Prompt # 69 - Treasured Possession

Prompt # 69 - Treasured Possession

I have so many inherited treasures. Two diamond rings, one mine, one my mother's, made from an old cocktail ring which belonged to my grandmother. Her brass Buddha in brass bowl on brass serving tray. Books. China. Photographs. My mother's wedding dress. And more stuff seems to arrive every day as my cousin Carol keeps sending me things. My great-uncle Murray's war medals, from the North West Rebellion and the Boer War.

The one object I have treasured since my Grandma gave it to me at her death is a ceinture fleche, a Metis arrow sash, a colourful mainly red wool scarf, over six feet long with four feet of fringe, handmade probably around Red River about 1870. I do not know its true provenance but her husband's family lived in Selkirk, Red River, later Manitoba, from about 1869 to 1891. I think she willed it to me because I lived in Manitoba at the time and she thought it should go “home.”

This fall as I was researching Uncle Murray who was a Mountie in the North West Mounted Police and then the Royal North West Mounted Police, from 1882 to 1906, I learned that some Mounties adopted the Metis sash because it was so functional. The Metis who wove the sashes using their fingers and chairs as looms, used them as a tump line and mainly as a belt, outside the overcoat, to keep out the cold, and to attach useful accessories to, such as knives, tobacco pouches, powder horns, purses. So perhaps the sash belonged to Uncle Murray. I wish I knew. I wish I knew how to find out. I also wish I knew how to take better care of it, because I have had it for fifty years and it really needs to be washed, but I do not dare.

Metis means “mixed” in French and is the name given people with both Caucasian and First Nations ancestry. Although I'm unaware of any blood connection, I have always felt of myself as in some way “between,” or spanning. Probably because I am so literal, and I take a symbolic meaning of my surname. I choose to see myself as a link, and the bridge I build between worlds is a bridge of words and story. 

Prompt # 68 - Memory Tree

Prompt # 68 - Memory Tree

Holiday memories include the eighteen Christmases I lived at home with my parents (and two younger brothers as they arrived) and the four years before my mother died, after I moved to BC to be closer to her. Christmas meant winter, snow, Santa Claus parades where helpers threw candy. After age 6, Christmas meant the school Christmas concert, with skits, plays, and choirs, and the arrival of Santa with a bag full of toys and an orange and candy for every child. The first role I remember, it must have been Grade 2 because my brother was in Grade 1, I was a baby doll, in my blue flower girl dress and a baby bonnet, and all I had to do was sit completely still under the giant Christmas tree on stage. I think it must have been some version of the Nutcracker because I remember my brother was a mouse and some of the boys were toy soldiers and my rival Jane was a Raggedy Ann doll with giant freckles drawn on her face with an eyebrow pencil. In Grade 3 I was offered a lead role but I did not want to talk so I asked if I could be one of the angels. Wish granted. I stood at the back of the stage with a spotlight shining the tinsel on our wings and halos. My ideal acting role.

At home, Christmas meant a tree, and stockings hung for Santa, and parcels to be opened after the breakfast dishes were done. Special foods were prepared weeks in advance—cakes made with fruit and brandy poured on them, steamed pudding, buns, roast turkey, dressing, jelly salads, brussels sprouts, massed turnip, potato, gravy. For the first eleven or twelve years, Christmas Day was at Grandma and Grandpa's farm and all the younger aunts and uncles would come home. The groups always split into men in the living room drinking whisky and maybe playing cards and women in the kitchen preparing the food. It was usually a big meal at noon and a turkey sandwich meal at supper. And it was always a ritual at Grandma's, crackers and cheese with cocoa before going home. We lived only three miles away, but the winter roads were unpredictable.

When G & G retired and moved into town, their house was too small for gatherings so we went alternately to our house and to Uncle Tom and Aunt Jean's, for Christmas and for the repeat, almost the same menu, prepared by the other hostess, for New Years Day. By this time we were down to the two families as all the other aunts and uncles had their own families by then. The one worry was the number of place settings. Grandma would not sit at a table of thirteen; it was bad luck. So there was usually a kid's table off to the side. Now a tradition started that on Christmas, one day a year, the men offered to do the dishes.

When I think of these memories, I miss Grandma, Mum, and Auntie Jean the most, because, being the only girl, I seemed to have spent most of my time with them, not with the men and the boys. They are all gone now, and I have neither parents nor children. I rely on the charity of friends, or I collect the widows and orphans and we celebrate together. This year I resolved not to bake, decorate, send cards, give presents, or entertain. Two out of five isn't bad. I did bake shortbread and gave a lot away. I am cooking for a friend tomorrow, and going to another friend's on the 25^th. I don't call it Christmas any more as I am not a Christian. I think the name should be saved for the true believers, out of respect for them. I celebrate the season, the Winter Solstice, which we all experience. Nature is inclusive and can bring us all together should we so choose. Where I live, here in Sto:lo territory, it has always been known as the Winter Dance season.

