Minnesota to Winnipeg. The completion of the trans-continental railroad across Canada in 1885 undercut the river freight business. The American route was no longer necessary. CW took the train west to scout out new opportunities. In 1891, he found land in British Columbia's Kettle River valley, a couple of miles north of the 49^th parallel, east of Kelowna and Osoyoos, and purchased the ranch from Mr. McCallum, the man who owned the preemption. Three hundred and twenty-three acres for $291.25, paid in four installments. The old Dewdney Trail built in 1858, linking Fort Hope and the mining district in eastern BC, skirted the northern edge of the ranch. And in 1910, five or so miles of river frontage were expropriated for the construction of the Kettle Valley Railroad.

But I've already gotten ahead of myself. In 1891, Charles (CW) and Sophronia moved their family to Kettle Valley, BC. Seven of them set out—father, mother, Stanley, Franklin, Bayard, Beatrice, Charles, and six year old Miles who did not survive the journey. His was the first grave in the family cemetery on the hillside above the ranch house. Six years old. The family built log barns and stables. They lived in a log cabin and later built a log house. The cattle brand for the ranch was 91, the year they began ranching. CW augmented the unpredictable ranch income by doing contract work, freighting, and working in sawmills. On July 4, 1900, he drowned in a log boom accident in Golden, BC, leaving Sophronia and her sons to run the ranch. When Franklin married the local school teacher, the ranch was split between the two older brothers and a second home was built at the western end of the property. (The two younger brothers later purchased ranches at Beaverdell.)

Stanley lived in the main ranch house with his mother, Sophronia. He loved horses and raced his horse Solo in local fairs and contests. There is a professional portrait of him taken in Walla Walla, WA, and another tourist shot of him standing inside the famous hollow tree in Vancouver's Stanley Park. And the iconic photograph of him fording the Kettle River driving his two white horses known as the Two Blind Mice. A large print of this photo hung in the ranch house dining room all the years of my childhood.

 

In 1919, during the Great Flu Epidemic which followed the first World War, Stanley drove his sleigh (now in the Midway museum) pulled by his favourite black team up to the door of a quarantined house in Rock Creek, a few short miles from the family ranch in Kettle Valley. He handed a sealed envelope to the child at the door and asked that it be given to the nurse, Miss Hayne. This was the way he proposed to my grandmother, Winifred. She must have said Yes as they were married, not sure where, but registered in the courthouse in Nelson, BC, on June 25, 1919. Stanley was 43 years old and Winifred was 25.

 

For the first eight years, the couple lived with Sophronia in the big ranch house. Winifred bore seven children (one was stillborn) between 1919 and 1931—Anne Patricia, George Murray, Elizabeth Jane, Margaret Norah (my mother), Stanley Livingstone Jr., and Arthur Leonard. Sophronia did not approve of Winifred, or of her “English airs” so Winifred retreated to the library. Sophronia died on July 2, 1928, when the house became Winifred's domain. Her daughters did all the house work and cooking. The whole days worth of dirty dishes awaited the girls when they got home from school. Auntie Betty remembers her father Stanley closing the door between the dining room and the kitchen, rolling up his shirt sleeves, and helping the girls wash dishes. There are snapshots of him tickling his daughter Anne when she is maybe four years old, and of him cutting his sons' hair outside at the woodpile, and one of him and Winifred a couple of years before he died.

 

Bill Harpur, a neighbour whose mother Mary was a friend of Winifred's, remembers the couple coming to the Harpur home for a meal. When the platter of fried chicken was passed to Stanley, he piled his own plate high with pieces, announcing to the table that “I was invited to a chicken supper and I'm going to eat chicken.” I can just imagine Grandma tut-tutting “Oh, Stanley!” This story may be the origin of my thinking of my grandfather Stanley as a cross between King Henry VIII and Tom Jones.

Stanley died of a heart attack in September 22, 1937. His young son, Stanley Jr. had been sent by his mother to call his father in for lunch. “I found him there, lying in the field, stone dead,” Stanley Junior recalled. “I was seven years old.” Stanley Sr. joined his parents and young brother in the family cemetery. Winifred, with six children under 16, carried on. She ran the ranch along with her sons until she retired in 1959 and moved into a small house in town (Midway, BC).

