Crow Woman

Photo by Linda Tasa, from her Facebook page.  

The main character in the opening scene of our play The Old Woman & the Barefoot Maiden is Crow. She was played by my sister, Della. Della is a wiz when in comes to putting costumes together, as you can see from the evocative crow she has crafted.  She made the mask and the wings, which were a combination of a Cirque du Soleil scarf that she found at a rummage sale in Ireland and a hand-crocheted black shawl she found in a second-hand shop. The rest of her crow-like clothing, she cobbled together from bits found at used clothing shops and new clothing stores. Crow's black feather earrings were found in a shop in Bahrain. Here, Crow flies about the stage, getting into a frenzy in preparation for winter, for the old Akka of winter, that is, the Old Woman of our last days.

FinnThunder play: Old Woman & the Barefoot Maiden

My sisters and I have been busy. Here's part three of our contribution to FinnThunder 2012, starting tomorrow. Our performance piece is a one act play. The characters are an Old Woman (Vanha Akka), Crow, a corpse, Spring Maiden, Suvi, Black Swan, Tuonen Tytti (Queen of Death/Tuonela), Spirit dancers, and a Narrator! Sat. July 28, 2 pm, Finlandia Club, Bay St. Thunder Bay. $10 or free with FinnThunder day pass or weekend pass.  

The inspiration for the Suvi summer woman who ends our play was this old book that I once found at a Finlandia Club rummage sale. It's a book of poetry from the 1940s in Finnish. The poems are wonderful old poems, all dedicated to nature, to the lakes, rivers, sky, clouds, flowers, fields, and cliffs. The book cost me either 10c or 25c. Suvi means summer, the heart of summer. I laid the book in my bed of thyme and doesn't she look pretty there!

Finn Thunder: song performance

My sister, Della, will be performing/singing her story Echo of the Ancestors, this coming Sunday at the FinnThunder Festival. Hope to see you there!

My Mother, the Bear

I will continue with my poem about the Sacred tree, 

but I've decided to waylay you with a short story.

My Mother, the Bear.

My mother paints in her eyebrows. Using a Maybelline brow pencil that

needs sharpening, she draws wide choppy strokes along her brow line.

“You should wear your glasses when draw your brows,” I tell her. “And

use a light stroke. You don’t need that heavy pencil.” Her blue eyes

widen, but she ignores me and continues her beauty ritual. 

My mother prides herself on her appearance. When people tell her she

doesn’t look her age, she glows. Last month, she turned 78. That means

she has spent 56 years living in Canada. Yet, she still has a heavy

Finnish accent. Her voice cackles at times when she speaks Finnish, an

old dialect from Kauhajoki, the farming region we left behind.  

English speakers often don’t understand my mother when she speaks

English. They would say she speaks “broken English.” Even my husband who

sees her regularly has a problem understanding what she’s saying. She

makes up her own words. She uses Finnish grammar when she speaks

English, so her sentences are all mixed up. She code switches, that is,

she throws in English words when she speaks Finnish, and she mixes in

Finnish phrases when she speaks English. 

My mother, however, does not think she has any difficulties speaking

English, so she is puzzled when people don’t understand her. She will

repeat herself until her point is made clear. 

Nothing stops her from speaking her mind. Nothing.  

Her favorite place to shop is the Sally Ann. Every week, she finds a new

colourful used blouse, skirt, or dress. Last week she found a coat and a

purse. Accessories are her favourite. She loves wearing scarves, belts,

jewelry, hats, and gloves—all at the same time. My mother is a colourful

dresser; understatement is not a word in her vocabulary. Everything

matches in her fashion lexicon: stripes with flowers, green with red,

lace with denim, plaid with paisley.  

My mother’s lustrous curly hair is her pride and joy. Everyone comments

on her hair, and my mother revels in their attention. “No,” she tells

anyone who asks her, “I don’t dye my hair. I don’t have to. I don’t

have any grey hair.”

My sisters and I shake our heads. 

“Your hair is not red, Aiti,” I remind her. “Your hair is brown. And

there’s quite a bit of silver in it now. But you’ve been dying it for so

long, so you think you don’t have any gray hair.”