I just watched an interesting documentary with Joanne Lumley on her quest to see the Northern Lights. I would add them to my memory tree. The Northern Lights. Grandma Bridgeman. Auntie Jean. Mum. I miss them all. 

Prompt # 67 - Priorities

Prompt # 67 - Priorities

My first priority is work. My work is writing. Creative writing. My project this last year has been writing a novel. The Rocking Girl. I consider it literary fiction although it is also quite accessible (IMHO). I make my work a priority by keeping to a work schedule and putting work before socializing or recreation. So my goal for 2015 is to self-publish The Rocking Girl on Amazon. I am apprehensive. About the technical challenge of uploading. About the emotional challenge of “putting it out there” where it (and thus, me) is vulnerable.

I wanted to write the kind of book I like to read. With a female protagonist, Wyn McBride. Set in British Columbia, Canada. Incorporating art, poetry, music, history, geology, genealogy. It involves a quest--a search for self, for belonging, for home. It aims to be positive, uplifting, enlightening. Like my former writer hero said, it is a story without villains, where the conflict is internal and inter-personal. It involves “deep travel”, a return to the ancestral home in Ireland, where the most important aspect of the journey is what the traveller learns about herself. 

Prompt # 66 - Treasures

Prompt # 66 - Treasures

I treasure: my privacy, space, my home (which I will have to give up soon). Freedom to focus on what I choose to do (creative writing). The beauty in which we live. Way more friends than I deserve.

Prompt # 65 - University

Prompt # 65 - University

University of Manitoba Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English and history

Certificate in Education (teacher training)

Master of Arts in English (Canadian literature)

I recently watched Bill Moyers interview American writer Marilynne Robinson who stressed the error of thinking that education is there to serve employers. That the goal of all education is to develop all aspects of the individual – not limited to employment skills. I loved going to university and notice myself wanting to return to it every time I am facing a major life change. I am grateful that I had the luxury of being able to study subjects and topics which interested me personally, and which still interest me today. Reading. Writing. Creativity. Psychology. Linguistics. History. Political Science. My true passion, Geology. And Canadiana.

Geologists can tell where this chunk of obsidian was mined, and thus retrace the First Nations' trade routes. This sample is in the National Historic Site at Fort Langley, BC, a former Hudson's Bay Company trading post, which offered new weapons and tools to First Nations traders in exchange for the furs, salmon, game, and berries they brought in, and the baskets and blankets they wove.

Prompt # 64 - Jobs and Careers

Prompt # 64 - Jobs and Careers

jobs – car hop, dessert bar girl

au pair

Eatons catalogue warehouse worker

china department clerk at the Bay

bookstore clerk

house cleaner

careers – high school teacher

social service caseworker

coordinator of volunteers

correctional officer

correctional case manager

adult education instructor

tutor

freelance writer

Aside from student summer jobs, the variety of careers I have had are all to me forms of education. Once I realized that what I was really doing was collecting stories, I left paid employment to work full time as a writer. I still see stories everywhere. For example:

Prompt # 63 - Addresses

Prompt # 63 - Addresses

I lived in the same house on the same farm for all my first seventeen years until I left home to go to university. My mother moved to that farm as a new bride and my parents had their 25^th anniversary there before they retired. The farm was located 10-13-22 (section, township, range) in Manitoba, Canada. The phone number was Oak River 308-3. We picked up our mail at the post office in town, Box 61. No one ever lived in that house after my parents retired. In the last couple of years, my brother Harv has reported that the house and the yard and barnyard have all been bulldozed and no sign of our old home can be seen today. The land they occupied has returned to field.

Our only close neighbours were the Haggertys on the next farm, about a twenty minute bike ride west and south. Theirs was the only house, the only light, you could see from our place. Ann and Murray had three girls, Bev, Linda and Leila (twins). The twins were four months younger than me, but one year behind me at school, in the same grade as my first brother George. Our parents were good friends and we spent many hours playing together, at our place or theirs, in the house or outside. When Murray got sick and Ann went back to work as a teacher, the family moved into town and two years later, into Brandon, the closest city. As the twins entered their teen years and were into boys, we lost touch. When I was at university, they were already married. I have no idea where they are now.

For a couple of years after the Haggertys left the farm, families rented the house and then my dad helped my uncle Tom and aunt Jean buy that farm and our nearest neighbours became our cousins, Ron, Garry, and Brian, and Cameron who was born after they moved there. We visited a lot with them too, we kids playing cards or ping pong indoors or outside in the pasture, the bush, or around the dugout and barn. 

That house was an old house, bigger and a bit fancier than ours, with a basement and a coal chute. Inside there were embossed tin tile ceilings and a bay window. I spent hours in that house but I do not have one photo of it. One hot spring day the house caught fire and burned down. No one was hurt. Only Auntie Jean and the baby were home at the time. It was thought that perhaps coal chips or coal dust had ignited in the hot sun. They built a concrete basement and cistern and moved a modern new house on to the same spot as the old. Like Dad, Uncle Tom sold the farm when he retired. The boys live in Dryden, Ontario, Alexander and Flin Flon, Manitoba, and Lethbridge, Alberta, and thank goodness that their wives are on Facebook, I hear snippets about their lives. 

