Author Archives: Thelma

Just Names

The hallways and rooms of Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley had been decorated with paintings and photographs donated by community members. When the provincial government shut down hospital services in June 2013 and turned the building into a long term care facility, the mysterious figures who pull the levers from hidden corners of Health PEI deemed that anything in the building that wasn’t generic had to be removed.

You probably think I’m being dramatic, but I’m not. Down came the paintings that showed rustic local barns and familiar vistas, only to be replaced by made-in-China blandness. The reasoning? It was some vague idea that the facility was the residents’ home and…well, honestly, I never understood it. The place ended up looking like a forgotten corner of an airport lounge.

I documented all the original artwork in the hospital before it was removed, and they are in this Flickr album.

Most of the hospital rooms had been sponsored by groups or families, and all the plaques by the doors acknowledging these contributions had to come down. Photos of past staff, items donated to thank staff, all dismantled. The place had to look like everywhere and nowhere. You can guess I wasn’t a big fan of this move to strip away the long community history of this building.

A new building was built a few years later and now the old hospital building that has stood on a Tyne Valley hill since 1951 will be demolished. What was left in the old building has to be removed.

I received a call to see if our SMH Foundation wanted some memorial plaques. When someone died, and donations were made to the Foundation in their memory, a small plaque would be put up in a beautiful display case that was very visible in a hospital hallway. We had so many donations over the years that we had to build another case to house them all. Of course, as had happened with the artwork, when hospital services were discontinued, the cases had to be moved to an unused ambulance bay, and with them the memory of a community that had cared enough to support the hospital.

So, my mother and I went to pick up the box of plaques at the new long term care facility, which is a beautiful building appropriately devoid of much local character. I picked up the little box of plaques and carried it back to my car. It felt like a funeral and I was carrying the ashes of all that we had worked so hard to maintain.

I put the box on a table when I got home, but didn’t feel up to going through the plaques. The next day, I decided to have a look, and near the top was the plaque with my father’s name from when he died at Stewart Memorial in 2008 after having resided there for a couple of years. I flipped through a couple more names and started to cry. I knew them all, related to many.

The loss of our hospital still stings, and I think it always will. Soon the building will be gone, and younger people will never really know what we had and what we lost. They can knock the place down, but I will never stop talking about it, the remarkable achievement of building and maintaining a small rural hospital for over six decades.

Some of the artists who donated their artwork to the new wing of Stewart Memorial Hospital in 1983.

PEI Provincial Election 2023

Our provincial election, called six months early of the October fixed election date, limped to a close yesterday. We had the lowest voter turnout in my lifetime, just under 70%, which would be seen as a great result in other jurisdictions but is considered pretty dismal here. The Progressive Conservative party strengthened their majority, and the Green party lost their official opposition status to the Liberals. No NDP candidates were elected.

Here are my tepid election takes:

I knew nothing about the NDP leader, Michelle Neill, before the election, but thought she was extremely relatable and well prepared for the televised leaders’ debate. Her concession speech last night was sincere, positive and classy. I hope she sticks around. Only the NDP and PCs fielded a full slate of candidates, and I’m sure her presence will help build the party over the next four years.

There was much consternation on Twitter about why the MLA for my riding, Ernie Hudson, was reelected. He has been the Minster of Health and Wellness for the past couple of years, a time of extreme stress on our health care system. #PEIpoli folks couldn’t understand how anyone would vote for him as everyone seems to think he has done a terrible job in the health portfolio, but I challenge anyone to name one PEI health minster who has ever been well liked or thought to be doing a good job. I can’t think of one, and I’ve met them all in the past 20 years of fighting for access to health care for our area. It’s a cursed position, and I think given to people with very thick skin or someone the premier dislikes. Our health system should be run by those hired to do so, and the politicians made to keep their unskilled hands out of it, but the meddling continues and health ministers rightly pilloried. The people in Hudson’s riding are afraid their small hospital in Alberton will be eliminated, so voting for the candidate from the party almost guaranteed to form government only made sense. He’s a good constituency politician, having worked as a political aide before running himself, and he’s a nice guy to boot.

Left-leaning votes keep splitting between the NDP and Greens, and I wish the two parties would work together. I would like to see proportional representation finally come to PEI, and a temporary Green/NDP alliance might make that happen. Both parties have difficulty finding strong candidates, and we desperately need more progressive voices in the legislature. I doubt if there would be much support for this idea in the two parties, but politics is a game, with teams and players and colours and logos, and the old parties play it very well. To win you have to think and move strategically, and use what resources you have to your advantage.

