Winnipeg, where I grew up, had a shock in store. My old house gone, property changed beyond recognition, the small community of immigrant farmers along our country road had become a desecration of “advancing times”. The only vestige of those seemingly salt of the earth lives was in my memory: chickens scratching around the pump, accordion music livening the tiny kitchen crowded with it’s wood stove, Eaton’s catalogue for t.p.in the outhouse. Seeing the change took me beyond mourning; it was truly ruined. Nothing familiar existed any more. Even the river had the exhausted look of a toxic run off.

BUT, In my memory, at least, it is still beautiful, still the way it was in those free days with the wind whipping our hair as we tore down the road on our bikes. The train still runs, I think, down to the US border. Sometimes, out west, the train tracks and the telephone poles are the only constant, but even the telephone poles have sunk half their length into the gulping earth…markers of time.

Thank God for memory – at least some of the time…