Memoir May 19, 2021

 

The painting, “Blue Taffeta with Flowers” hangs in our upstairs bathroom above the painting I featured yesterday of “Grandma and Mrs. Biggs”.  This painting features a photo of my Grandmother, as a young woman, a couple of old jars AND a dark blue taffeta skirt with pink paper flowers.  The taffeta came first.  I was visiting my sister and she said that she had an old evening skirt of my mother’s in her kid’s dress up boxes.  “Is it dark blue and shiny?” I asked.  When she said “yes”, I immediately claimed ownership of it and brought it home with me.  

 

When I was nine, I took piano lessons from Miss Dillon, our church organist.  She was a brutal teacher and I learned so much. The hardest part for me was walking to and from my lessons in the dark.  I was scared to death of rabid foxes and had to carry a big stick, just in case.  I remember running from street light to street light. By Christmas, I was playing Christmas Carols with two hands and that spring I got a starring role as Mother Nature in Miss Dillon’s annual operetta.  I don’t remember the song I sang but I do remember my costume. My Mom  cut down the blue taffeta evening skirt that she had made for herself for New Year’s Eve before she was married. She sewed pink paper flower around the hem.   I remember the lights shining on the skirt as I swirled and sang on stage. It was beautiful.  The next year, I change music teachers.  I walked in day light to Mrs. Newell’s.  She was a sweet, loving wonderful person. I never again was pushed to excel at music.

 

And the little photo in the painting, is  one of my wonderful Grandmother, Lily,  as a teenager.  Everyone in my Mom’s family had large noses.  (Another story I was repeatedly told was that when I was born everyone marvelled and laughed over my tiny  nose, the spitting image of my Dad).  I still remember on my first painting trip to England, admiring the giant noses on most of  the English people.

 Memoir May 18, 2021

Grandma and Mrs. Biggs

This painting brings back so many memories.  It hangs in our upstairs bathroom.  My sister doesn’t think it is appropriate to sit knee to knee with my Grandma and her friend Hattie Biggs  but I just love to see this painting each and everyday.  This painting was in my 1989 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.  I remember the curator of my exhibition didn’t want my paintings of people in the show as she felt they weren’t good enough.  I persisted perhaps because I was used to a husband not liking what I was painting.  I have always felt that artists have to be completely pigheaded.  What we paint and how we do it is the essence of art and it is really all we have to give.

This is my Grandparent’s living room at 196 Roger’s Road, Hamilton Ontario. I love to see their “modern” sofa and the little cushions that helped make it comfortable.  The only thing I left out was the large painting done by my Grandmother’s brother that hung on the wall behind as I felt it made the painting stronger and more harmonious

My Grandma didn’t whistle or tell stories or play the harmonic.  She didn’t grow giant tomatoes and she didn’t drive. She wasn’t interested in learning stuff.  She did love playing games with me and even though she was deaf, she loved to sing with us on the family car rides.  My Grandmother loved.  That is exactly what she did best.  She loved everyone. 

 She loved my Grandfather. Just before the first world war, her family moved from England to Hamilton Ontario. My grandmother was thirteen and her sister Martha was fifteen and they went to work in a knitting factory.  When she was twenty the war was over and after church one Sunday, Jack, my grandfather, who had been a Canadian foot soldier in France,  asked her father if he could walk Lily home from church. 

 “No” my Grandmother’s father said.  

“You can walk Martha (her unmarried older sister) home from church”. 

“But it is Lily that I want to walk home” replied my Grandfather.

My Grandmother told me about my Grandfather getting down on his knees to help her her boots.  They walked home from church together.  A few months later they were married  My Grandmother wore a beautiful new suit and a hat trimmed with flowers. After the church service,  they had a small family luncheon at her parents home to celebrate and then Lily and Jack went together to buy stove pipe for their new apartment.

“ I had to marry him, my Grandmother always said

”or I would never have gotten to see him.” 

 My Grandfather worked sixty hours a week at Westinghouse as draftsman and took night school courses, five nights a week!

 MAY 16, 2021

This morning, I packed my chair with art supplies. Then  Fen and I ambled down to a favourite stump next to our little cabin by the river. I have forgotten my water contain and tissue.  I use the lid off my water bottle and my sweater sleeve.  I soak in the beauty with paint and words.

Next to the salt marsh,

My old stump glows in dappled sun light.

There is the soothing endless gurgle of river.

Swaying above are the white blossoms and golden leaves of

an amelanchier; chuckley pear.

Crows screech by.

A woodpecker taps on a still standing, 

Dead or dying spruce.

A tiny black and white female warbler scampers up a tree.

Her nest is probably hidden on this forest floor.

My stump is gradually decaying 

Into the fallen leaves, needles, cones and roots.

Bits of mottled mauve bark have pealed away

Leaving crumbling orangey pulp 

That provides new homes for mosses;

Shaggy  olive green, 

Tiny dots of blue green,

Or rounded lumps of bright yellow green,

Rain and roots burrow into every crevice.

A tiny spruce seedling is also growing out of my stump,

One last gasp for life from a dead tree.