 

My mother was eleven when her father died. I think she felt abandoned. I know she missed him terribly. I never met him, but I feel that I would have liked him. I loved his three sons, my uncles Arthur, Stanley Jr., and George. I have visited the family cemetery. Visiting the family origin sites in Maine and New Brunswick is still on my bucket list.

Prompt #6 - Diaries and Journals

 

Prompt #6 - Diaries and Journals

 

I do not keep a diary or a journal. The closest thing for me is my TO DO List which I keep, monthly, with daily updates, which includes work, home, and social records. At the end of each month I run it off (keep it as a WordDoc) and store it with my business accounts. Not terribly romantic or revealing. Maybe revealing in the sense that I think of my work seriously, as a business. That's partly why I tend not to journal. I feel it is a way of evading work, or of putting my energy and inspiration elsewhere, taking away from work. I think of journalling as therapy, and I think of writing as something that is not really done, finished, until after it has been re-written, revised, polished. Which does not seem possible with a diary or a journal. I guess you could write "I should have said". Do people keep diaries on computers? Because, for at least twenty years, I have done all my writing at a keyboard, and before that for another twenty, on a typewriter. My handwriting has deteriorated from lack of practice. I am curious to learn how others make this balance between private and public writing. I do make profuse notes on scraps of paper which I refer to for writing ideas and prompts. Periodically, I sort through these scraps piled around my desk and file them in the appropriate file folder.

I have a diary I started when I was nine, and trip diaries I have started and mostly not finished, and a couple of work diaries, again usually petering out after about two weeks. I tend to avoid looking at these documents. Avoidance is my default position.

I have inherited one red scribbler which my mother used as a diary for one year. I do not know what prompted her to do this. It was very unlike her. I suspect it may have been suggested by someone else as a way for her to cope as it seems to cover about one year after her father's sudden death when she was almost twelve. It talks about school, work, sports, money she made cleaning homes and the school, visitors to their ranch home, trips taken. The most exciting page is the day she met my father, a new hired man, working on the ranch owned by friends of the family. She describes the day (and later told about things too risque to write down) when she was twelve/thirteen and he was eighteen and a group of teens went to the old swimming hole. They were never an item then. He may have dated one of her older sisters. They did not get together until ten years later, after the war.

I take a lot of photographs. I have a cupboard full of shoe boxes of photos filed by place or family grouping. Since I got my first digital camera at least five years ago I have taken more than 10000 photos which are on my hard drive filed by date (making it very difficult to access a specific shot). I also have all my mothers' old photo albums, a trunk full. My passion is flowers, followed by greens, then landscapes. I don't have any photos of myself that I like but I have taken several snapshot portraits of friends which I treasure. I don't even want to think about what will happen to my photos as I have no descendants. And doesn't it seem to be a truism: we all get "into" genealogy after it is too late to interview the people we really needed to talk to?

Prompt #1 - Who Are You?

Prompt #1 (September 3, 2013) – Who Are You?

I am: a Canadian, a writer, a reader, a blogger, a teacher, an editor, a photographer, an advocate of human rights.

I am a homeowner, a driver, a sister, an aunt, a great aunt, a friend, a brunette, a Scrabble player.

I am an ex-wife, an ex-screw, an ex-Manitoban, an ex-lover. A traveller, a collector, a lover of nature, a lover of cats, a lover of art.

I am J.M., Joan, Joni, Bridget, Eartha, Jamie. A female, a woman, a watcher, an observer, a natural.

The wording of the question "Who" implies to me, a very literal-minded reader, a noun response. Not adjectives or adverbs. The public exposure of a blog invites positive responses, keeping up the facade, a persona of optimism and positivity, of what is acceptable, expected.

Ideas abducted from reading other posts: I am an introvert, and a Sagittarius.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside awakes. - Carl Jung

I love Carl Jung, but I'm not sure about this one. It would seem that “inside” would need adjectives. I found a great image though. I visited the Book of Kells in May.

