Celebration!

Yesterday was the first anniversary of a family wedding...

(Wow! Time flies!)

Congratulations, Aaron and Natalie!

What a wonderful year it's been!

Blogging - a Learning Experience

I always find it interesting to see which blog posts are still read - years after they were written! At this time of year, one of the most popular ones viewed was originally posted in August 2010. It's about late August flowers in my garden at that time. Over the past week, more than 30 people have accessed it, according to Google stats.



After a query from one reader about a plant name, I updated the post, adding names I now know, names that I didn't know back in 2010! But over the years I have learned them...















I also find it interesting to see how different my flower beds looked four years ago - which perennials have survived and which haven't!

Blogging has been an interesting learning experience for me as a gardener. Keeping this online diary of my life, I am logging changes in my garden, as well, as it evolves year by year!

Fifty Years Together: Red Deer and Kelowna - Part 3

This is the final part of the speech my mother wrote in 1994, an account of my parents'  50 years together. This week marks the 70th anniversary of their marriage on August 26, 1944:

In 1953 we moved to Red Deer where Dick worked as a garage mechanic, specializing in automatic transmissions, and I taught home economics at River Glen High School.

Here Dick had a regular work schedule, only 9 hours a day from Monday to Friday, and 4 hours on Saturday, from 8am till noon. (49 hours a week!) He also got 2 weeks off in the summer, which allowed us to take family vacations.

 

We often drove to Kelowna, BC after my parents, Hugo and Olga Bartz, moved there. We enjoyed the Okanogan Lake, perfect for boating, fishing, and water skiing.

In 1959 we moved to Kelowna where I again taught Home Economics, first in West Bank, then in Kelowna, and Dick worked as a mechanic.

In the summer time, lots of friends and relatives from Alberta came to visit. We all enjoyed our boat - fishing, water-skiing, or just cruising.

The time passed very quickly. In 1964, only 5 years after we moved to Kelowna, Marlene graduated from high school and left...

When Ted graduated from high school in 1967, he went south to study on a sports scholarship at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma... Now he and his wife live in Dallas...


Dick and I are both enjoying retirement, happy to be together - slowing down, but hopefully able to continue spending time with our children and grandchildren, whom we see at least once a year. We have many happy memories.

Fifty Years Together: Living in Hay Lakes - Part 2

 Margaret's story about the early Hay Lakes years continues:

At that time - living in Hay Lakes in September, 1946 - I was happy to be a stay-at-
home Mom, taking care of our baby, Marlene; helping my husband with the bookkeeping; and sometimes serving gas when the men were busy doing other things. I did not intend to go back to teaching, but at that time there was a shortage of school teachers. So in September, when my baby was about 6 months old, the school trustee asked if I would return to teach at the Hay Lakes School again.

"Who will take care of our baby?"

It was agreed that the trustee's wife would come to our home every school day until they found a suitable baby-sitter for us. Reluctantly we accepted the offer, and I went back to teaching again.

[This is a school picture taken in 1947. My mother is the teacher on the left.]

[The school must have grown from its two classes around that time. Among my mother's photos I found this one of the Hay Lakes teachers in 1947-8. My mother is in the middle.]

Three years later, when our son was born, I stayed home for about a year. We had many baby-sitters and nannies over the years, until both our children attended school.

At times Marlene and Ted stayed for brief periods in Edmonton with Grandma and Grandpa Bartz or with Dick's sister, Elsie and her husband, Rudolph Missel.

[This old photo shows my mother and me standing outside my father's garage, next to my brother's carriage, my aunt Elsie in the center and my mother's mother on the right.]






We lived in Hay Lakes for 9 years. Then Dick sold the garage and we moved to Red Deer.

(Continued... tomorrow)

Fifty Years Together: New Serepta and Hay Lakes - Part 1

Yesterday marked 70 years since my parents were married. Twenty years ago, the year my father died, they planned to celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary - 50 years. I recently found the guest list for that event, together with the speech my mother planned to make. Here it is, a summary of their life together...

Dick and I met in 1942. Dick had just rented the Julius Drebert farm in New Sarepta. I was the school teacher at the New Sarepta Rural School, which was located on the Drebert farm. I lived on the school yard in the "teacherage" - a one-room shack with a fairly large porch.

Dick was a very helpful neighbor and we soon became good friends.

Dick was always buying and selling used cars and other machinery. He even bought a gas-motor washing machine, which were hard to get during the War Years. He asked if he could store the washing machine in my home - with his permission for me to use it. Dick says, "Margaret would not part with that washing machine. That's why she married me - so she wouldn't have to give it up!"

We were married August 26, 1944, in Edmonton, where my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hugo Bartz, lived. The Rev. Luitkeheolter performed the marriage ceremony at Trinity Lutheran Church. The wedding reception was at my parents' home.

