We Are Lucky

 Since I was born during the depression and spent my early childhood during WW II, we did not have many toys that came from a store. There was little availability of these as the major efforts of manufacturers was survival and for the war effort. We, or parents, made much of what we played with, either by carving or whittling from wood, knitting or sewing a doll and then stuffing it with newspaper. We cut out paper dolls from the pictures in catalogues, we created villages from the light cardboard pieces that separated layers in some packaging. We used our imaginations a lot. We dressed up in old clothing and played "house". I remember I received a gift of a small blackboard and some chalk and with that we played "school". We played lots of hide and seek types of games and with a rope we could skip and with a stick we could draw a grid in the dirt and then throw a piece of glass into a square to play hopscotch. If we were lucky enough to have a bag of marbles, we...

Lois responded to a series of writing prompts to get her to write about her life.  Unless otherwise noted, she wrote all of what follows.  When I first saw the question: where did you go on vacations as a child, my reaction was But I never went anywhere! My father was overseas in London all through the WW II and we were always at home. We had no car. My mother did not drive anyway.  No one I knew went "on vacation". Friends went off sometimes to visit their grandparents but I didn't do that either as my grandparents were all deceased. Then I thought about when I was 10 and went for ten days to Camp Medley, a Girl Guide Camp. I no longer remember where it was located. I just remember I absolutely loved the experience. I loved being with so many other girls my age. I loved the novelty of filling a mattress with fresh straw and sleeping in a big dorm on a bottom bunk bed. Every day we would have the usual camp activities of swimming and both indoor and outdoor games, but we ...

After the call came, and I had made my flight, somewhere over North Dakota, I started to write about my mom. My first thought was that Mum was so competitive.  After spending all day Sunday watching the Queen’s journey from Balmoral to Edinburgh, Mum probably wanted the spotlight back.  Not that she craved the attention, but she never REALLY minded when she had it. I am relieved that she is finally at peace.  After having spent the summer in hospital because of a fall and COVID and pneumonia, she was so grateful to be back in her chair and among her friends and that made the stroke particularly cruel. That is not to say that she didn’t appreciate the attention she received from the terrific nurses at Royal Inland, but she loved her apartment more. I remember when they moved into Lorne Street.   It was so cute the way she was worried about fitting in, especially after Eric’s stroke.  She was so tentative about joining Wednesday Coffee and Friday Happy Hour, ...