Author Archives: Thelma

Make Your Own Bible

I had a very intense and traditional Christian education as a child, and spent a lot of time reading the Bible (my party trick is reciting the books of the Bible in less than 30 seconds!). When I left Christianity behind, the Bible happily went with it, though that knowledge came in mighty handy in university english literature classes and trivia quizes.

I never got much lasting inspiration from the Bible, finding the formal language of the King James Version I was raised with impenetrable, only reinforcing the stark realization that finding a personal relationship with the Creator wasn’t possible for me through Christianity.

I did always slightly envy those who found great comfort and strength from the Bible, not least my mother, who hosted a weekly study group in our house many years and has recently been watching online Bible studies on YouTube. It seemed a handy source for instant comfort and help, Bible verses at the ready for all situations and challenges.

A few years ago I gathered the scraps of quotes, poems and inspirational bits and bobs I had floating about in various notebooks and cubby holes and decided to plonk them all in one place for easy reference, create my own Bible, something I could go to for inspiration and guidance and succour. There are poems, quotes from spiritual leaders like Thich Nhat Hann, things I heard on podcasts or movies, excerpts from novels, and even a few Tweets.

Whenever I read or hear something that makes me sit up, open my eyes a little wider, slow down and think, “this is important, I need to remember this”, I pop it in my green-covered notebook, knowing future me would want to feel that same tingle and joy again and again.

I try to pick up my little book every morning and read whatever comes next, my own form of non-secular Bible study. Today was a poem from Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz.

I remember first reading this poem and sinking into the simple peace and harmony he so beautifully described. Milosz reminds me of why I love to garden, getting lost in the moment of standing in the solid, red dirt under the limitless sky next to a river, everything in its place, thinking of nothing but the life all around me. Perfect happiness.

Consider writing your own holy book, or unholy book, your choice. For as it says in the book of Thelma, Chapter 3, Verses 7-9:

Do it, all ye who have strayed from the narrow path to stumble about in the wide world. Write the Book thou wouldst wished to have been given when first ye asked the good questions and received only poor answers. Making thine way in the world today takes everything thou’s got, taking a break from all thine worries sure would help a lot. Cheers/Amen.

PhotosRevive

I’ve been a Setapp subscriber for a few months now. MacPaw, the company behind the Setapp service, are a Ukrainian company, something I only learned since the Russian invasion on February 24. MacPaw took many steps to protect their services, and are now using their apps in innovative ways to communicate to their clients and make their voices heard, like this release note for an update that basically was, really, just this note:

A new app showed up on the Setapp service this week, PhotosRevive. It promises to colourise black and white photos using some AI hocus pocus. I popped some photos in to see what it could do, and the results were mixed, but interesting.

From left to right: my great-grandmother Eva Hardy, great-great grandmother Martha Sharp, grandfather Wilbur Hardy and my mother Vivian Phillips, probably taken in 1927. The older folks look pretty good, my little mother looks a bit ghostly.
My great-great aunt Florence Arbuckle, twin sister of Eva Hardy. She was married to a doctor and quite well off, so could afford beautiful beautiful clothing like the dress she wears in this photo.
My mother Vivian and her Uncle Elmer Hardy. The app handles foliage really well.
My mother in my parents’ general store in 1966. Pretty sure they didn’t just sell blue and yellow products! She’s holding a box of King Cole Tea, which has always had an orange and green theme. I think they won an award from the tea company, so this was a publicity photo.

You can tweak the PhotosRevive settings to make things look a bit better, but I’ve not had time to play with it yet. I like black and white photos, or am at least used to them, so probably wouldn’t have gone looking for this, but it’s a fun addition to the Setapp universe.

Maskwi

I’ve added a page to my site to track the regeneration of birch bark trees that were first harvested in July 2021. I’m told it will take about five years for the white bark to remerge, so I intend to photograph the trees every six months to document that process.

It’s been interesting to watch the bark change from a light soft leathery feel to dark and hard. The trees did not bleed and I didn’t notice any difference in the leaf drop in autumn. While the trees probably wonder where the bark went, they seem to be just getting to work and growing more bark!

I believe some of the harvested bark is included in quillwork pieces that are part of the exhibit called Matues Revisited that is on until March 13, 2022 at the Mary E. Black Gallery in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. I told the trees this news, and they nodded and swayed in appreciation.

