Anyone for pig?

I arrived at the airport three hours early for my flight home home to Calgary.  When I gave my passport to the agent at the Ottawa check-in, she said that my flight was delayed for yet another two hours.

Hard to know what to do at an airport, after you have opened the cover of every book on the best seller list and read a page or two besides, ... and checked out the fast food menus of the kiosks, none of which looked as good as the food you have been eating on your two month holiday.

I went straight to Gate 28 to do a power nap.  Instead, I found a wooden chair on slider rockers that had been placed beside an electrical outlet. I pulled out my computer and searched for the file called Memoirs of the 1940s, thinking I could write something about my childhood and while away the time. \

The chair was facing the huge glass window that looked over the runway, so I sat and slid back and forth, rocking my way into the past, at the same time watching a huge group of maintenance machines clear the runways between flights.


Liberty's Pig Shaped Beech Chopping Board

£29

This was my second time, trying to bring back those old memories: favourite foods, skating at the community rink, warming our hands by the pot bellied stove in the hut there,  games we played with our parents, how Wyora id the washing and drying in the winter -- memories flooded from everywhere.

I didn't type about a small room in our house called the sewing room  there in which there was a Singer sewing machine on one wall, and an ironing board on the other wall and barely room to walk between the two if someone was sitting at the machine stitching.

On the wall within easy reach of the bobbin winder was a wooden pig into which nails had been pounded. 

Mother's spools of thread were on those nails.

 I thought we were a pretty wealthy family, given the number of colours of thread Wyora had on that board.

Grandma Edna had told my impressionable young mind that her mother made her pull out the basting threads and hang them over the door to use again and again, an economy measure.

At our house,  used basting thread was just thrown on the floor to wait for the evening sweep up.

Now that was sewing decadence.

Liberty of London has a similar, though somewhat pricey, wooden pig board on sale this week, should anyone who likes to do mail order want a remembrance of the past.

Arta