Prompt # 62 – Blood and Water

Prompt # 62 – Blood and Water

My parents are dead, I have no children, and my brothers live thousands of kilometres away in Manitoba and Florida. My nearest relatives live two or three hours away and I see them once a year if I am lucky. I have more than 50 first cousins. One cousin, Marge, has become closer in the last few years. We keep in touch by notes, e-mail, FB, and visits. Our parents were close. Also a cousin, Wilma (really a cousin of my father's, but my age) sought me out and we keep in touch over the phone, and maybe meet for coffee or lunch once a year. I guess one of the joys about relatives is that we get to know these people who we would otherwise never meet, we live such different lives.

Friends are precious and I've never had a large number at any one time. However, as the years accumulate, so do old friends. My best friend from high school lives in Calgary and we talk about twice a year (birthdays) and visit much less frequently. My best friend from work forty years ago still lives in Winnipeg and we write or call once or twice a year. I still have contact with several people I socialized with in other lives - university, work, even former students, and former homestay students, on FB, which is good as otherwise I would never know where they are or what they are doing. Locally my friends have mostly been from groups I've attended – writing, art, genealogy, photography, Scrabble. Which I guess means we share interests and passions. Two of these friends moved away, Marilyn to Port Moody, Leina to Salt Spring Island, but we still keep in touch. They have both visited me here since they left.

I appreciate friends and I realize that I am poorly skilled at seeking out friendships or even at maintaining regular contact. So I have to rely on friends being more aggressive than I am at keeping in touch. I am blessed.

Leina

Marilyn 

Carol 

Prompt # 61 - Success

Prompt # 61 - Success

To me, success means happiness. I wrote about it as a first assignment for Mr. Murray in Grade Nine and got a poor mark for an uninspired / uninspiring response. Now fifty years later, I still feel the same. You know that old joke. What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Answer: Just lucky, I guess. In other words, happiness is simply choosing to look at things in a positive way.

I consider myself to be successful because I have the luxury of living where I choose and doing what I want. I spend my hours each day doing only what I want - writing, creating, reading, socializing. If I wanted a different kind of life, I would act to get what I want. I live in my dream house, in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. Surrounded by a symphony of flowers. To me, flowers = happiness = success.

Prompt # 60 - Family Traits

Prompt # 60 - Family Traits

My Dad always said we were “long-headed” which meant, he said, that we thought ahead, long ahead, made plans, and worked to achieve goals. I think I'm like him that way. I look like him, and his father. From my maternal grandmother and from my father, I inherited a love of reading and learning. From my mother I probably got my love of nature and the outdoors, although she was sporty and active which I am not. I read and write about and take pictures of nature. From all my relatives I suspect I inherited a tendency towards an inappropriate sense of humour. And again from my Dad, his motto: Trust everyone, but always cut the cards. 

Leaves from the family tree.

Prompt # 59 - Tasks

Prompt # 59 - Tasks

I get out of bed, turn off the tv, use the toilet and flush, wash face, dress in long skirt or jeans, loose T-shirt, fleece, no bra unless I have company. I go downstairs, turn off nightlight, turn on radio to CBC, open curtains on picture window and french door. I go to the sink, fill coffee carafe with six cups cold water, pour into machine, struggle with filter, add three T of ground coffee, push the button On. Eat a bowl of something, or a homemade muffin, and sit either on couch at picture window or in television room which is warmer, and drink coffee, two large mugs. Then, I'm ready to start my day. Work at computer. Make bed. Make lunch, usually a bowl of homemade soup or a sandwich. Omelet on Sunday. Work at computer or read. Walk either at 3 or 5 pm. 4 pm watch Murder She Wrote, with cup of instant coffee and one cookie. Make supper. Close curtains. Tidy kitchen, washing pots, loading dishwasher. Watch tv. Play Spider Solitaire or Scrabble on laptop at the same time, checking Facebook and playing Scrabble with friends there. Eleven pm. Turn off lights, except nightlight. Upstairs to bed. If I go up town, to shop for groceries, check mail, meet for coffee at the Blue Moose every Wednesday, play scrabble at the Lodge every Thursday, go to library, it is afternoon. Except I go to garage sales every Saturday morning. Every Sunday morning I watch the Coronation Street marathon.

I could add more detail, but I know you are already asleep.

When my grandmother Winifred was my age, she lived alone in a little yellow house in a small town in British Columbia. We lived on a farm in Manitoba, two thousand kilometres away. She had diabetes and went blind, so her routine changed. She had running water and flush toilet in town but not on the ranch where she had lived for 40 years. She would have had tea for breakfast, made from loose tea, probably Nabob, which she strained through a strainer to keep the leaves out of the cup. She would insist on a cup and saucer. Mugs were for truck drivers. She made toast which she stood up in a toast rack and ate cold, as they do in England. I do not know what she preferred to eat, but she was always short (under 5 feet) and stout. I know she liked fish, sole. Once she made us tomato aspic with canned shrimp in it. That seemed so exotic to me. My mother often said that the only meal Grandma ever knew how to cook was curry. Let's just say domestic skills were not her forte.