Norman Falkner, Fancy Skater

Charlottetown Guardian February 23, 1922 page 6

Thanks to the Skate Guard blog for filling in the blanks about Norman Falker, who entertained the good people of Summerside 100 years ago this week. He lost his leg fighting at Vimy in the First World War, survived a harrowing trip back to Canada, and went on to have a career as a professional skater and skating judge, living into his nineties.

Socks and Masks

I bought a notebook not long after I moved back to PEI in 2001 and started recording the family stories and historical information my mother and others would tell me. I’ve finally had time to type up these notes and am realizing how much of it I had already forgotten.

December 17, 2014 – Mom offered to darn my socks, burgundy ones she knit for me many years ago. They were very thin. She said her grandmother would cut the feet off wool socks that were too difficult to darn and knit new ones on, ravelling back the yarn and picking up the stitches. Knitting new feet on socks was hard, but money for yarn was harder to come by.

Eva also had a manual knitting machine that, if I remember correctly, would quickly knit the leg part of a sock and she would then knit the foot onto it. That took much less time, and as she had seven sons and a husband to keep well supplied, sock manufacturing and maintenance would be an endless job. The men all worked outside, either fishing or farming, and in the winter they would spend days in the woods cutting lumber and firewood, so having warm socks were vital tools for good health and productivity.

January 6, 2015 – We were talking about someone who was just recovering from an illness. She said a family with the last name Best had once lived in Freeland. Their daughter, Lillian, got tuberculosis. They built a little house for her in the field next to the main house. Lillian lived in it, didn’t go anywhere, and when her mother went out to visit, she wore a mask. Lillian eventually recovered, married and had children. No one thought she’d ever be able to have children, but she did, and lived a long time.

Masks are nothing new, nor are pandemics. I would imagine Lillian’s story was from the 1920s when PEI was without a provincial sanatorium. When someone contracted TB, people did the best they could on their own, especially in rural areas lacking even the most basic health care. My grandmother, Thelma, died of TB in 1927, and was nursed at the end by a local woman who also was a midwife. Dr. John Stewart had an office in Tyne Valley at this time, but there really wasn’t much he could have offered beyond advice to rest – you lived or you died.

My grandmother was probably given country remedies like mustard plasters (a mixture of dry mustard, flour and water applied to the chest, still being used by some to relieve congestion when I was a child), inhaling the vapours of turpentine or kerosene, or doses of cod liver oil.

An unoccupied old house was torn down a couple of years ago not far from where we live, and my mother had been warned as a child not to go near it as it was “full of TB,” the family who lived there having lost a daughter in 1924.

January 25, 1922

My mother’s parents were married 100 years ago today. I know almost nothing about that event as my grandmother, Thelma, died so long ago in 1927, and my grandfather, Wilbur, later remarried and died the year after I was born. My mother says that her father rarely talked about her mother, so she doesn’t know where they met or what their short life together was like. There is no one left from that time, of course, so it is a mystery that will never be solved. All we have is their marriage certificate, and a photo taken after their wedding.

Some of my family’s history is so clear to me, even events that occurred long before I was born, because I heard the stories over and over. I can hear the sleigh bells as Wilbur and his brothers head up through the Foxley River woods to cross over the ice to Cascumpec and on to Alberton, where they sold firewood in the 1930s. I can smell the tar and oil and half rotten fish of the wharves where most of my mother’s uncles spent much of their lives. I can see my great-grandmother, Eva, who fell and broke her hip while feeding her hens on the Sandhills in the 1940s, being carried by her sons on an old door to a dory, then rowed to the mainland where a truck was waiting at Brooks Wharf to take her to the doctor. All the tales carefully polished, shining, sharp, and each story helping me to find my place in my family, starting first as just a listener, and now as a keeper and recorder of the lore.

But Thelma and Wilbur are always in soft focus in my mind, just as they are in their wedding photo, and I have had to make up my own version of their story over the years from the bits and pieces I have gathered. The story ends sadly, with Thelma dying from tuberculosis, leaving Wilbur and her two small children, but this photo from the beginning – Wilbur confident and casual, hand stuffed in his jacket pocket, and Thelma next to him, finally with someone to care for her after losing both her parents by the time she was seven – this photo reminds me that the story really didn’t end sadly, for my mother is still here, I am here, my cousins are here. We are here, we were there.