After our memorable honeymoon in Banff, we settled into our first home in Hay Lakes, where Dick worked as a mechanic and I taught grades 1 to 5 in the two-classroom school in Hay Lakes.

We had a nice little house with a big kitchen and living room and a bedroom. We even had a crab apple tree and some berries in our back yard. Friends and relatives were always welcome. Dick had a lot of friends in Hay Lakes. That was his home town from the time he first arrived in Canada in 1929.






Life was quite different in a small town 50 years ago. We had no indoor plumbing or electrical appliances. Dick was always very creative. Before I met him, he had built the light plant for the village of Hay Lakes. So we did enjoy the convenience of a few electrical lights in our house.

[To elaborate on that - I remember my father saying that when Saskatchewan Power came to Saskatchewan, local power generators were no longer needed. The village of Hay Lakes purchased a used generator, but it arrived in pieces - with no instructions for its assembly. My father was very mechanical and succeeded in putting it together.]

Water was hand-pumped from a well in the back yard. Wood and coal, stored in a shed, was carried into the house for the kitchen stove, and also for the heater. The heater was usually in the center of the living room. How happy we were when, a few years later, we were able to buy a propane gas kitchen range! No more ashes to carry out every day.

About 2 years after we were married, Dick bought the Esso Service Station and Garage in Hay Lakes - "Dick's Repair Shop" - with living quarters upstairs.

Marlene was about 2 months old when we moved into this upstairs home. There was still no indoor plumbing and the stairs were very high!

Dick always had a very long work day - often 16-20 hours. He says, "The only pastime we had in Hay Lakes was work and more work." If you were there you served your customers - sometimes very early in the morning, even before breakfast. You might also have customers late at night. Dick hired a few men to help him - working in the garage and trucking, since he also had the bulk dealership for Esso.

(Continued... tomorrow)

Looking Back 20... and 70 Years

My parents were married 70 years ago today.

Here is a picture taken on that day...


















And another taken during their honeymoon in Banff. They took the train for a week away.


My mother had to return to the classroom to teach after Labor Day weekend, the first weekend in September, in Hay Lakes, Alberta.






Twenty years ago, my parents were planning to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in Edmonton, the city where they were married.

Recently going through some of my mother's papers I came across the guest list...

My father didn't want to send out invitations until after they returned from Europe in June, 1994. They were planning the trip of a lifetime, for him - going to go back to the village of his childhood in Poland. He had left at age 19 in 1929, never expecting to return. The fall of the Berlin Wall had made his return possible.

But during that holiday, after seeing the place where he had lived as a child, he contracted bacterial meningitis - and died. Not in his village in Poland, but in Juterbog, a town near Berlin where he was visiting a cousin.

Together with the guest list is the draft of the speech my mother was planning to make - at the celebration of their 50th anniversary.

Reading

From the time  I began reading, I loved to read novels. They allowed me to experience someone else's world, in time, place, and emotional conflict. My love of reading led me to study literature at university. But there - living my own "adventure" - I stopped reading novels! I found them too emotionally draining, as I got caught up in someone else's problems - even if they were fictional! Books and characters lingered too long in my mind. Movies had the same effect on me. I found it hard to live in two worlds at once, so I stopped watching movies as well.

Occasionally I'd read a memoir - a real story about real people, or so it would seem. (We all remember events a little differently.) No happy (or sad) endings guaranteed - just the ups and downs of normal life.

This summer I began to read the books of Jane Christmas, a contemporary Canadian writer, who tells interesting stories about some of her own adventures. I started with her latest book, And Then There Were Nuns. It tells of her fascination with convent life. She stays in several, starting with a convent in Toronto where I have stayed several times. I enjoyed it, so I next read her account of her second last book,about her Camino de Santiago walk in Spain. Humorous at times, full of struggles - it has a happy ending.

Now I have bought the first two books she wrote. The first, The Pelee Project, is an account of a three-month escape from the city. I can identify: I've often thought about doing that... The other is an account of traveling with her mother in Europe. I did that once, too.






Am I ready to escape my daily life and jump into a reading adventure? Do I have time to get involved - and begin to care about what happens to her?! I'm hesitating for the moment. I know I'll be so caught up that I won't want to put the story down. Is that how I want to spend these last few weeks of summer? Or should I wait for a cool, rainy fall day to take the leap and jump in?!

Home

We often wonder where all the rabbits in our neighborhood live. They appear to be solitary creatures - unlike squirrels who share large nests in trees.

This one often sits under our weeping cherry tree.


















Seeing him (or her) sitting so contentedly alone - as evening falls - reminds me that there's no place like home, no matter where that place might be!

Mid-August Gardening

Cool weather inspires  to get out and work in the garden. It was long overdue... but finally last week we had some cool - though rainy - weather.