My grandfather used to play “Beautiful Dreamer” for grandma on the mandolin. “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are awaiting thee . . . ” Stephen Foster

Prompt #2 - My Birth

Prompt #2 (September 10, 2013) - My Birth


I was born in Rivers. I have always loved the sound of that. Borne in rivers. But Rivers is a town ten miles from our farm, which was five miles from our home town, Oak River, in Manitoba, Canada. I was born in Rivers, in Mrs. Madden's "nursing home" which meant a private home where pregnant women went to deliver. This was before the age of rural hospitals. I always knew that Donnie M was born there at the same time, and my Mum and his mother remembered each other. I did not know until more than 60 years later that the mother of another friend worked at that nursing home, possibly as a midwife, and thus was present at my birth. I wrote about this "coincidence" in my Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/

I was born on December 16 and ever since, 16 has been my lucky number. I do believe that my first memory is of a field of sparkling white snow (over which we would have driven to get to the farm, possibly in a horse-drawn wagon because the snow made the route for the car impassable.) The lane into the house was not built until the year I started school.

There are photos of me swaddled and in my parents arms, with a winter woodpile and axe in the background, and more from about six months of age, by the time it got warm enough to take babe in highchair outside. This was before the age of flash.

I was lucky last Christmas when my cousin Carol from Toronto forwarded me two pieces of paper she had gleaned while sorting through some trunks belonging to our mutual maternal grandmother. My birth announcement: a small card, a circular globe with a babe bursting through, like a chick hatching. Inside, my names Joan Margaret (after my godmother, my grandmother, and my mother), the date, time 11:30 pm, and weight which I cannot decipher, perhaps 5 or 7 and three-quarters pounds? And a letter inside a birthday card sent to my Grandmother (whose birthday was May 16) written by my mother, thanking her for gifts of a baby kimono and diapers and telling her about hand-me down bonnets and dresses from my cousin, and a wee wee pot. Mum describes how I was already sleeping through the night and how I "sure was good." I joke to friends how she never in my memory said such things to me.

I don't know whether I had hair. I know my brother was bald for his first eighteen months. My eyes are green and I believe have always been, like my Mum's.

Twins: I've always felt like a twin, although technically, not. My brother next to me is only eleven months younger. Donnie M had a sister born the same year as he was, and cousin Carol is also only less than a year older than her brother. It was after the war and people were making up for lost time, for the families they had postponed while the world was at war. I also have a twin cousin, Lew, born the morning of the very same day and year. He's the smart one. I don't think there was any collusion. I was born in Manitoba nine months after my parents were married in Kettle Valley, BC, with Uncle Tom the only relative of Dad's who was able to attend. Lew was born in Peace River, Uncle Jim and Aunt Dot's second child. Also, our best friends and next door neighbours for the first ten years of my life were twins, Linda and Leila, who were born in April, between my birthday and my brother's. I think being the oldest, and the only girl, have both had more impact.

Prompt #3 - My Physical Self

Prompt #3 (September 14, 2013) My Physical Self

This is a topic I do not like. My appearance is not something I care to spend much time on, beyond basic cleanliness. I have a broad back and very square shoulders. I carry my excess weight mostly in front, below the waist. I'm never happy with my hair. I like it--still brown, chin-length bob, wavy, but super sensitive to humidity, and hot, hot, hot, in this hot summer we've had. But I don't want to cut it short. It curls, and short hair, especially bangs, remind me too much of being a kid. I'm glad to be past that stage. I like hats, especially a beige cotton one I wear all the time to keep off sun and rain. Bought it at a garage sale years ago. Just toss it into the tub, it's wash and wear.

I never wear earrings and do not have pierced ears. I'm glad that I inherited from my mother a lack of interest in such things. I never wear lipstick either, mainly because I do not wish to draw attention to my mouth. I was young before the days of "braces" and thus my teeth are farther apart than the standard American chicklet smile. Lipstick always wears half-off. I have a few fillings but not many. I dread getting older and losing teeth which I will not be able to afford to get replaced.

