More on Supper with Terry

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 19^th 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