I never saw her wear anything other than dresses and shoes which she called “slippers,” because you slipped your foot in, without laces. She also had real fluffy slippers as well. She wore a large flesh pink contraption underneath her dresses, a sort of combination girdle with stays and bustier, with garters. I don't know how she got it done up without help. She was used to having help. As a child in England, there would have been helpers and servants in the house. When she was married with children at home, her daughters did most of the house work including cooking, dishes, cleaning, garden, and laundry. For most of her life, she would have been happy reading for 16 hours a day. After she went blind, she borrowed recorded books from the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind). I used to love visiting at her house. It had no wallpaper. Every wall was bookshelves, filled with books which I would volunteer to dust. Grandma enjoyed socializing, especially meeting women friends for tea. She went to church three times every Sunday. I'm really not sure how she managed for those 9 years she lived alone. I know she relied very heavily on her daughter-in-law and the 2 granddaughters who lived nearby. 

Prompt # 58 - Goblet

Prompt # 58 - Goblet

I think of myself as always a “glass half full” type. But really, I see that glass and I think “Lots of room left for more.” Maybe it is a question of: Are you filling it up, or drinking it down? Are you adding or subtracting, giving or taking. I still insist that I am adding - to that water goblet of the world.

Prompt # 57 - Chapters

Prompt # 57 - Chapters

“My life closed twice,” the great Emily Dickinson says. As if it were two books, rather than two chapters. “People, places, events?” the prompt asks. I think the most revealing to me is: 22 years as a student (birth to university, but not continuous). 22 working for others. 22 working on my own, freelance, contracts, my own creative endeavours. The last is the best, probably because it is best suited to my needs, skills (or lack of), and talents. Although I do realize that in all the years I was working in education, social services, corrections, I was collecting stories. My interest in humanity has never dwindled.

Prompt # 56 - Groups

Prompt # 56 – Groups

My group participation has dwindled to two groups, both informal. Every Wednesday several of us meet at a local coffee shop called the Blue Moose and talk. Originally, we were an off-shoot of the defunct Philosopher's Cafe. We joke that the ticket to admission is that you have to use the word “art” at least once in your conversation. As we are all rather “artsie” – writers, painters, sculptors – this is not a hardship, and allows us to delude ourselves that what we are doing is more than gossip.

Every Thursday, a group of us meet to play Scrabble. We used to go to Molly's house because she could not get out. Now that she is in extended care, we go to the Lodge and play there. If we have more than four players, we set up two boards.

I have belonged to other groups. Our photography club and our genealogy club both folded. At one time, I was a member of the local art guild which runs the art gallery. I quit mainly because I hate going to meetings, especially at night. I also used to attend the local book club at the library. I love books and reading and I confess that I find the excess of negativity in such groups really offensive. There is too much focus on 'I don't like' and 'the writer should have . . . ' whereas I feel that when I read I am trying to figure out the writer's purpose, goal, and the choices made to achieve those goals. Rather than sit there feeling angry or letting the negativity of others darken my own experience of the book, I decided to not go. I recently read an account of a writer's experience when being attacked by a reader and I recognized that she was describing exactly how I used to feel at book club. http://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/bws-05-03-14-angie-abdou/ Thanks to Lauren Carter for this link to Angie Abdou's article.

Recently since I've had the luxury of more time, I manage to read about one book a week, which I report on Twitter @earthabridge instead of posting photos of my latest lunch. Although when I'm writing I find I don't read much. I do not want to switch from one world to another. 

Prompt # 55 - Movies

Prompt # 55 – Movies

The first movie I remember seeing was a western. My parents left my brother and me near the front of the theatre and they went to sit farther back. A horse and rider came full on the screen and the horse reared, seeming to fill the room and coming right for us. The noise I made, not sure whether it was screams or sobs, brought my parents running. I'm still afraid of any horses without a fence between me and them. This theatre burned down when I was six but I think this event was a couple of years before that.

The worst experience I remember was when as a young teen, my mother took me to a show called Mom and Dad. Parents were rooked by advertising to take their teen-age children. The show was sold as the answer to “the talk” on sex education which neither parents nor schools ever really had with young people. I think the movie was an old military health education film from the previous war that stressed avoiding sexually transmitted diseases by instilling fear in everyone. People were puking in the aisles. Although my memory appears to differ from what IMDB says.

I've never been a big fan of science fiction but because John Wyndham was a famous writer and his novel The Midwich Cuckoos, which is often taught in schools, had been made into a movie called The Village of the Damned starring Hayley Mills' father, I went to see it. Several small villages around the world are “visited” by an alien force. Nine months later every female in every village gives birth to a blond child. The children all have ESP. They can communicate with each other telepathically and they can read other peoples' minds. In order to save the world, John Mills, a teacher, has to rig a briefcase with a bomb, build a brick wall across his mind so the special children cannot read him, and enter the classroom on a kamikaze mission. A suicide bomber hero. The first day of my teaching career, in a Manitoba community where the majority of families were of Icelandic heritage, I walked into a classroom of white-blond children. I freaked. I had no briefcase, and no brick wall.