I'm Caucasian female, 5'3" tall, 30 pounds overweight, size fluctuates, with brown hair, a small bit of grey at temples, and green eyes. I've worn glasses since Grade One (for almost 60 years) and expect to do so forever (astigmatism). Plus, I feel naked without them. I have two small scars. No, maybe three. One from exploratory laparoscopy through my belly button. (Fibroids, not serious.) One on my left breast, for a biopsy which I was later told had been unnecessary. And one on my forehead where I was hit by a stone at recess in the schoolyard in Grade 3. That time, there was lots of blood. A boy named Mervin was blamed. He was big, older, but already behind in school. The story was that boys were competing to see who could throw a stone the highest, and I happened to be standing where one of those stones came down. I always suspected that my brother knew something that he did not confess about this incident. He was there.

My hands are large, I think. With long fingers. Glove size 7. I love rings but often forget to don them before leaving the house. For everyday I prefer silver, and semi precious stones, smokey quartz, rose quartz, garnet, jade, moonstone, amethyst. This is connected to my passion for geology, mica, obsidian, tourmaline. The diamonds I have to keep in the vault so I seldom see them let alone wear them. My prize ring is a diamond band made from half the diamonds in an old cocktail ring that belonged to my grandmother. Mum had the ring taken apart--the prongs (claws?) were too worn to wear it safely--and had two rings made, one for her and one for me. Now, of course, I have hers too, which features a large solitaire with two other diamonds on each shoulder. I cannot remember if my fingerprints are loops or whorls. I was fingerprinted twice, both for the purposes of employment as a peace officer in the federal penitentiary system. I've only had a good manicure once in my life, and one other time when it got messed up as I was getting into my car. What a waste. And I probably only got the manicure because it came with the pedicure. I do like my feet. Size 6.5 or 7. Long toes. I love wearing thongs (flipflops) and slides. Maybe I should take a selfie of my feet.

Anderson Cooper, eat your heart out.

Prompt #4 - Seasons

Prompt #4 (September 22, 2013) My Favourite Season

For my favourite season, I think I have to pick fall. Probably because it meant the start of the school year. New clothes, a new lunch kit, new scribblers and pens. The smell of cedar shavings around the classroom pencil sharpener. Of someone's orange rinds in the wastepaper basket after lunch. And the end of the farm year, with combines and grain trucks, augers and elevators. The hot noon lunch driven out to the fields, eaten "on the run" so as not to lose even an hour of warm dry days. Hot tea drunk from quart sealers. Cookies stuffed into dusty shirt pockets. And the garden harvest, Mum's kitchen becoming a factory production line. Blanched peas and corn for the freezer. Rows of cellar shelves stocked with sealers and more sealers full of every kind of food for the winter. Apricots. Blueberries. Cherries. Crabapples. Peaches. Pears. Raspberries. Rhubarb. Strawberries. Tomatoes. And pickles. Beets. Mustard cauliflower. Mustard beans. Rhubarb relish smelled the best of all--onions and cinnamon stewing together. Tomato and cranberry catsup. Thousand day pickles. Dilled cucumbers. Dilled carrots. Old hens and venison. Grape jelly and strawberry jam. A full potato bin. A huge crock of sand with carrots and parsnips buried within. Stacks of pumpkins and vegetable marrow. Cabbages hanging upside down from the joists. That was what it seemed to be all about. The world turned upside down. With everything that had been "going out" now coming back in, in a flurry of lonely or communal labour.
 

I love the colours. Gold. Red. Brown. Orange. I loved the full pumpkin harvest moon climbing from the horizon. The smell of earth in the air. The colours of the sunset exploding with all the extra dust. And in the olden days, when they used to burn the stubble and the fields were a line of fire, yellow and orange and red against the black of night. The smell of clean smoke.
 

I live elsewhere now. There is no real harvest except for decorations on school windows and displays in the supermarket. And fall here means the beginning of the rainy season. I can already hear it strumming as it hits the roof. Everything is still lush, even the crop of leaves which have fallen on the moss of the lawn. A different kind of beauty. The same wet earth smell. No basement. No canning. A wealth of generous friends with gardens.

Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic because my brother just phoned me with the news. The house, the yard, the barnyard have all disappeared. Bulldozed like the windbreak and the pasture and the sloughs which used to surround it. Bulldozed, burned, buried, levelled, cultivated over into the one grand wheatfield. Owned now, rumour has it, by some giant corporation on another continent. Things change. Life goes on. Mine goes on virtually without wheat, and without a cellar full of home preserves. I'm just glad that such abundance was once a part of my experience. I'm glad too that it sewed in me an appreciation of how so much is given.

Prompt #5 - My Childhood Home

Prompt #5 (September 29, 2013) - My Childhood Home

I lived in the same house on the same farm for the first seventeen years of my life, until the day I left home to go to university. And I never lived with my parents ever again after that. I loved living on a farm even though I was not the typical outdoors type of person. My father and brothers did what few barn chores there were and my mother did all the gardening and lawn care, so my responsibility was pretty much just my schoolwork. But I loved walking out into the pasture or across the fields or walking or biking down the roads and over to the nearest neighbours which, for the first ten years, was where the twins lived, Linda and Leila, and after that, my cousins, four boys all younger than me. The pasture was a magical place of grass, low box-like shrubs, and scrub bush, mostly Manitoba maple and poplar, with willow in the lower sections surrounding the sloughs (rhymes with “clues”) which are places where rainwater and runoff water collect, mostly in spring, and which have usually evaporated before the end of summer. If the water did not evaporate, then it would have been called a lake. The farm was on the Parklands of Manitoba, three quarter sections around the home place, most of it “broken” meaning under cultivation, planted in wheat, oats, barley, or flax, with clumps of bush around the farmstead and along the fencelines.

Set atop what passed for a hill on those plains, surrounded by a mature windbreak of Manitoba maple and American elm, and covered with grey asphalt siding, the house was old. It came with the farm. It had been built in 1891 and did not have a foundation or a basement. There was a cellar dug into the dirt underneath the main building which was accessed originally by a trap door from the kitchen. The house was heated by the cookstove and a space heater which burned originally, coal, then briquettes, then oil. The upstairs was heated by a chimney which snaked through the floor and walls and out through the roof. My mother always tried to improve the house. She had grown up in a much larger ranch house built the same year but in BC, about 2000 miles away. She painted and wallpapered and eventually got built-in cupboards installed and running water in a bathroom after “rural electrification” arrived, and a water cistern under the new master bedroom. We never had “flush toilets” at home, just an outhouse, but also the luxury of an “indoor honey bucket” during the winter. The downstairs floors were beige tile and the upstairs, grey linoleum. There was yellow congoleum around the kitchen walls and painted v-joint wainscotting which was removed and the walls covered with gyproc when a picture window was installed in the living room. I can barely remember the pre-electric light days, although I still have some of the kerosene lamps that we used back then.

My room was one of two small bedrooms under the slanted ceilings upstairs. I inherited its white wallpaper with red roses which I loved. The room had two big windows facing south which for one week every month were flooded with moonlight. I loved that room and the moon is one of the things I missed most when I moved to the city with all its light pollution. I still miss the moon, and the Northern Lights, and the winter sunlight on snow. And the wolf willow. The way it smells in June when its shy flowers bloom.

The first leaving consisted of day trips, going to school. A van (a private car contracted to transport schoolchildren) picked us up at the door at 8:25 am and drove us to school and home again by 3:55 pm. School was in town, Oak River, about five miles away. I did my whole school career there, eight years in the elementary school and four in the “new” high school, Oak River Collegiate (although my brothers, only one and three years behind me, both graduated from Rivers Collegiate, in a slightly larger town, about ten miles from our farm, because of consolidation.)

I left home to go to university, moving into women's residence at the University of Manitoba's Fort Garry campus. I loved university, and living on campus. There were 20,000 students there at that time (only twelve in my whole Grade 12 graduating class) so it was a bit of a culture shock, but in a good way. I learned to negotiate the buses around Winnipeg, a city of about one half a million people, then and now. I was there for four years and then three years summer school for teacher training. Some of the best years of my life.