Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Deep - February 2015 - The Things I Didn't Do

The Things I Didn't Do:





I didn't succeed in my attempt to make lava cakes, but the rejects, crumbled, with cherry pie filling and whipped cream, made a tasty Valentine trifle.

My grandmothers and great grandparents didn't stay in England, which enabled me to be born and raised a proud Canadian.

I didn't stay with Interior Design my first year university. However, starting in ID got me to the big city, Winnipeg, and the University of Manitoba, and I still love houses, art, landscaping. I didn't get engaged to my first boyfriend. A world awaited. I didn't stay at university after 4th year when I wanted to. I left to start work. I went back after I had saved enough. I didn't go back to teaching high school after doing my Masters. However, I used teacher training in every other job I had, from bookstore clerk to social caseworker to corrections worker to freelance writer. I didn't leave my first marriage when I should have. I stayed for seven years too long, but It did get me to the North and to Ireland and through the difficult first adult years. I married my second husband after all his ex's warned me off. I learned to be a better listener. I didn't accept my last marriage proposal because I believed it was best for the guy I loved. I miss him, but he's better off, and I know marriage is not meant for me.

I'm with Julie on this. I don't believe we make wrong decisions, just decisions which are leading us to experiences and/or revelations we need at the time. 

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Deep - January 2015

Forest From the Family Tree



The house where I grew up for the first seventeen years of my life was set atop a small hill in southern Manitoba, surrounded by a shelter of poplar (trembling aspen), Manitoba maple, and American elm trees. There were fields on three sides of the house and barnyard and the pasture on the fourth side, with grass, flowers, shrubs such as boxwood, wild rose, and wolf willow, stands of poplar and maple, and with willow around all the low spots were water pooled in the spring. Pussywillows were the first flowers, along with crocuses in the last drifts of snow. Since this beginning, I can never imagine myself living anywhere where I am not surrounded by trees.

However, in thinking symbolically, and about family, the tree I think of, at least for my father and his family, is the oak. Firstly, because the name of our hometown was Oak River. Secondly, because on at least three sides of our family there were Royal Navy ties (and the navy relied on oak for their ships). And thirdly, because of the ancient ties to the oaks of the British Isles, the oak groves, and the pagan rituals associated with what I have learned is called the nemeton, the sacred space in the woods.
 




My mother, on the other hand, grew up in British Columbia. The trees of her childhood were giant Ponderosa pines with their long needles and huge pine cones. The pines along with wild rose bordered the river and pines anchored the hillsides and continue to do so today. Although, at the front door of the ranchhouse there was a giant Manitoba maple. A cutting had been brought with the family when they relocated from the Red River Valley in Manitoba to the Kettle Valley in BC in 1891. They had also transplanted Golden Glow, a flowering bush, which they brought with them from New Brunswick, and a lilac bush which formed the backdrop of every family photo. So Manitoba did not sound completely foreign. Mum's honeymoon journey was the drive from the ranch in Kettle Valley to the farm at Oak River, Manitoba, a distance of some 1700 kilometers, or about 1000 to 1200 miles at the time. As they neared the farmstead Dad pointed. “The house is over there, behind the bluff.” Mum looked at him in disbelief. There was no bluff. The first culture clash. In Manitoba a bluff is a grove of trees. In BC it is a rockface.



Mum loved being outdoors more than indoors. She always had a huge garden. She mowed a huge lawn, tended pansies, petunias, and a bed of tiger lilies. One summer on a fishing trip north towards Riding Mountain National Park, she stopped and dug up a small fir tree from a ditch where it would surely have died and transplanted it to the edge of her lawn. The closest fir trees to our farm were those planted in square lines around the cemetery on the road into town. Like Mum, her transplanted tree survived, it lived, but it was alone, lonely. Homesick. Longing, perhaps. With a feeling of belonging elsewhere, even though the Golden Glow bloomed beneath her window and the lilacs flowered every spring.
 


The first house I bought myself was in Winnipeg's granola-belt West End, where the elm tree branches intertwine over the street, making it seem like the nave of a cathedral. My first house in BC was anchored by a giant weeping willow and the yard was ringed by cedar, fir, birch, wild cherry, holly, and a walnut tree. My present house is in a surround of grand fir with an understory of wild rose, dogwood, honeysuckle, laburnum, box, and plantings of rhododendron and hydrangea. I rely on the generosity of friends every spring for bouquets of lilac within whose perfume, wherever, I always feel at home.

I love this winter shot of the red wheelbarrow in the snow. You can tell that my house too was once living trees. But my favourite tree quotation is from Canadian-born writer/musician Buffy Sainte-Marie - “I was an oak. Now I'm a willow. Now I can bend.”

The poster at the top of this post hangs in a Starbucks in Vancouver. “The deeper the roots, the higher the reach.” “Work closely with farmers.” “Look around the globe.” “I would like to make a difference.” Not to mention, I like coffee.

Prompt # 70 - What I Learned

Prompt # 70 - What I Learned

I'm relatively new to this genealogy thing. Maybe 5 years, and our club disbanded two years ago. I don't belong to Ancestry.com. So I'm still a bit confused between what is considered Family History and what is considered “genealogy” and whether there is a difference. In our group there was a stress on “hard evidence” which meant original documentation of births, baptisms, certificates/licences/degrees, land titles and addresses, marriages, deaths, graveyards and headstones. Add to this, newspaper clippings and photographs. Legends and connections to historic or famous people were treated with skepticism and considered to be myth unless proven by genealogy charts and/or DNA evidence. I have learned that I am much more interested in the history, the stories, than the hard evidence. I have dozens of first cousins I hardly know and I'm not inspired to search for unknown blood relatives. Although I would be curious about finding Woodland relatives in England. I found these Genealogy Prompts of The Book of Me more on the story side, recollections, memories retrieved before they are lost forever. Memories I may not have thought about in years. Often only at funerals.



As a female I have always been aware of the shorter shrift females tend to get in history and family history. We take the pictures and are less often in them. We change our names and are thus more difficult to trace. We inherit china, silverware, and fabric arts but usually not medals or tools. Because of this I choose to focus more on my matrilineal line, mother, grandmothers, great-grandmothers—Bubar, Hayne, Bullen, from New Brunswick, Hampshire, and Surrey. Last year I did a timeline of my Grandma Winifred's life. I have neglected so far my father's maternal lines—Woodland and Vickery from Somerset. I'm not even sure of his grandmother's maiden name. Holkham? Rosa Holkham of Pagham, somewhere near Bognar Regis. Still much to do.

There is so much in the last 69 prompts, I forgot I even wrote it. The next question is, what on earth will I do with it? I realize that often I felt the fruitlessness of not having an audience to write to. Privacy is a concern. If I post a notice on Facebook, is it limited to the other members of the Book of Me group?

Mostly I would like to thank Julie for the inspiration. You forced me to open the trunk and to start unpacking a bit. I think my favourite is the handwriting prompt.


Wednesday, December 24, 2014

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 25th. 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. 



Friday, December 5, 2014

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.