My mother comes from a family of storytellers. Her father was the

village storyteller of Hyyppa. People came from all around to sit in my

mother’s family’s kitchen and listen to Vesteri’s stories. My mother

grew up listening to her father talking about forest spirits, ghosts,

funerals, practical jokes, neighbours, and people’s misadventures. 

Over the years, my sisters and I have noticed that our mother likes telling

stories, too. Like her sister, Irja, she creates new memories all the

time by changing what happened in the past. We tell her: that’s not how

it happened! She laughs at us and continues telling her story of what

happened. She retells family history to fit the truths that she wants to

believe.   

My mother drives a car that looks like a small hearse. She wears shoes

that are too small for her feet. She climbs up long ladders to clean

leaves out of the gutter of her rooftop, she mows her own lawn, shovels

her own driveway, drives her 90 year old friends to the doctors and

translates for them, bakes cakes for her church’s bake sales, and writes

poems for everyone’s birthday. 

Not that long ago, she heard my father, who died in 2000, talk to her in

a dream. He told her that there was a break in the water line and the

water was seeping into the weeping tiles of the basement wall. He said

the water would cause serious damage that would be expensive to fix. He

told her the leak had to be stopped; he said she had to call the city to

dig up the ground and fix the water pipe. When she woke up, she woke up

my sister, Katja, and told her she had to call the city to come and

check the water line. My sister thought she was crazy, but she called

the city, anyway. Sure enough, when the city workers came to check,

there was a break and water was leaking right where my mother said our

father had told her. 

Although my mother’s mouth is small as a rosebud and her nose is small

as a button, that’s all that is small about her. Well, that’s not quite

true. In all honesty, I have shouted at her that she has a small mind.

We argue a lot, my mother and me. We argue about politics and religion.

My voice can get as loud as hers. I can be as adamant as her. Neither of

us ever convinces the other of her truth. 

I call her Aiti. That’s the Finnish name for Mother. 

If my mother was an animal, she would be a bear. She looks like a

bear—full-bodied, curly hair, brown toned pelt, small inquisitive nose.

Her eyes are like a bears’—intense. At times, when her feet hurt and her

ankles swell, she waddles like a bear does when it walks on two feet.

She is protective like a Mother Bear. She is most protective of her

turf: the Bible and Jesus. If anyone says anything against her Jesus,

her fangs come out and she turns into a grizzly bear. If you challenge

her story of Jesus, she will rise up on her two feet and come towards

you in all her fury. You don’t want to meet her on a path. She will swat

at you, violently. She will rip you to shreds like a salmon between her

paws.  

Marja Kalaniemi's ryijy

Marja Kalaniemi, renowned Finnish accordionist

The other night when the moon was new, I did a short storytelling performance for a circle of women. My sister, Katja, assisted in the performance and our sister, Della, participated through long distance mentoring and by singing a song (which we played from her CD). I performed a story that my sisters and I collectively wrote for the last issue of New World Finn; we called our story "The Old Woman and the Barefoot Maiden."  It is a Finnish Canadian women's re-visioning of pre-Christian mythic Finnish women as the changing seasons.

When the opportunity came up for me to contribute some creative energy to a women's moon circle, I offered our story, reincarnated through a storytelling performance. So, I set about collecting various props to help me bring the story to life. Some of the things I used in my performance included an upside down sheep skin that stood in for a white reindeer skin; a small deerskin medicine bag that I once bought at the Napapiiri in Finland; inside this small pouch I put small chicken bones that I cleaned and dried, which stood in for bleached ptarmigan bones; a black loopy vest with two black feather boas attached to it which represented the Black Swan who carries the corpse of the Old Woman to Tuonela; a black, white and stone grey Marimekko huivi; old red patterned wool socks knit by our mom; a ball of red yarn; a huge (abandoned) crow's nest I once found down at the waterfront; and a number of other things.

When Katja and I prepared to practise our story last Sunday, I said we need something big to put under the crow's nest; something that I could sit on behind the nest, but that we could then easily pull out of the way. I hunted around my mother's house and found her old brown ryijy rolled up on a top shelf in the laundry room.

