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.