Once, after my marriage ended and I was living alone in the city, I decided I had to force myself to do things I wanted to do without waiting to meet someone to escort me. I picked an afternoon matinee and, because I was an English major, decided to check out the new version of D.H. Lawrence's classic Lady Chatterley's Lover. What I learned is that a lot of single men go to matinees and sit there watching with overcoats or felt hats covering their laps.

One recent movie that really made me angry was The Notebook. The young couple, Rachel McAdam and Ryan Gosling, were beautiful, and I've always loved James Garner. But the plot, the romanticization, the emotional manipulation, was really upsetting. Haven't we matured beyond fairy tales for adult children?

I was a relatively young adult during the Vietnam War. Three of my favourites are set in this era. I love Apocalypse Now, starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando, the updated revisioning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I love Coming Home. I've always loved Jane Fonda's work. And I like Rambo First Blood which was one of the first stories about post traumatic stress. Because it was filmed in the town where I now live, Hope, BC, I have written about it on my Earthabridge blog, pieces called "Cult Fiction," when we celebrated the 25^th anniversary around 2007.

My favourite fluff film is Dirty Dancing. Love Jerry Orbach and Patrick Swayze. I recently really enjoyed re-watching Shakespeare In Love, although I usually refuse to watch any movies interrupted by advertisements on television. And I still don't watch scary movies. I don't watch many movies at all, because of where I live and lack of disposable income. And because I learned that lesson the hard way, not to go alone.

My favourite DVDs are actually two masterful documentaries. Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz about the Band with Robbie Robertson and including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and more. And an Australian homage to my favourite Canadian, Leonard Cohen, called I'm Your Man.

 I wish.

Prompt # 53 - Home Town

Prompt # 53 – Home Town

I grew up on a farm 4.5 miles south of a small prairie town called Oak River, about 50 miles north of Brandon, Manitoba. The town is so small that Facebook will not accept it as a place, so I have to list my hometown as Rivers where I was born, which was about 10 miles south east of the farm. I went to school in Oak River for all twelve years before leaving to go to university in Winnipeg.

                                                            A little town on the prairie.

Oak River is still on the map. At least one hundred people live there, about half what it was fifty years ago. It is a victim of technology. Bigger machines mean bigger farms worked by fewer people. It exists still mainly to service the farms which surround it. Groceries, quick freeze, gasoline, mail, coffee shops, pub, farm equipment, hardware. There used to be a drug store, liquour store, and in the earlier years, the 1950s, a telephone exchange, an egg grading station, a blacksmith shop, general goods store including clothing, a railway station. Even the grain elevators are gone now, and the tracks have been pulled up.

                                                     Main Street in winter in the 1950s.

Grain is now trucked to a modern elevator about ten miles away. The high school kids (grades 7 to 12) are bussed to Rivers. The bank is now a credit union. I believe there is still an active curling and skating rink and that golf has joined baseball as the summer recreation. There is a seniors complex now. The old school has been torn down, and the elementary school uses the building that was built as a high school for us. It had four classrooms, a hallway lined with lockers, a gym, a science lab, but no library.

                                          This old elementary school has been torn down.

I never lived in town but for a few years my grandparents were retired there, and many school friends were town kids, if their parents worked as teachers, or in other service industries such as butcher shop, mechanics, retail, etc. In high school, kids from the neighbouring smaller town of Cardale were bussed to Oak River, which provided an opportunity to make new friends. I am still in touch with my best friend from Grade Nine, Leona, who lives near Calgary. I no longer have any aunts, uncles, or cousins living in my old hometown. I don't think anyone from my grade still lives in the area. We all had to leave for higher education and for employment. 

Prompt # 52 - Inheritance

Prompt # 52 - Inheritance

Somehow I have become the keeper of several family treasures. From my paternal grandmother, her old geography school textbook, complete with some fold-out maps. Although Grandma would have used it in Ilminster, Somerset, in the first decade of the 20^th century, before she emigrated to Manitoba around 1912, the maps and political information contained within suggest that it was written before the 1830s. The map of North America is barely an outline of coastlines.

From my maternal grandmother, who was born in Portsmouth and went to school in Twickenham before she emigrated to Canada in 1913, a brass Buddha, wearing coral and carved wooden beads, sitting in a brass bowl on a carved wooden stand, a brass tray, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a silver hand mirror, silver button hooks, silver and ebony glove stretchers, a silver plate mustard pot with blue glass liner, a silver plate toast rack, a Belleek cake plate, a Wedgwood milk jug with hunting dog handle, her coral christening necklace, a hand-wrought gold necklace with amethyst and aquamarine stones, a gold cocktail ring set with seven diamonds, and a book – The Parents Book, Answers to Children's Questions. I think her mother, grandmother, and aunts used to send her things from England.

