My Mother's Canada Day 2010

Eighty-one years ago (at the age of nine), my mother would have experienced her first Canada Day. Her family had arrived six months earlier, on December 8, 1928, having abandoned the family home (which had been built by my mother's grandfather in 1910) ... and their farmland... Knowing it would be taken by Stalin's Communist Regime - and that, as landowners, their lives would be in jeopardy. The world they knew was crumbling around them.

Friends and neighbors were fleeing. Some managed to immigrate to Canada and the United States. Others fled to Poland and China. Others were sent to work in Siberia.

My mother's family was among the fortunate ones who ended up in a free, democratic country.

What was your first Canada Day like? I ask her.














She shrugs. I don't remember. We lived on a farm (in Alberta), so life was pretty quiet.

Later, when she moved to the city, she remembers parades and multi-cultural parties.














And yesterday, eighty-one and a half years after arriving in Canada, she celebrated at the residence where she lives. There was a barbecue. Many wore red and white - the colors of the Canadian flag...

Tonight on Canada Day, there will be fireworks in the park near her home, visible through some of the windows. I ask her if she will stay up to watch...

I don't know... It's pretty late, she replies.

Everything is so different now!