Prompt # 26 - Technology

Prompt # 26 - Technology

When my two grandmothers emigrated from England to Canada before WW I, they travelled by boat and the trip took about three weeks. When I visited England to see the places they were born, I travelled by air and the trip took about nine hours. Transportation seems to be one of the more obvious changes in the last one hundred years. When they arrived in Canada, both would have crossed the continent by train, one half way, to Manitoba, where they probably transferred to a branch line and disembarked right at the train station in the small town where she met my grandfather. The other crossed from Montreal to Kaslo, BC. Did the train go right into town, or did she have to transfer to the paddlewheel boat for the last jaunt up the lake? I don't know. But I do know that when the new Kettle Valley line was constructed within her first two or three years in BC, she rode the train to Kettle Valley, to work for another doctor, who just happened to live up the creek behind the ranch where her future husband lived. I have a picture of her on horseback which I am sure she only did for transportation purposes. It was her husband who loved horses, bred them, raced them. Both grandfathers worked their land with teams of horses and also had modern machines, tractors, swathers, rakes, thrashing machines, combines. In both cases also, half a continent apart, in Manitoba and BC, their farm and ranch are now owned by international conglomerates. Where the land once grew wheat for bread and pasta, now it grows canola for cooking oil. Where the ranch grew alfalfa to feed beef cattle, the fields are covered with shade netting over rows of ginseng.

Both grandmothers were married before 1920. Both would have received electricity in their homes well into their married life. By the time I remember visiting their homes, both had telephones—the wall-mounted kind with a mouthpiece on the wall and a bell-shaped earpiece that you picked up as you listened to see if the party line was busy, before you cranked the crank to call the operator and to give her the number you wished her to connect you to, literally, physically, at her switchboard in the telephone office in town.

Luckily, my family has not had a lot of medical difficulties, so the scientific advances in that field are less obvious to me. However, convenience and communication developments are everywhere. Rural electrification reached Manitoba in the 1950s. I remember when we got hydro on our farm. Electric lights replaced kerosene and gas lamps. A fridge replaced the icebox. A water heater replaced blocks of ice melted on the stove for laundry. A pump moved water from a cistern instead of buckets bringing it in from the rain barrel outside. Mum received a large Mixmaster kitchen appliance for Christmas. These conveniences never reached as far as flush toilets in that old farmhouse, but certainly in every home since that first, all the “modcons” have been present.

With electricity, we could then get television. A very wise retailer in town sold tickets to the first television which he displayed in his hardware store window. Our nearest neighbours and best friends won the television. We would all go over to their house to watch. Soon everyone in the area bought their own, installing the tall aerial on the roof to receive the only station, CKX Brandon, Manitoba. After that, we stopped visiting people because my dad would get so annoyed, going to someone else's house and all sitting quietly in the living room watching the television, not being allowed to talk. We could do that at home.

Electricity also meant new radio, record players, then stereo, electric sewing machines, electric washing machine, clothes dryer. As a teen, I had a precious transistor radio, and a small portable manual Underwood typewriter. As the eldest child and only girl, I got to drive the tractor while the boys picked up stones and hay bales. And I learned to drive a car when I was sixteen, although I didn't get my licence until I was twenty-one and bought my own car. A computer came into my home in 1981 and played a part in the end of that relationship. However, within ten years, I had my own PC, and today I have a PC, a laptop, a tablet, and a cell phone, but not a smart phone although if I had kids, I'm sure I would pick up on this one too. I don't like electronic “facetime.” Even selfie's require a Halloween wig and much cropping.

I still own four televisions and four radios. I do cling to the past, with my land line, and my DVR player, and a TV that plays old VCRs. Although I don't like to admit it, I guess I have to confess that I embrace technology hesitantly, slowly. Last year I bought a new-to-me car which I'm proud to say is from this century, 2005. It has a stick shift and driving it reminds me of when I used to drive the tractor and my brothers would complain about the jerky ride. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Prompt # 25 – What Do You Love?

Prompt # 25 – What Do You Love?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A great title, by a great “local” writer, Raymond Carver, who, although he was American, lived and died a few mile from here in Port Angeles, Washington State, on the northern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. He grew up in Yakima, in southwestern Washington, inside the curve of the Columbia River. Usually I'm a passionate, even radical, fan of Canadian literature because I love both this place, Canada, and literature itself, especially the way it holds up mirrors and forces us to see, to look at and to see ourselves. It celebrates us. However, I make three exceptions for American writers who have lived near here, in Washington State, on the US west coast, in what they call the Pacific Northwest (because, of course, for us, it's really the Pacific Southwest.) The Americans? Gary Snyder who lived along the Skagit, which rises in Canada. Raymond Carver. Jack Kerouac of On the Road fame, who came from a New England family which had migrated from Quebec, and who through his friendship with Snyder, found summer work on a fire lookout in the Cascades, his eyes on Canadian mountains and Canadian sky. He wrote about it in Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums. (Desolation Peak is the name of a mountain almost on the border.) I should also add Annie Dillard who for some years lived on Lummi Island, near Bellingham, between here and Seattle, and wrote one of my favourite pieces. It's Chapter 7 in her The Writing Life, about flying and art, about a pilot friend at the Bellingham Air Show (but in my mind it is the famous Abbotsford Air Show) and about flying around Mount Baker, “the old man with white hair who sits there smoking,” the mountain we watch all the way out from Vancouver to Abbotsford and Chilliwack. 

