Sixty years of sisters

My sisters and I have lived different lives in different places, but when we all got together in Vancouver this week to celebrate Betty's birthday, I was reminded of how much the past brings us together. From left, Betty (age 67); me (age 69), and Diane (age 68).

How we started out:  Diane, me, and Betty in the early 1950s, on the farm where we grew up in Alberta.

Getting ready to launch: Betty, me, and Diane in our teens. We all belonged to the local 4-H sewing club and learned to make our own clothes. All of these dresses would have been our handiwork.

We fought a lot, my sisters and me. In the early years, there was biting and kicking, and later, cold silences and competitive rivalry. But there was warmth and companionship, too, and an indelible understanding of what it meant to grow up on a small struggling prairie farm in the midst of nature. We played cowboys, we staged weddings, we rafted on the sloughs, and skated and tobogganed through the long winter months. We shared the daily misery of long rural school-bus rides, the excitement of lumpy Christmas stockings in the dark, and the ultimate annual pleasure of a week at our grandparents’ cottage on Sylvan Lake.

We were very different personalities, though, and with adulthood came different life choices about careers, families and geographic locations. Mostly, we didn’t stay in close touch, relying on our mother to keep up with all of us and pass along the high points to each other. Now that mom is gone and we’re well into the aging process ourselves, we’ve entered a new stage.

Betty, the youngest of us, turned 67 this week. Both she and Diane were in Vancouver from their homes in Quebec and the Kootenays respectively, so we decided to celebrate by getting together for the first time since mom’s funeral six years ago.

There was no biting and kicking over Betty’s birthday lunch. Instead, there was a rewarming of that long-ago sense of connection built by our childhood. We didn’t have to explain to each other why we all cook from scratch, why we would always choose a walk in nature over a walk in a shopping mall, or why plants, birds, dogs and other critters of the earth are always worth paying attention to. Our lives have been very different, but what shone through this week were the similarities that will connect us always because of our earliest experiences on that little Alberta farm.

I have always liked this picture of my little sisters and their (very cold) bride and ballerina dolls in the snow. Diane is on the left, Betty on the right.

Playing dress-up, decked with flowers from mom's garden, was part of our childhood on the farm. Betty is on the left, Diane on the right.

My little sisters at a Vancouver restaurant this week. Betty is on the left, Diane on the right. Their amusement is Betty's photos of the family dogs. 

Valentine's Day

Once upon a time, Valentine’s Day meant cut-out books of anodyne valentines, painstakingly addressed to friends in primary school. It was a touchy business; quality and quantity mattered. Later, the day was marked by the punctual appearance of a mass of red roses on the desk of a colleague, who was rumoured to send them to herself if her boyfriend of the day was being unreliable. Now, in retirement, it means casually noticing that heart shapes are suddenly showing up in odd places – oh, that time of year again out in the bustling world. Here are a few reminders I’ve encountered lately:

If you can have a Christmas tree, why not a Valentine tree? Somebody must have been thinking along those lines when they hung red and pink valentines on this tree in a North Vancouver park. My sister Betty fits right in with her bright red jacket.

It took me awhile to realize that the somewhat scraggly line of snowdrops on this Vancouver boulevard were actually picking out the shape of a heart. They were luckily blooming just in time for Valentine's Day.

The Valentine connection in this photo is semi-hidden behind the daffodils, which were too pretty not to include. See below:

"Love" and "Hate" windows, marking at least the first aspect of Valentine's Day, were for sale at Southlands Nursery. I'm curious about where they might end up -- the "Love" part would be easy, but the "Hate" part might be tricky.

The details of those windows: According to the price tag ($2,500 each or $4,000 for both), they come from an old tattoo parlour in England.

Another view of cold

My brother-in-law Bert and my sister Betty, in Vancouver for a respite from the Quebec winter, are amused by Vancouverites' complaints about the chilly weather. They're used to far worse than they encountered during a walk on Spanish Banks on Sunday. 

This was the disheartening sight out of my dining room window the day Betty and Bert arrived in Vancouver earlier this month. The pink viburnum blossoms were covered in snow. 

But Betty didn't bat an eye. She thought the sight of crocuses poking up through the snow was delightful. 

On Feb. 4, the day my sister Betty and her husband Bert arrived in Vancouver to escape the snow and cold of Quebec, it snowed here. “I apologize for the snow,” I wrote her that day. Although the snow quickly disappeared in a torrent of rain, people have been apologizing to them for Vancouver’s chilly weather ever since. “People say it’s cold; they say they hope it will warm up,” Betty laughed Sunday. “Hah! They don’t know what cold is!”

Betty and Bert do. Betty wears a cozy, loose indoor sweater that her daughter says looks like a great big hug and that she wants to inherit when the time comes. Betty and Bert carry photos on their cellphone of last winter’s snow that reached nearly the roof of a neighbour’s house. They wear wool socks and warm jackets with hoods that cover their ears.

Vancouver’s warm weather has always been a boasting point for residents, who like to send photos of early-blooming flowers and greenery to eastern relatives still buried under snowbanks. We don’t like it to let us down– hence the apologies.

But for Betty and Bert, it’s all relative. When she first arrived, Betty was delighted at the beauty of purple crocuses poking up through the snow of a white-blanketed garden. When we went for a walk on Sunday, she laughed at my suggestion that it was a bit nippy (the water had frozen in the birdbaths, always my measure for nippiness). “Look around,” she said. “It’s green; the lawns are all green.”

Blooming winter heather in the sunshine is exactly the kind of photo Vancouverites like to taunt their eastern relatives with in the depths of winter.

