Tag Archives: Tyne Valley

Cosmic Filing Cabinet

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation this morning on the progress of a written history of the village of Tyne Valley. My friend Carolyn McKillop, who grew up in Tyne Valley, has been doing research for years, and has amassed a jaw-dropping collection of photographs and information. It was a nerdy delight to see her incredibly well-organized records. 

She has joined forces with Gary MacDougall, another Tyne Valley native and former editor of The Guardian, Charlottetown’s daily newspaper. The meeting was as well organized as Carolyn’s research, and both of them gave an excellent overview on what they have accomplished.

Item Five on the agenda, “Dreaming of time”, had Gary’s name next to it. He said he had been thinking a lot about time recently, perhaps because he is getting older. He admitted what he was going to say might sound a bit “out there”, but he went on anyway, as he was amongst family and friends, and said he feels that the people and events from the past are still here with us somehow. He called it the Cosmic Filing Cabinet, how the memories and events of the past are just filed away, waiting there for us to discover them. In the midst of a meeting of the practicalities of creating a community history, he offered a short, beautifully poetic aside about trying to understand his place in time. 

Now, Gary is my second cousin, so perhaps there is some genetic resonance at play here, but I’ve also been thinking about time a lot as well, and in a similar way. I find myself time travelling, almost forgetting that those I love who are no longer physically here actually are. I’m not seeing ghosts, nor am I lost or having delusions (I hope!). Time is bending, and I find myself pulled from it, suspended and observing it, and then dropping back down into the stream of time.

It started one winter night a couple of years ago while I was driving home from another meeting in Tyne Valley, as it happens. Warm light was glowing through house windows, and it struck me that the light I was seeing was more or less the same kind of light I would have seen 50 years ago when I was a child being driven along the same road. The houses had memories, were doing the same things as they always had, looked the same way. Different people inside, in most cases, but that wasn’t evident from the road. It could be 50 years ago, it could be now, it could be 75 years in the future. Time didn’t matter.

I passed a house that had belonged to one of my great-uncles and pictured him sitting inside it watching television. I passed the store and house that had belonged to my parents and could see them in both, quick flashes of them as young people. Then our immediate neighbours doing their evening chores in their barns and kitchens. There were no figures in the windows, but the light was timeless and transported me away.

If I’m feeling out of sorts, discouraged or overwhelmed, I have learned to open what I guess I’ll have to start calling my Cosmic Filing Cabinet and pull out a good, warm memory. I can put myself back in my childhood bedroom, all Barbie pink and filled with stuffed toys, my ginger cat asleep at the foot of my bed, listening to adults murmuring and laughing in the living room after a dinner party. I know where every light switch is in that house, what was in every drawer, how the basement smelled, what could be seen from every window. I can go back and be there and find the security and comfort I was so fortunate to have as a child, no worries or concerns.

As Gary said, a human lifetime is but a blip in the history of the universe, but it matters. We are creatures who are bedevilled by the knowledge that our time is limited, but who look for meaning in spite of that knowledge. We just need the key for that filing cabinet.

Freeland Presbyterian Church, December 24, 2021. Generations of my family have worshipped here, their prayers and songs clinging to the fine polished wood interior.

April 1, 1920

I was a regular reader of UPEI’s Island Newspaper site’s “This Day In History” feature when I first became aware of it in 2014 (probably through Peter or CBC Radio, two of my main sources of cool PEI news!), but I let the habit slide after a couple of years. Each day the site highlights the issue of the The Guardian from 100 years before, and there is always something interesting, even if it’s just the ads.

I have been reading it everyday again for the past couple of weeks now that I have more time, and it has been more fun as I am now seeing people that I actually knew in the paper. The young adults of 1920 were in their sixties and seventies when I was a child.

The first person mentioned in the April 1, 1920 issue that I knew was my great-aunt Dorothy MacDougall.

Aunt Dot would have been 19 and had just been married the year before. She was a lot of fun as an older lady, and I imagine she was a pretty sparky young woman, too! Her older sister and probably her best friend, Gladys, was my grandmother. Dot’s grandson, Gary, was the editor of The Guardian for 20 years and retired in 2015 – he, as all of her grand and great-grandchild did, called her Ga.

On another page was a wedding announcement:

Angus was one of the contractors for the hospital we used to have in Tyne Valley, Stewart Memorial, that served our area from 1951 – 2013. The hospital fundraising foundation still exists and I have been its secretary since 2014. We are trying to acquire the old hospital building on behalf of the community with the intention of turning it into a community care facility; our board chair is Hilton MacLennan, Eva and Angus’ grandson.

Both Dot and Gladys worked at the hospital. They were also members of the hospital auxiliary, as am I, as was my mother, as was Eva, and Eva’s daughter-in-law, Ruth, and Ruth’s daughter, Aleah. Aleah was a nurse at the hospital and cared for my father, Harold, when he lived there in the long term care wing for the last four years of his life.

At this time of social distancing directives and upsetting news, I’m deriving an enormous amount of comfort from getting lost in the past, of connecting the Dots and Evas, as it were! I know the deep, complex connections I have all around me are precious and rare, even in this interconnected age. I am wrapping myself up tightly in this long, warm tapestry of family and friends on this rainy April evening, and thinking of Aunt Dot, with her beautiful red hair, boarding the train to go to Summerside.

Tyne Valley Sports Centre

There was sad news this morning that the sports centre in Tyne Valley burned overnight. Thankfully no one was injured, a miracle when six fire departments and heavy equipment were on the scene. Photos show the frame of the building is mostly still standing, but the interior is gutted and a lot of history is gone: trophies, plaques, photos, files and records. Just stuff, in the end, but it all told a story.

Before the sports centre was built, most communities in our area had a small outside rink, often just a clearing on a pond that was kept free of snow by skaters and hockey players. Then for many years after the Second World War, a rink at the former RCAF Station Mount Pleasant was also used for hockey and skating parties.

My father was an enthusiastic hockey player and coach. He would work in his general store all day and head to a rink on many winter evenings, often ferrying a load of players in the back of his pickup truck. It was a tough game, with little protective gear and certainly no helmets!

Lot 11 Seniors Are Champs 1960
1960

People from Foxley River to Lot 16 supported the building of this central facility, just as they had the building of the Stewart Memorial Hospital in the early 1950s. Government funding was secured as part of the centennial celebrations of the 1864 meeting of the Fathers of Confederation, which saw lots of government dollars flow across the Island.

The community held a parade and carnival to coincide with the official opening of the building in August 1964. This was the beginning of the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival that continues to this day. I’m proud to say my father was one of the people who helped create both the sports centre and the festival.

The shock and grief of this loss has already been followed by a strong outpouring of support and a drive to rebuild. I know of no stronger community, no people better equipped to come together for a common cause. Everyone will pitch in and work hard and, best of all, appreciate and lift each other up while doing it. We have excellent young leaders in our community, and they will create something even better, I know it.