Am I ducking the question? Love is not an easy topic, because instantly my brain says Who? Instead of What? And Who crosses privacy lines. Who wants to intrude upon other people's privacy? And I think there's something else. Scripts in my head. A former lover who pleaded: “Don't say that. Everyone who has ever said 'I love you' has left me. So don't say that.” And my late mother who had similar advice when referring to pets. “They just die. You can always get another cat or dog, but you know that like all the rest, they're going to die too.” Love and death. It's as if daring to love is daring death, giving the finger to death. Seizing and living in the moment, for this too shall end. Like the Lone Ranger and Tonto duking it out. Oh, yes, I should add another American writer. Sherman Alexie. From Spokane, Washington. When they made the movie of his Smoke Signals, two great Canadian First Nations actors played the leads—Adam Beach and Evan Adams.

So. What do I love? Canada, and especially the places where I've lived and visited. Manitoba. BC. Montreal. Toronto. Kingston. Whitehorse. Literature. Especially Canadian Literature (CanLit.) See my CanLit Reading List. http://www.CanLitPlace.blogspot.ca/ Literature in general, especially Thomas Hardy. I love Beauty, especially Nature, natural beauty, flowers, landscape, cats and dogs (remembering my beloveds Julie and Cami .) I love houses, history, heritage. Sunshine. Lightning. Snow on a sunny day. Fog on a misty day. I love poetry and narrative. Stories, especially British television dramas—Coronation Street, Heartbeat, Foyles War, Morse, Lewis, Midsomer Murders, Downton Abbey. Some American drama—The Good Wife, Grey's Anatomy, Bones. Canadian dramas—Republic of Doyle, Arctic Air, old DaVinci's Inquest. I also love shows about houses, and about treasures hidden in houses--Antiques Roadshow, Canadian Pickers, UK Pawn Stars.

I know. I know. I watch way too much television. I have the TV or CBC radio on sixteen hours a day. I live alone, work at home, and prefer to shop and drive by myself. Introverted. Focused. Sometimes too anxious to be able to enjoy the luxury of other people's driving. Of course, I love my family members. My late parents. My late grandparents. My brothers who both have families and lives of their own thousands of kilometers from here. I am lucky to have friends and good neighbours. Good friends from high school and from work over forty years. Good friends here who walk with me, meet for coffee, pizza, play Scrabble, talk art and books and genealogy, and the disappointments of politics. Share holidays.

Sometimes it's easier to ask the question backwards. What do you not love? What do you hate? I hate cruelty, bullying, meanness, abuse, violence, injustice. I hate boxes into which parts of us are scrunched, forced to fit at the expense of our true shapes and sizes. Boxes labelled: Class. Gender. Sexuality. Income brackets. Nations. Races. Professions. Couples. Cliques. Location. Location. Locations. (I've always felt that I have to defend rural living.) And what is it that I do about this? I write. Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/ In Your Dreams. A Modest Proposal. Anything You Say. The Truth About Reconciliation. Imagine—Canada 2017. The Annotated Morag. Here In Hope: A Natural History. And my Earthabridge blog which I seem to have abandoned while I tackle these prompt. http://www.earthabridge.blogspot.ca/

I'm going to finish by going back to Raymond Carver who died in 1988. “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”

Like I said. Lucky. (Delusional perhaps, but definitely lucky.)

Prompt # 24 - Colours

Prompt # 24 - Colour - My Favourite Thing

Colour is one of my favourite things. “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes.” The first speech I ever gave in high school was about the psychology of colour. The first time I had a project displayed in class at university was in a colour lab when I made a swatch by pasting stripes of yellow peas, red and green lentils to a base, like those avocado greens and golds of fifty years ago. I always search for colour to create compositions in my photography (as opposed to other less obvious elements such as line or texture.) On reviewing my hundreds of photo files, I see that the most dominant colour I feature is red. Of course I shoot a lot of green, living as I do here in the temperate rainforest. I like to play with colours and light, sometimes with more success than at other times.

I love almost all colours (except orange) but if I have to pick one, it will usually be turquoise blue. Maybe because turquoise is my birthstone. I don't think it's because I am blue or depressed, but rather that I'm just a nature lover and blue is found in rocks, sky, and reflected in water and glass. And it is often used in man-made things like paint and fabric dyes.

I usually wear muted colours, shades of black and grey, with bright accents like hot pinks, reds, and purples. I never wear earth tones with the exception of sand/beige used as a basic which goes well with black. I never think of black as a colour of mourning or “goth.” I think of it as elegant, as “the colour of knowing.” I associate my mother with greens which is why I describe her as being moss, cedar, jade in “Bridal Falls.” If she had been able to work it, she would have lived her entire life outdoors.

Here are some of my Turquoise shots. Enjoy.

All photos © J.M. Bridgeman

Prompt # 23 - Memory Board

Prompt # 23 - Memory Board

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. -- Albert Camus

I love the way people just make these prompts their own. It's freezing here so I'm remembering spring, summer, and fall.