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.