I imagine many people in urban PEI don’t realise there are still patronage jobs being handed out in rural parts of the province, thinking that practice died out with the Ghiz government. It did, for the most part, but there are still some seasonal jobs that are “influenced” by MLAs. They expect your loyalty (ie. vote) in return for your job, and if you don’t show up to the polls in a timely manner, you will be reminded and a car will be dispatched to give you a ride to the polls. Politicians will deny this, of course. At least there isn’t someone standing outside the polls with bottles of rum and $20 bills as in the misty days of yore (or maybe there are, but no one offers them to me!)

Health care, lack of affordable housing and the high cost of living were the main election issues, while the climate crisis barely got a mention. I understand those who are living in poverty and struggling to make ends meet might not have the climate at the top of their list, but there are many on this island who are doing alright, and don’t seem at all concerned that their children and grandchildren will be inheriting a world that will be challenging at best and unlivable at worst. It is a disconnect I will never understand.

It’s usually the little things

Found water sitting at the bottom of the boot of our 2002 Maytag Neptune front load washer this morning. This has happened before when I had barn clothes to wash during my milkmaid career and straw would make its way into the drain.

It’s an easy fix on our machine: undo the two screws that hold the door and two on the other side, and then remove the front panel. Inside you’ll find a cute little drain held on by two spring clamps.

Using pliers, or your fingers if you are strong, undo the clamps and remove the drain. I usually slide the clamps onto the drain so I don’t lose them!

Inside the top of the drain I found a little piece of plastic. Once that was removed, I put the drain in the sink and ran some water through it, which dislodged some disgusting slime. Yuck.

I put the drain back on, reinstalled the clamp and poured a little water into the boot to ensure I had the clamps snugly attached. Front panel and door reinstalled, a five minute fix!

Margaret and Kevin

What began this afternoon as a quick confirmation of a name turned into a startling and slightly overwhelming discovery, one that still has me feeling a bit stunned.

I was looking up Kay Jelley, my mother’s lifelong friend and former childhood neighbour in Freeland. I knew Kay had been interviewed by historian Dutch Thompson as she is often included in his regular CBC PEI radio pieces. While looking her up on the Island Voices website, which has some of Thompson’s interviews, I decided to put “Freeland” into the search box and see who else might be there, and a few other interviews popped up.

The last result was not recorded by Thompson but by someone from the Benevolent Irish Society, who seemed to have travelled around PEI in the 1980s recording the descendants of Irish immigrants. It was an interview with Kevin and Margaret Kilbride, our neighbours here in Foxley River. Kevin died just over a decade ago, but Margaret has been gone since 1991.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would hear her voice again.

Margaret was unique, funny, smart, lovable. She was a registered nurse, and had been a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps in the Second World War stationed in France and Belgium. She was the head nurse at our little Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley, and while full of fun, people who had worked with her have told me she could also be quite exacting. She was a smart dresser, and always drove a snazzy car.

Margaret at a Stewart Memorial Health Centre staff outing…not sure where or when, but likely 1960s or early 70s by the look of that outfit and car!

Kevin, on the other hand, was exactly how I imagine Matthew Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables to be: quiet and soft spoken, wise and kind. Their house, a classic PEI farmhouse that had been built by his grandfather in the 1890s, even looked a bit like Green Gables. Where she favoured tailored pantsuits when she wasn’t in her crisp nursing whites, Kevin was almost always in his overalls when at home, working in the barn or yard.

The interview is probably not particularly interesting to someone outside our community, and some of it unfortunately doesn’t age well, but to be able to hear them again, in their 60s and 70s, still vital, the way they interact, mentioning names I had forgotten, has been a delight. Margaret’s distinct way of speaking. Kevin’s thoughtful pauses. And the background noises: a small plane flying over (I might have been out in our yard across the river waving at it!), cows mooing, a crow calling, Margaret lighting a cigarette.

I was a like a moth to a flame when it came to Margaret. I was fascinated by her, as she was unlike any other woman I knew, outspoken and bubbly in a way that wasn’t the norm. She visited our house often when I was a child, usually on her way home from work at the hospital. She was a great friend to my mother, and a wonderful medical resource as I rolled through childhood illnesses and incidents. Margaret would always know what to do, and she would dispense sound advice with a laugh and a big hug. I have a couple of bottles with her distinctive hand writing on them, creams and lotions to sooth some long-forgotten condition. When I went through a brief anxious period as a child when I imagined my heart was stopping, she gave me a stethoscope and helped me understand how the heart worked in rest and action.