Or, hellebores blooming against a picturesque tree trunk.

Or, a very early rhodo.

Snowdrops in full bloom also remind easterners that their banks of white are still snow.

Well, yes, we did have a lot of rain this winter -- enough to create a little lake in the local park near me. In fact, one Vancouver website said on Feb. 6 that we had had 28 consecutive days of precipitation, making it the longest run of wet in more than 50 years.  January had only one moisture-free day, and 55 per cent more rain than usual. But these are things we don't usually include when we send our pretty-flower pictures east. 

Mean streets

Cars and pedestrians make an uneasy mix, a point I've been thinking about a lot since two of my friends have been hit in crosswalks in the last 13 months. This photo, taken by my partner John Denniston in the 1970s in downtown Vancouver, seems to illustrate a certain nonchalance by pedestrians that might be fatal today. 

When the walk sign gives the go-ahead and the cars are all stopped, drivers at some Vancouver intersections may occasionally be startled by the gimlet eye of a certain grey-haired pedestrian before she sets foot out onto the street. That suspicious old party would be me. I’ve always been a cautious walker, but that caution has been elevated to near paranoia by the fact that two close friends have been clobbered at pedestrian crosswalks within the last 13 months. Both had the right of way, but that didn’t prevent left-turning drivers plowing into them, one in broad daylight, one during a nasty grey twilight in pouring rain.

My friend Linda was hit in the early afternoon of Dec. 9, 2018 at a four-way stop in the Fairview Slopes area. A car that had stopped and was waiting to make a left turn suddenly accelerated while she and another pedestrian were in the crosswalk. The other pedestrian escaped, but the car sent Linda flying up into the air, shattering a hip, cracking many ribs, fracturing a shoulder, cutting her face and chipping a tooth. After surgery and a year of intensive rehabilitation, she’s back to walking the mean streets again – but very, very carefully.

My friend Andre, who was hit in the late afternoon of Jan. 31, 2020, gives at least some credit to Linda’s experience for helping him escape injury altogether. In his case, a left-turning driver ignored the walk signal and plowed into him as he crossed Broadway at Quebec Street. The collision knocked him out of his “admittedly loose-fitting” shoes, but he saw the car at the last second and managed to roll off the hood before sprawling onto the street. Ever since Linda’s accident, he has been “doubly aware and alert when crossing streets,” he wrote her later, “and I’m sure that alertness is what gave me the chance to react and to roll off the hood. Your misfortune helped to avert mine, and for that I am very grateful.”

Why two friends would be hit under similar circumstances within such a short time frame is a puzzle. Are Vancouver drivers getting worse? Is congestion making people more impatient? Is the design of modern cars, with those wide, view-obscuring side pillars, making it harder to see pedestrians? I would need studies and statistics to know whether two such accidents are indicative of anything more than coincidence and bad luck. But they explain why at least one ultra-suspicious pedestrian waiting to cross the city’s intersections these days is giving all drivers in all directions a long, hard stare.

Backyard entertainment

Every year, I wait until it snows before I feel justified in putting out food for the birds. But squirrels think it's for them too, and their tactics in getting it are so entertaining that I figure they earn it. This squirrel and a buddy made short work of a wheel of seeds I had hung from a tree limb, manoeuvring it up onto the branch for easier eating. Photo series by John Denniston.

The initial approach; squirrel and dangling food.

Okay, got it.

And. . . here's how you have a meal hanging upside down.

If I had my way, I would fill my back yard with bird feeders that would attract every known variety of bird in the city. But alas, there's the issue of rats. I hate to recall the number of expensive bird-feeders I have thrown out over the years because no matter how sophisticated they were, or how careful I was, vermin were the result.

Snow changes the equation, however. When birds might be starving because their usual food sources are covered up, who cares about rats? Every year, I secretly look forward to the brief period of icy weather when I can feel justified in putting out bird food. When the time came this year – late because of our unusually warm winter – I was reminded again of why I’m always fascinated. Bird food transforms the back yard from a quiet place to a playground where something is always happening. It’s entertainment at a bleak time of year; a reminder of how you don’t have to go far from home to glimpse another world.

Possibly because I have more time now, possibly because our cat is gone (sadly, our incomparable Mr. Darcy died of leukemia more than a year ago), possibly because the bushes have grown closer to the kitchen window, I’m noticing the backyard wildlife more than ever this winter. How some birds arrive in flocks, swooping like fireworks past the windows, filling the yard with their darting and chattering, then suddenly, as if rush-hour was over, disappearing. How when the temperatures rise, the flickers monopolize the newly melted birdbaths, fluffing themselves up to twice their size, while their patient mates await their turn. How everyone else disappears when the raucous, swaggering blue jays arrive to make kamikaze dives at the feeders, spilling seed on the ground so they can eat it there. Squirrels, the clowns of the back yard, immune to ridicule, contort and connive to get at the feeders, hanging upside down to eat their meal if that’s what it takes.

This entertainment will end when the bird feeders empty in the spring and the birds and squirrels return to their usual fare. As will the rats, who no doubt are enjoying this winter bounty as much as anyone. Quietly, and at night, so I don’t have to know about it.

My photo of squirrel, feeder and apple tree. Mr. Squirrel was reluctant to leave his potential lunch.

This was the wheel of seed the squirrels were attacking. The birds didn't seem interested in it, so I didn't mind the squirrels getting it. Eventually, one cut through the string, grabbed the whole thing in its mouth and took off for the hedge, closely chased by an indignant buddy. That's the last I saw of it.

The real bird food. It's protected from the rain, and covered with cayenne pepper, which deters squirrels but does not affect birds.