Thelma and Wilbur Hardy, 1922

Small victories

Yesterday I had two DIY victories. One was repairing a bathroom sink that wouldn’t hold water when the stopper was in place. Turns out it was easily fixed by undoing the nut underneath, lifting the drain piece up, removing the disgusting plumber’s putty that had started to disintegrate, putting a generous amount of fresh putty around the drain, and reattaching the whole thing.

The other repair success was a burner on our Maytag MGS5770 gas stove that was sometimes difficult to light. A repair person who fixed something else on the stove a few years ago said the whole burner would have to be replaced, at a cost of $50-$75 for the part plus a $75 service call, but it wasn’t bad enough to bother with that expense and faff.

My list of home repair projects has benefited from the latest pandemic advice to stay at home, which we have been doing since before Christmas anyway, so I decided to tackle this burner. When cleaning the burner holes didn’t improve anything, I examined one of the other burners and observed how the spark from the electrode lit the gas coming out of a hole directly under it. On the faulty burner, that electrode was ever so slightly twisted, perhaps a couple of millimetres off, so I took a pair of pliers and gently twisted the electrode so it pointed directly down over that hole. It worked perfectly, and now the burner lights immediately and much more safely.

As these little niggling projects had simmered away in the background for years, they weren’t obviously going to massively change our lives, but the small victories were satisfying and very much felt like putting things in order in a disordered world.

Ignitor at 6 o’clock
Me in my father’s propane delivery truck circa 1969 reminding you to be careful when working on anything powered by gas…never mind that he used to drop the shiny 100 pound tanks in the background off the back of this flat-bed truck and roll them across people’s lawns by kicking them with his foot.

Blanka and Anna

These two happy faces just caught my eye on the bottom of page 8 of the January 8, 1947 Charlottetown Guardian:

What happened to Blanka and Anna after this photo was taken? Did they ever know they were in the newspaper? Did they settle in Chicago? Where was Mr. Zwern?

In 1947 I would have just had to wonder about these two and move on, but in 2022 I can quickly fast forward this story:

  • Anna Zwern became Annie Birnbaum and donated family papers to the United States Holocaust Museum in 2019, including a clipping of this very same photo.
  • Blanka became known as Blanche and gave her testimony as a Holocaust survivor to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996.
  • Blanche lived to be 89 and died in 2011, leaving behind Annie and her two siblings, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Blanche’s husband of 50 years, Simon, predeceased her.

Born to a respected Jewish family in Krakow, Poland in 1922, she outwitted Nazi roundups through unflinching courage, intelligence, cunning and agility. Married to concentration camp survivor Simon shortly after the war, they immigrated to America with an infant daughter. Hope and love allowed her to leave her hatred and anger behind and begin to create a new life. She lived and taught deep wisdom to all around her, saying “as long as you have life, you have hope” and “to find happiness, take whatever hand you are dealt and make the best of it.” She turned her devastating hand into a beautiful, productive and love-filled family.

Obituary of Blanche Zwern, published by Atlanta Journal-Constitution on November 28, 2011.


I’m glad I lingered for a few minutes with Blanka and Anna, if only to be reminded that hope is what propels us forward, and love can make all things possible.

Field Notes

Putting to bed my second little note book where I recorded my comings and goings in case I needed to do COVID-19 contact tracing. Our chief public health officer suggested we do this in the early weeks of the pandemic and I stuck to it, for the most part. I have long kept a brief daily journal as well, recording weather conditions and highlights of the day, but this little pandemic record is all about practical movement and contact, not how I felt and experienced life.

While I would tell anyone who asked that I live in a remote place and don’t see that many people, I have filled 48 pages since May 2021 with my interactions and gadding about, both the well-worn paths to the grocery store, Samuel’s Coffee House and the homes of friends and family, and the unique experiences of harvesting birch bark with new friends and sitting with my mother in the hospital.

In a couple of weeks, once my chance of being a superspreader has hopefully passed, I will set this little record down under a pile of branches in the woods to melt back into the earth, as if it all had never really happened.