And from my maternal grandfather's family, who lived in Maine/New Brunswick before the border was drawn, and moved to Red River for ten years before moving farther west to British Columbia in 1891 - wedding china from 1870, a ceinture fleche, a Metis sash from Red River, circa 1870, a Hudson River Valley landscape painting, and oak-framed photographs of their ranch in BC taken before 1910.

From my cousin Carol who received them through her mother or aunt, a Dead Man's Penny with our grandmother's brother's name engraved, a medal awarded to the next of kin of every British or Commonwealth soldier who was killed during WW I. And pieces of ephemera – including a postcard sent from our great-great-grandmother (who died in 1920) to our grandmother in Canada before she was married.

I also have from my mother - an oil painting on wood from around Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where she spent her wedding night. A blue lustre cream and sugar set, a green oval casserole, wool blankets, a Eugene Veder print - all wedding gifts. A statue of a horse. A jewel box with jewelery. An unusual necklace with pastel glass globes like mini light bulbs. Her silverware chest. A trunkful of photo albums. Table cloths. Her wedding dress. Lord, I even have an ancient wooden wagon wheel, moved from the Manitoba farm to BC when my parents retired to Vernon. The wheel was from an old grain-hauling wagon which probably came with the farm when my father bought it with veterans' assistance after WW II. It was also the wagon which brought me home to the farm when I was born, because the lane had not been built yet and cars could not get through from road to house during winter. Horses and wagon to the rescue. I love the symbolism of this old thing, a sun image you can find in ancient art. I found it once on the base of a High Cross in Ireland. I can't believe my parents saved it and brought it to BC as by then fifty years later, it was purely decorative. It leans on my deck.

Mostly I feel honoured to be the keeper of these “things” which by their connections to people, places, and times past, the stories they hold, I am keeping alive. Sometimes I feel the burden of “things” - the weight of responsibility. These things reduce my options. I need space to accommodate them. I have to figure out what to do with them. Not to mention the $40 x 20 years = $800 I've paid already to keep some things in a safety deposit box.

Of course, other than things, from each family and each ancestor I also inherited physical, intellectual, emotional traits, for better or for worse. I look like my father's family. I seem to have inherited my maternal grandmother's love of books, reading, and writing. When I used to visit her about every two years after she retired into town, I would volunteer to dust the books in her library. I hope I've also inherited her sense of humour. From all my ancestors, I proudly celebrate a questioning mind and a fair bit of contrariness. 

Prompt # 54 - School Trips

Prompt # 54 - School Trips

Trips were not part of our school culture. We didn't have any school teams or drama clubs. If you were in the choir, you would go to the nearest music festival once a year. I remember only one, in Hamiota, the next town to the north-west, about ten miles from our school. The two songs I remember most are “The Skye Boat Song” (speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing over the sea to Skye) and “The Little Drummer Boy” (come they told me pa rum pa pum pum). I wasn't in the choir. Or, shall I confess, I got booted out of the choir, for mouthing. Honestly, I thought I was doing everyone a favour. I have no voice. But one time, I skipped school with an accomplice and rode on the bus with the choir and then ran wild around Hamiota while the others were singing in the competition. I think we missed the bus, or maybe someone called our parents and informed on us. I know I ran into my parents downtown and went home with them. This could have been just pure luck as otherwise there was no way to get home except to hitchhike.

In Grade Twelve we did go on one trip to Winnipeg, the provincial capital, about two hundred miles east of Oak River (this was before metrification). We toured the university and the general hospital, where some of us planned to go for further education or training. There were about five or six of us in one car driven by Mr Hall, the science teacher. We stayed in a hotel. I think that would have been the time we went to a play at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. It was The Fantasticks, with the song “Try to Remember the Kind of September.” I do wonder whether it was a travelling troupe, and if so, whether Jerry Orbach played one of the young men. I think this was also the time that my best friend Leona and I went to see the movie Dr Zhivago. We both loved it, especially the Ukrainian symbolism in many of the scenes including the opening funeral, which were so similar to our own experiences in rural Manitoba.

I was honoured to be chosen for one special trip, the summer between Grade Eleven and Grade Twelve. The school named me as a Centennial Traveller, a special federal program to celebrate the upcoming centennial of Canadian Confederation. I went to Winnipeg and joined a group of 23 others of my age from all over the province, along with two chaperones. We travelled by train, two nights, to Montreal and were then billetted with a Quebecois family, going on group tours along with 24 Quebec students during the day. To Old Montreal. The Botanic Gardens. Ile St Helene which was being built for Expo '67. Private parties. Outings with the host family to Sorel and to the mountains. A bus trip to Quebec City including tours of Old Quebec, the aquarium, the Plains of Abraham, where the English defeated the French during the Seven Years War, and Canada became British. In Quebec City we girls stayed in a nunnery and the boys in a monastery, miles away. On our way home to Winnipeg, we stopped in Ottawa and toured the Parliament Buildings.