Between showers I headed out to the flower bed in the side yard and began to smother out the creeping charlie and gout weed that was invading that flower bed - using newspaper held down with stones and bricks. Then I put mulch on top.










Not perfect - but it looks better!















(In my world, there is no such thing as a zero-maintenance garden!)

Needing Neighbors

I recently came across an online article - in Macleans Magazine - about our increasing isolation from the people who live around us. We need people - connections in our community - to live a long, healthy life, according to the article.

Do I live in a more isolated community now than I did when I was young? I wondered. I don't think so... Not if memory serves me right.

When I think about our street in Red Deer (where I lived from ages 7 to 12), I remember that we knew the neighbors next door and across the street. But none farther away. As kids, we knew families with children our age, whom we played with. Ditto for Kelowna in our De Hart Avenue home.


The same holds true today in the suburban community we live in now.

There may be fewer stay-at-home moms these days than there were in the 1950s and 1960s. But nowadays some of my neighbors have home offices. (They may feel lonely and disconnected!)
On our street, there are plenty of retirees who chat when they see each other. When my children were young and I was at home alone with them, these same retirees all went out to work. I remember feeling isolated, especially in winter.



I recall staring out the window one particularly cold, bleak day, knowing I was the only one at home on the street. Who would I call in an emergency?















Perhaps there is more isolation and less willingness to make an effort to meet neighbors in the downtown core of large cities. But I know that my daughter, in her downtown Toronto apartment, knows all the people in the three apartments in her building, even though they move in and out annually. And last winter, when a pipe froze and her building had no water for a day, she ventured next door with a bucket, and found a neighbor more than willing to give them water.

Perhaps it's a myth to believe that we were friendlier and more connected back in the day.

The only group of people I know who are truly isolated are the elderly who no longer get out of the house much. They no longer drive, so many sit indoors all day. I hardly ever saw one of my neighbors, after her husband died, because she rarely left her house. When her daughter insisted she move into an assisted-living apartment as she was no longer steady on her feet, she was angry. Her life is better now - she will admit. She has exercise classes to keep her walking, as well as other activities in her building. She doesn't have to cook - and at mealtime, she has people to talk to. But she still misses the home she lived in for 55 years - even though her quality of life there wasn't what it had been before.

Appreciating the Art at Richard Gilll's Studio

It's always interesting to see the art work artists surround themselves with.

When taking a workshop at Richard Gill's studio last week...













  



... I noticed a lot of interesting pottery hangings...


















... as well as other art (like this quilted runner).













Was most of the pottery done by him?










 

I didn't ask, but I assume it was.














In his kiln room, we saw some of the work he is preparing for his next collection, debuting in October.

Here is some of it - sitting in the kiln.

I think the theme is music. I hope to go to his opening and find out.

Pottery Workshop with Richard Gill

I wasn't planning to do any pottery this summer - but when I saw that Burnstown potter, Richard Gill, was offering two-day workshops in relief wall hangings, I decided to sign up for one. My art style is very "loose." (Which may be why I gravitate to doing the human face in pottery.)

Richard, a former architect, has a totally different style. Could I absorb some of it in a 2-day workshop?!












Our group of five started out by learning his technique, which involved working with one hand under a slab of clay, the other on top, forming the relief of the picture. Details and texture were added later. This is Richard's demo plaque.

Working from the same sketch, we all ended up with something slightly different. (Here is mine... in process.) Working with clay is always fun!















The second day, we each worked on a design of our own. I attempted to create a relief of the lighthouse at Peggy's Cove, which we visited earlier this summer.












 

We left our unfinished pieces drying in Richard's studio. In the next few weeks he will fire them and glaze them. When they are done, we will be able to pick them up. I can't wait to see how mine turn out!

Mid-August Flowers

Spring began later than usual this year - but little by little, the flowering of perennials in my garden has caught up.



A lot of flowers are currently in bloom - though the reddening of the fall Sedum (Autumn Joy) warns me that the end is nigh!

But for now, I still have some pink Echinacea cone flowers in bloom... and brown-eyed Susans beside them...








 

A few Heliopsis...

Golden Glow Rudbeckia (Outhouse plant)...

Tall Japanese windflowers (Anemone tosermentosa)...

Coreposis...













These late blooming day lilies...













Phlox...

A daisy or two...












These low-lying geraniums that have been flowering all summer long!














A few red roses (beside remnants of white phlox)...













Achillea - both pink and white - together with a sprinkling of red Knautia (seen in the left of the picture)...







 





And these lovely mauve flowers that bloom in late summer. (I don't know what they are called!)

In my attempts to control the gout weed in my front flower bed, I have accidentally smothered out the Golden Rod! But it grows like a weed - so I expect to see it back again before long!