One summer day when I was five, I saw Margaret’s car pull into their yard from the front lawn of our cottage. I somehow got our little dingy into the water and rowed across the river, clambered up the bank, and knocked on their door to say hello. I wasn’t supposed to have taken the boat by myself, and Margaret knew it. She called my mother right away to tell her where I was – Hi, Viv, guess who I have here?! (the only person to ever give my mother a nickname) – and then we had a great visit, she with a cup of milky, sugary tea and her ever-present cigarette, and me with a glass of milk, probably from Kevin’s cows, and a few molasses cookies. I have no idea what we talked about, but I am sure we had fun. Then we hopped in her car and she drove me home, the boat later retrieved by my father.

The Kilbride House as seen from our lawn one summer morning in 1968

I fell and split my forehead open at my boisterous seventh birthday party, and although my great-aunt Lois was at the party, and she had nursed in New York City for forty years, it was Margaret I asked for as I sobbed, blood running down my face, and she quickly came from across the river to assess me and send me to the hospital for stitches. The party continued as I was sewn up, and I came back looking like Frankenstein’s monster, making it a party to remember!

I am lucky to have few regrets in life, but not having been more attentive to Margaret in her later years is one of them. I didn’t visit her when I would return home from university, expecting her to be around forever, I suppose, and after she died, I soon realised what I had lost. It has always bothered me.

I feel like I got a tiny message from Margaret today that it was all ok, and if I close my eyes, I am still in her kitchen having a cookie and a chat. Nostalgia is the child of memory and imagination, a potent salve for psychic wounds.

Margaret and me in her kitchen, 1967. You’ll notice Margaret is missing a finger on her right hand, and I understood this happened during her war service.

Grabbing

Land use and foreign ownership has been much discussed on PEI recently, but this is certainly not a new preoccupation in this province. When my ancestors arrived from England and Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries, they would have paid rent to landowners back in Britain, people who probably never set foot on PEI. That system ended in the 1870s, allowing people to buy the land where they lived, but Islanders seem to have been touchy about who can own land here ever since.

Someone showed me a post from a Facebook group that referred to certain recent land purchases as “land grabbing.” It’s the perfect phrase to stir people up on social media, but those of us who are not Indigenous Canadians need to be mindful of the history of land grabbing on this continent.

There is plenty of talk about who should own land on PEI, who should be allowed to build structures and where they can be situated, but very little, if any, discussion about how we recognize and reconcile the fact that every inch of this island is unceded Mi’kmaq territory. How must the “land grabbing” discussion sound to Mi’kmaq people?

Peak Load

PEI experienced very cold weather last weekend, with windchills below -40C in some areas for extended periods of time. Pipes froze in buildings, in some cases because of power outages probably due either to Fiona-damaged trees coming down in strong winds or just the stress on the system.

Most Island buildings have traditionally been heated with furnace oil or wood or a combination of both. Households and businesses have been converting to air source heat pumps, often with electrical baseboard backup, as a cheaper source of heat, and as electricity prices are regulated on PEI, a source less susceptible to the fluctuations of world oil prices.

With all this added draw, our electrical system experienced its highest peak load ever on the weekend. When the CEO of Maritime Electric was asked in a CBC interview “How high can you go?”, he said he didn’t know and didn’t want to ever test it. I can’t say I found this to be very comforting.

On the same day this interview aired, the PEI government announced that a program to give Island homeowners free heat pumps will be expanded. Shouldn’t our electrical utility be able to tell us if they can meet this increasing demand, or if the system can handle it? I’m pretty sure Islanders would not be thrilled with the rolling blackouts common in other places.

Post-Fiona Maskwi

Updated my page documenting the healing journey of the maskwi (birch) trees that were first harvested in July 2021 by my friend Kay, an amazing Mi’kmaq porcupine quill artist who uses the bark as the backing for her pieces.

The trees seem to be doing very well, the dark bark starting to peel off on some of the trees revealing a lighter layer underneath.

Dark bark coming off, lighter layer underneath

Storm Fiona was not kind to parts of our woodland, but the trees I have been documenting all survived in the midst of severe damage all around them. Birch are bendy, and they seemed to whip in the wind better than the white spruce that toppled all around them. Before Fiona, the “group photo” had been easily accessible along a trail we have had for decades; this time I had to climb over and under piles of trees to get there, the trail completely buried. The devestation remains breathtaking.

It’s difficult to capture, but this was a stand of towering 60-year-old white spruce, all felled by Fiona.

