I am filled with memories
from my childhood that have been triggered by the visit of Terry Stringer. Howard,
Lila, Nila and Terry Stringer were the neighbours across the street from
us. When I lived at 1235 16 A Street
they were the family to the east. To the
west of us was a meadow and then the small rolling foothills, then the bigger
foothills and then the Rockies. We were
on the edge of town, so much so that Doral had a cow kept by a farmer whose
house was in a field a 20 minute walk away.
That field is now the corner of 19th street and the
trans-Canada Highway. Between us and
that farmhouse was bald prairie,
gophers, dry summer grass, , crocuses, purple shooting stars, grass hoppers –
we had it all.
Terry’s lifetime dream was fulfilled when she
took a Scandinavian-Russian Viking Cruise and stopped over in St. Petersburg. She took the early hour tour of the Hermitage
so her group missed the crowds in the museum and had a guide help them go from
room to room. Her goal was to see
Rembrandt’s Prodigal son . She said she was not disappointed by its
size, she said, something that can happen when a person first sees the Mona
Lisa.
We shared common
experiences and the not-so-common experiences of all of our lives. Terry took a degree in agriculture, then a
degree in education, and then a master’s degree in education and has taught
widely with experiences in Alberta and in South Africa where she helped start
an NGO. I was fascinated as she
described the rise of this space to help orphans. She spoke of the lifetime of the NGO and now of her work in it as it
winds down for the last three years of its lifetime service to the orphans who
are now grown.
When our dinner group
went back to discussing our shared pastTerry described what it was look out her
window and see what was going on at the Pilling house, Moiya and I brought our
own perspective to what was going on.
For example, Terry said that her mother took all of her tools and
painted them with bright yellow handles.
Then Doral would come to borrow one of them. The kids would get hold of the tools and take
them down to the meadow and leave them there.
Having bright yellow handles made it easier for Lila to go to the meadow
and find her tools. Terry was right. We
never had tools at our house.
I use the word meadow
loosely. Behind our house was a long
hill and then a road. We were on 16A
Street and the meadow was a block long and maybe 3 blocks wide. At the bottom corner
was a hidden spring. By the water there
was a copse of willows. In the winter
the hill acted as a toboggan run for us.
In the summer it was dry grass full of gopher holes, chirping crickets
and evening fireflies.
I didn’t know that Howard
Stringer had Parkinson’s disease. Nor did
I know that he died at the age of 62 and Lila at the age of 69 which now seems
young to me. Terry and Moiya are in
their later 60’s now and agree that the decade of the 60’s seems young.
Terry told Moiya that
Moiya was the object of a sermon that Terry gave not long ago. I wanted to know more. Terry had always been a swimmer. Moiya also
swam but not to the degree that Terry took lessons. One day Doral came over and
took Terry’s dad, Howard, out to watch Moiya swim. Terry carried a hurt over that, since Howard
had never gone to see Terry swim. The
mature Terry knows that Doral was giving Howard an outing. But that younger
Terry still knows how it feels when a parent is perceived as not loving a
child.
I think we must have been
discussing this subject since The Prodigal Son is Terry’s favourite
parable. I was curious as to what moral
Terry takes from that parable, since lately I attended a meeting where many people
had a chance to tell their take-away from that story. Terry’s bottom line is that the picture is
about a father’s mercy and love for all of his children.
Terry and Moiya talked
about the forbidden stories of
childhood. For Terry it was that
my grandfather, Will Pilling, would go over to Lila’s for a cup of coffee or
maybe for some elderberry wine. He
walked with a big knotty pine stave, its diamond design decorating its
length. When he got to the Stringer’s stairs
he had to climb to get into her house. Will sat on one and then lifted himself
up to the next, slowing making his way up the landing and to Lila’s
kitchen. Her children were told by their
mother, “The Pilling’s grandfather comes over here for coffee, but we will keep
that to ourselves
All three of us talked
about the neighbours on our street – what had happened to the house when the Manning’s
moved out. How the Randall’s now had a
second story added. Was someone still in the Cockerton house?
Where was the best place
to hide during the game of Kick the Can? That was a question that still
lingers. Terry’s answer? Behind
Cockerton’s fence, since everyone knew the Cockerton’s didn’t allow us to go
there even in a game of hide and seek.
As I have been typing I
have been thinking about our house as a focus out of our neighbour’s windows. Our house looked west to the rolling
prairie. But the neighbour’s windows
looked on at the Pillings before they could see meadow, the foothills and the
mountains.
My mother had 3 clothes
lines. Two could be accessed from the
main level side porch and the other from the walk-out basement. The washing had to be done every two days. There were 11 people in the house and usually
a baby in flannel diapers. The diapers
would take least one whole clothes line.
I learned how to hang them in two’s to conserve space, lining up the
ends of two diapers and then putting a clothes peg on which would eventually hold
four corners neatly pegged to the line.
For many years there was
always a truck and a car parked at our house.
Those were the vehicles that ran.
Two others vehciles, either waiting for repair or having found their
final resting place, sat on the south side of the property.
When we moved there in
1945, only farm houses from the past dotted the prairie. Doral borrowed $7,000 to build the
house. When times were tough, his
mortgage payments might get many months behind.
“Don’t answer the phone,”
my mother would say. She knew it was
another call about mortgage arrears.
Doral sold the house for $300,000 in the late 1970’s and said it was a
gift for he didn’t think the old place owed him anything. He had raised his family in it and that was enough.
My father liked
animals. He raised champion hunting dogs – both cocker
spaniels and
setters. He liked to train dogs. He liked to hunt ducks. The two passions went together.
Doral bought a horse,
Comet, and tethered him in the meadows where there was rich grass to eat. I hadn’t really thought about it before,
Comet must have left horse dung for us to leap over as we played in that
meadow. That hose must have been an
object of delight for the neighbourhood children. Terry said that when the call went out, “Comet
got loose”, everyone ran to catch him.
Doral liked the unusual
so while we did not have animals inside, we did have a Siamese cat keeping the
mice down.
And now I must stop thinking about the past and get out and weed while the sun is cool and the ground is wet. The rest is "to be continued", perhaps.
Arta
