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.

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.

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.