A Tribute to Mothers

A Tribute to Mothers

(L-R) Gerry, G-Grandma, Mom, Grandma, Joan

I've been thinking about this post all week wondering if I was ready to write it. Unfortunately, my mother unexpectedly died of cancer on August 9, 2009, and coming to terms with it has been a long process.

My mother was born on December 30, 1940, in Viking, Alberta, where she grew up. Unfortunately, I only visited that little town two hours south-east of Edmonton when we buried her ashes last June. It gave me one more piece to the puzzle of my mother's life. I was able to see the farmhouse where she grew up, the endless prairie and the great big beautiful Alberta sky that she woke up to every morning. As you'll also see below, in a small-wooded area we also found  the remains of my grandfather's model-T, which was apparently a source of embarrassment for my mother.

Viking was not the original homestead. My great grandparents came to North America from Finland and the original parcel of land they were given was in Jenner, in Palisser's Triangle, which in spite of its rich soil was unsuitable for agriculture. My great grandfather, who was apparently shrewd, managed to get rid of it and buy land in Viking. For reasons unknown to me, returning to Viking for a visit was never high on my mother's list of priorities until a few years before she died.

Grandma in front of the Model-T

Although both my parents are from Alberta and British Columbia respectively, I spent my entire life without any extended family growing up in Eastern Canada. But strangely enough, as I discovered last year, I feel very much at home in the west.

The Remains of the Model-T

My mother still returned to Alberta once a year to visit her family, but she spent most of her life in Ontario, attending college there and later graduating from Carleton University with a BA in Art History. For the last 25 years of her life, she lived in a village south of Ottawa, a farming community much like the one she grew up in. She belonged to countless clubs and organizations, working  tirelessly as a local historian.

We really miss her, especially her grandchildren who have endless questions about crafts, which I'm at a loss to answer. This post is for my mother and my grandmother, who are probably having breakfast together somewhere.

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there!



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Prairie Towns

Prairie Towns

I must admit that I love prairie towns, and I had my cousin Rina drive me through a number of them. Yesterday, I said that store fronts were rarely brick, but as I discovered, there are brick store fronts, but only in the more affluent towns; otherwise, clapboard or stucco is de rigueur.

Yesterday, we managed to pinpoint several shared characteristics of small towns in Alberta. On a main drag anywhere, you will inevitably find angle parking, a hardware store, a Chinese restaurant, a bank, a small grocery store, an auto-tractor parts shop, a liquor store and a tavern, saloon or "hotel." In the better-heeled communities, there will also be a pharmacy, hair salon (usually called "the Cutting Edge" or "the Cut and Curl"), and a barber shop because men don't like the feminine smell of girlie hair salons. In Stettler, the heartland of Alberta, we found a fairly affluent area, as it had a jeweler on its main drag selling diamonds and Rolex watches. That was proof that oil money has helped keep Stettler happy and healthy.

On our way back from Viking, we saw the ornate spire of a Ukrainian church from the road and decided to go in and look around the small town of Holden. Many of the businesses on the main street were abandoned, and we found a hardware store that was being converted into a home. As I got out to take pictures, the owner came out to see what I was up to. I told him that I loved the facade of his store, and he told me that they were slowly converting it into the family home. As we talked, I noticed a few doors open a crack to see who the newcomers were. Clearly, a Montrealer rolling into town to take pictures was a rare occurrence.

The picture below is the main intersection of Holden. On the left hand side is an abandoned hardware store and directly across the street is a small food store. The statue at the centre of the intersection is a memorial to all the local boys of Beaver County who died in World War #1. By today's standards, the middle of an intersection is an odd place to put a war memorial, which suggests that it was probably erected before cars had taken over the streets.

I found it hard to overcome the desire to take pictures here. The light and the skies created some amazing and unique photo opportunities, and apart from the wind, there is also the silence of the prairies and the feeling of being utterly alone.


As we stopped to take pictures of an abandoned homestead, I said to my cousin Rina, "It feels as though there is no one here for miles."

"Well," she said, "that's because there isn't anyone for miles, unless you count the gophers."


Related posts:
Alberta: Prairie Sky
The Badlands





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Alberta: Prairie Sky

Alberta: Prairie Sky

I arrived in Calgary on Tuesday and reconnected with relatives from both sides of my family. I may never have mentioned that both my parents were from Western Canada. On Wednesday, I drove to the tiny town of Viking, the home of the famous hockey-playing Sutter brothers, the birthplace of my mother and the cemetery where we were going to bury her ashes.Tiny prairie towns look very different from those in Quebec and Ontario.The main streets are much wider, and there's a noticeable absence of brick on store fronts.

Alberta has many coulees, or small valleys, and sloughs, which are shallow pools of water that reflect the deep blue of the sky. The countryside is punctuated with oil wells, abandoned homesteads (See picture below), farm equipment and a lot of modern Cargill grain elevators.  I also saw a lot of horses, buffalo and deer, obviously on farms. But let's get to the heart of the matter. About 80% of what you see on the prairies is sky, a spectacular panoramic sky. As we drove further east towards Saskatchewan, the terrain became flatter, and the clouds seemed to travel at the same speed, giving the impression that we weren't moving forward. This frozen-in-space feeling explains why the drive across Canada seems endless when you hit the prairies. I told this to my uncle.

"After a few hours of driving on flat prairie, you want to get out and push up and down on the bumper of the car,"  he said.
"Sorry?" I said, every bit the daft Easterner.
"To make sure that something is moving," he said with a laugh.
I walked away scratching my head.

Today, we are going to the Badlands, about an hour and a half east of Calgary, where the prairie opens up into canyons.

Related posts:
Prairie towns
The Badlands



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