This trip was one of the highlights of my life. It helped expand my love of Canada. At a folk club our group had met students from McGill and the University of Montreal. I remember one was an engineer and he asked simply: Why do I have to learn English and study and work in a language not my own? Thus, when the Quiet Revolution happened in Quebec, followed by the October Crisis in 1970, I felt I had some personal understanding of some of the issues, from these meetings, and from the pen pal relationships I maintained with students from the host group.

This visit also made all the Montreal references seem real once I became a passionate fan of Leonard Cohen. Because I'd already been down to that place by the river. And to Our Lady of the Harbour, the Notre Dame de Bon Secours Church in Old Montreal, which is still one of my sacred places. When you walk in, your eyes immediately go up, towards heaven, to see a navy of miniature sailing ships floating in the sky, carved by sailors and given to the church as votive offerings as their boats were leaving the safety of the seaway and the harbour and setting off back out over the sea to who knows where.

Prompt # 51 - First Home

Prompt # 51 - First Home

I lived in my first home for 17 years, a farmhouse five miles from Oak River, Manitoba. (10-13-22, section, township, range) The house stood atop a small hill in the middle of fields, beside the pasture, with a fence separating the barnyard and granaries. The house had been built in 1891. It was surrounded by a windbreak of American elm, Manitoba maple, and poplar. It was about a half mile from the main road, which is unusual. The house was located before the survey for government road allowances had been made. This meant that the lane was long and winding, curving past two sloughs which had water in spring and bulrushes all year. The second slough also had muskrat houses. I loved living on the farm. I've written about the pasture, my favourite escape. And about the fact that nothing remains. House, yard, barn, barnyard, trees have all been bulldozed and the land broken, folded into the fields. So now it is truly a magic place which exists only in memory.

Prompt # 50 - Godparents

Prompt # 50 - Godparents

I'm not sure if I had official godparents, named at my baptism, but I always associated two women as my godmothers. The first was Mrs Ethel Grove who was the mother of a friend of my father's. I don't know why I think so. We had no special contact except when our family visited her on our trips from Manitoba to BC. She moved from Bradwardine, Manitoba, my father's home town, to Trail, BC with her daughter Ruth who was a teacher. The two later moved to Sooke, BC to be near Mrs. Grove's son Ralph. Before my parents were married, when my dad was in the Canadian army waiting in England, he visited the Groves when he was on leave. They had gone to England to visit family and got trapped over there when the war started. I think they may have been in Scotland.

My second godmother was Joan Smith, a good friend of my mother's. Their mothers were best friends. Joan was also like a sister to my father who had worked for her parents. I was named for Joan and for my maternal grandmother, Winifred Joan.

I left home at seventeen to go to university and never lived with my parents again. This meant that I seldom saw the people they visited. That and the fact that I still lived in Manitoba while everyone else lived in BC.

Prompt # 48 - A Perfect Day

Prompt # 48 - A Perfect Day

A perfect day begins early, with a pot of coffee and a good book to read by dawn light through the picture window which frames Mount Hope. When the sun pops over the mountain I close the drapes to keep the room cool.

                                          Hanging basket on the deck in the sun.

When it is not summer holiday, or if I have no visitors, a perfect day includes four or five hours at my computer making up stories. I'm working on a novel, working title Shine, about aging gracefully. It involves journeys into various Interiors, in British Columbia and Ireland.

A perfect day includes meeting friends for coffee at the Blue Moose.

A perfect day includes a walk with a friend into the forest or down to the creek or over to the river. If it is Saturday, the walk may include a garage sale or two or the outdoor market in the park.

                                          The Flood Falls Trails ends here.

Supper finished and dishes done, I settle down to watch Coronation Street.

A perfect day ends with a full moon shining across my double bed.

Prompt # 47 - Awards

Prompt # 47 - Awards

When I was nine, I won a free trip to summer camp at Clear Lake based on my Sunday School by mail submissions.

In Grade Eleven I was chosen to be a Centennial Traveller, winning a free trip to Montreal where I stayed with a French-Canadian family in Longueuil for two weeks. We travelled as a group from Winnipeg, visiting Parliament in Ottawa and Quebec City as well.

My M.A. Thesis The Indian, the 'Other,' In the Canadian Quest for Identity: Four Prairie Novels of the 1970s won an Honourable Mention for best thesis of the year. It is available online. http://ecommons.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/31

"Kettle Valley," an excerpt I submitted to a Writer's Digest contest, Spiritual Memoir, won First Prize with an award of $750 US. That was a good one.

Prompts # 45 & 46 - Childhood Reading

Prompts # 45 & 46 - Childhood Reading

 My reading taste moved from Lone Ranger comics to Archie comics (where I favoured Betty)

to trashy movie gossip magazines.

I made the switch to literature after reading my first Canadian novel about places and people I knew - Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Laurence was from Neepawa, Manitoba, a town only fifty miles from Oak River where I went to school. 

Prompt # 44 - Hairstyles

Prompt # 44 - Hairstyles

Hair has been the bane of my existence.