If you live in Mi’kmaki and are settled on land that has white birch, I hope you will consider allowing a harvest to take place. It is a different aesthetic, to be sure, and some people who see the trees near our house think they have been damaged or vandalized. I have, unfortunately, had some uncomfortable conversations with people about why I would allow the trees to be stripped, how ugly they look now.

I think the trees look beautiful, and the ceremony used to harvest the bark is a lesson to all who take from nature. Offering tobacco and a prayer to the tree is part of the bark harvest, and a relationship is formed between the harvester and the trees. I can’t imagine someone getting ready to mow down a bunch of trees in a huge machine making an offering to the trees they are about to destroy.

Where some see vandalism, I see justice, respect, and 12 millennia of history.

Inventory

At our first meeting with an insurance agent 20 years ago, she gave us a booklet for new homeowners that included a form to help us do a very basic household inventory. Being a lover of making lists and filling in forms, I started right away to go around the house and write things down, and had planned to do a more, but never did. I remember later downloading an app that prompted me to take photos and record serial numbers, cost, age, and many other details. I probably used it for 15 minutes, got overwhelmed with just how much stuff we had, and never finished it.

Today, looking over my ongoing list of household projects, Household Inventory is still lounging there, taunting me, reminding me that, despite years of paring down and purging, I still have too much stuff.

Then suddenly I realised that if, heaven forbid, our house and its contents were to disappear, I would be content to not reacquire everything we have now. The family mementos (I nearly wrote heirlooms, but our family was too poor to pass on anything of much monetary value) would be the only things I would possibly miss, and they couldn’t be replaced no matter how much insurance money we received anyway.

Household Inventory is now “take some photos of the stuff you have in case it disappears and you might miss it later, (but you probably wouldn’t).” That should take about five minutes and not 20+ years it took me not to do an inventory.

I would miss this clock, the heartbeat of my great-grandparents’ house (that’s them, Ernest and Eva Hardy, in the photo).

Cookie Diplomacy

One of the joys of being my mother’s daughter is acting as the courier of her kindness, most often as the deliverer of baked goods to family and friends, and even sometimes to strangers. From a young age I was often sent to neighbours with fresh muffins or bread or whatever had emerged from her oven just because she thought they needed a treat, casseroles and dishes of soup to those unwell. She did the work, but I received the thanks and could bask in her goodness; I have slid far on her cookie diplomacy!

Last week I delivered some of my mother’s Christmas baking to a friend, who had a little card and gift waiting for me. It is a beautiful pine needle basket made by an artist from Maine called Morning Star Wolf. My friend said the basket might look empty, but it was filled with gratitude. What a gift.

Powerless

I am writing to you from a house without electricity. This is the third time since post tropical storm Fiona blew through here at the end of September that our power has gone out from wind knocking trees over onto the line running along our lane. The electricity was out for nine days after Fiona, and this time it’s only been 22 hours, a dawdle.

We (have to) have a generator to keep the furnace, water pump, refrigerators, and a few lights going, but we usually only run it a few hours during the day, not constantly. It’s a Honda 6,500 watt that we bought in 2003 and it has given great service, even with shamefully little maintenance. It lives in our outbuilding and feeds underground to a sub-panel in our basement. I’m hoping very soon to replace or augment it with a battery backup system that would ideally be able to connect to our solar panels, which are grid tied and essentially dead during power outages.

Thankfully our internet provider stopped trying to restring our fibre line above ground and decided last month to bury it most of the 1,000 feet from the road to our house. When the generator is running, or the backup battery on the modem is in use, we can be online and make landline calls; this is a big improvement from pre-Fiona.

I’m not sure how we are going to deal with the remaining trees in our lane. There are dozens of white spruce to be cut, each about 60 years old and 60 feet tall, and it will be a big job, more than I can handle, and potentially dangerous near the power lines. We will also look at paying to have our line buried, though I have no idea what that would cost.

Since Fiona changed the structure of our forest, so many trees are exposed and keep snapping off or falling over in strong winds, and a few onto our power line. I’ve not been able to find the words to describe how Fiona destroyed parts of our forest. I still can’t believe how quickly the woods I knew so well were flattened.

I am aware that these minor hiccups and inconveniences are insignificant bumps on a privileged, gilded road. Many will never have the luxuries we have right now, even without electricity. It could be worse, no doubt about it, but it has been tiring and disorienting.

I developed a bit of a mantra to get through the days and weeks after Fiona, the endless lugging of brush and cutting of massive trees: At least a tree can only fall once. If they could only leave the power lines alone.

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