At first, it was white blond, like both my brothers, and we all turn mousy brown by the time we start school. This picture of me and the older of my two brothers is a hand-painted photograph, from the days before colour film.

I read somewhere that the popularity of blond bleach is a subconscious desire to return to pre-school innocence, or women giving in to men's desire for prepubescent pre-verbal females. Or maybe it's just a wish for Scandinavian roots (in more ways than one).

The first day I walked into a high school classroom to teach my first year, in an Icelandic-Canadian community in rural Manitoba, I was faced with a room full of blond heads. This immediately put me into the scene in The Village of the Damned where a classroom of blond-headed clone-like children with telepathic skills stared down a teacher, Hayley Mills' father, who built up a brick wall in his head to block the children from reading his mind, from detecting the bomb he has hidden in his briefcase, a kamikaze mission to rid the world of alien invaders. A piece of chalk whizzing past my ear and smashing on the blackboard behind me broke the spell.

My hair is light brown, now with white at the temples. I've never ever had it permed or dyed, although I've added a reddish rinse twice. It is naturally very thick and wavy, and it is super-sensitive to humidity, so at summer dances, although it may have entered the dancehall wavy and smooth, before the end of the evening it was a ball of friz.

Once I found a hairdresser in Winnipeg who had a poster that said Friz Is In, but my only response was “I wish!”

The best thing that ever happened to my hair was the invention of the blow-dryer. I use the brush attachment and it dries and straightens both at once. A good cut also helps. I like a bob with the bottom cut straight. If it is layered, each layer curls up separately. Friz again. Maybe this is just evidence that we always want what we don't have. Or, like Jane Fonda's character learns in Coming Home, natural is best, and being able to accept our hair is the first step in being able to accept our true selves. Maybe, although she did discover this universal wisdom in a beauty salon.

For my Twitter photo I use a selfie of me in a plastic Halloween wig. More wishful thinking, as real bangs too are out for me. They curl up into little fly-away wings which look like owl or devil horns.

The nicest thing anyone has ever said about my hair was when my grandfather, missing his late wife, said: You have your grandmother's hair.

Prompt # 43 - Emigration

 Prompt # 43 - Emigration

I was born in Rivers, Manitoba, Canada and I have never lived in any other country. I love Canada, both where I was born and where I live now, in Hope, BC. This summer, I cannot visit the prairies where I grew up so I am reading prairie stories. I just finished Gabrielle Roy's The Road Past Altamont. Altamont is a town near where my brother lives. I just started reading Homesick, a novel by Saskatchewan writer Guy Vanderhaeghe, with a cover painting by Gathie Falk, a BC artist who came from Manitoba.

Twice in my life I have visited England, Scotland, and Ireland. I could live in any of these places if I win the lottery. Both my grandmothers were born in England. My mother's mother in Portsmouth, Hampshire with family origins in Essex and Norfolk. My father's mother in Somerset. They both emigrated to Canada shortly before WW I. One came alone, to Kaslo, BC and the other came with her mother and two siblings to join her father who had come on ahead. On my tour last summer, I visited towns and houses where they both lived before leaving England. I took pictures. This is the house in which my mother's mother lived with her mother, grandmother, and two aunts, from 1904 to 1913.

In 1978, through a long series of coincidences, I spent Christmas in a small town in Ireland. I knew nothing about Ireland other than “the Troubles” in the North as reported in the news. I absolutely loved the country—the pubs, Dublin, Connemara, castles, monasteries, ruins, people. I felt very at home. Several years later, at least 30, I learned that my grandmother's grandfather had been stationed in Dublin with the Royal Navy when he died. Then, slowly, over the next 8 years, I learned that he had actually been born there, in Cork, where his father was also a doctor who taught at Cork University, and that he and several generations before him had all been born in Ireland. Later still, the more I Googled the family name on my mother's side, the more astonished I became. There is a bay. There were landowners around Kinsale. One of them was married to a Butler of Kilkenny Castle, which I had never heard of before the bus stopped there last year. There were graves with the family name a mere four miles from sites I had visited on my first magic trip to the emerald isle. I also stumbled upon a marriage between a man with my father's name and a woman with my mother's family name (although in Canada these families lived half a continent apart and knew nothing of each other.) Then, pursuing the matrilineal name with Kinsale, I came up with the final coincidence (so far). That a woman with my patriarchal name and my first name lived in Kinsale in the 1820s where she started a service group called The Sisters of Mercy. If you know how much I love Leonard Cohen, you will understand what this means to me. I think the word is gobsmacked.

I still continue my genealogy research. I have yet to make the link between Norfolk and Kinsale. It seems several archives were lost during the fight for independence. But I'm one of those genealogists more inclined towards “family history” and “blood memory” than I am towards “the paper trail” and “hard evidence,” so I'm enjoying the journey and the mystery.

PS  My mother's father's family moved from New Brunswick, Canada to Red River and then to British Columbia in 1891. My father's family came from Cornwall. His grandfather homesteaded in Manitoba in the 1891 after retiring from the Royal Navy.