"This is perfect!" I said to Katja.

We unrolled the old brown ryijy, put the crow's nest on top of it and began. We went through the whole performance; halfway through, our mother came back from church and came downstairs, wondering what her two daughters were up to. She sat and was our audience as we went through the story one more time. 

Of course, knowing my mom, I left out some of the more "pagan" words so that her Christian radar would not come out screaming. There were a few parts that she looked a bit perplexed or troubled by, but, all in all, she loved our story! Of course, she told us how we needed to change vanha akka to ....I said, mom, it doensn't matter, no one will know 'vanha akka' anyway as we are translating it to "Old Woman."

Our satu, our fairytale performance, passed it's first --and harshest (i.e. most important) critic-- an old Finnish woman who doesn't think she's old.

Perfect!


Now, today I was listening to Finnish songs on YouTube and one of the tunes I clicked on was Marja Kalaniemi (one of my favourite accordion players). I watched the clip above and could not believe it--there is the same old ryijy that my mother brought from Finland hanging on Marja's wall! The same dull brown colours (except Marja's is much brighter than my mother's, which is really muted in colour.) Maybe Marja's is a reproduction? I don't know.

On the night of my storytelling performance, the old brown ryijy onto which the crow's nest sat was first used for the centre of our circle, around which the women sat, candles flickering. So this old ryijy was reincarnated on a darkening November night in northern Ontario. Who was the woman who made it? I will have to ask my mother the story of how she got the ryijy. 

What is a ryijy?

Taika metsȁ [Forest of Magic]

I ryijy is a textile once used for multiple purposes, depending on the historical time. Made by women on a loom, it has been used throughout the years as a covering for a sleigh, for a heavy winter bed cover, for the wedding prayers -- come to think of it, I think I recall an old black and white photo in my mom's archive of photos that shows her old brown ryijy on the ground in front of an old wooden country church as the bride and groom (my mom and dad? her sister and her groom?) step down the stairs, out of the church's front doors -- and more recently, as wall hangings for decoration. 

The ryijy above, The Forest of Magic, was designed by Toini Nyström in 1941. A renowned Finnish textile artist, she designed over 400 patterns between 1918-1950, which are archived at the Friends of Finnish Handcrafts. A prolific and well-loved artist, Toini's unique patterns are visible in many Finnish homes and churches. At her summer home, she became a student of gardening, an initiate of the natural world. Inside her summer cottage, she would sit by the window and look out at the nature around her, carefully studying the natural world to forecast the coming seasons. Her Magic Forest pattern evokes the beauty of the Finnish natural world, which comes alive through her magical hands. 

The travelling sauna, part 1

The story of my travelling sauna begins like this:

This old house of ours (102 years old) does not have a sauna. The house was not built by a Finnish immigrant; it is a Victorian-style turn-of-the-century (19th-20th) tall brick house that has no Finnishness in its construction at all. It is unlike any house I grew up in, many that were built by my dad. None of the people who have lived in this house over the years, and there must have been quite a few, felt the need to put a sauna in the basement.

When we moved out of our previous house, which did have a sauna in the basement that had been built by the previous owners, descendents of Finnish immigrants, I lamented the loss of the sauna. How am I going to manage without a sauna?

About a year ago, we had a leak in a tap in the basement. Whoever had done some remodelling in the basement in the 1970s made the mistake of hiding this tap inside some panelling. Smart guy. Obviously, not a Finlander. Somehow over the years, the tap squeaked itself open unbeknowst and water leaked for quite some time, ruining walls and panelling and stuff in boxes.

Once my son had ripped out all the walls, I said happily, "Now, we can put in a sauna! Don't put up any sheetrock; I want a small sauna right here. Either build the sauna or buy a small pre-fab sauna kit and set it up right here."

Well, eventually, my son found the sauna he wanted to put in the basement.

"Mom. Look at this," he said. I looked over his shoulder at the laptop. "It's an infra-red sauna. It's really easy to set up. It's not very expensive. It's small and nice. It's made of wood and has a glass door. You just plug it in, warm it up a bit, and go sit inside." He told me a bit about how it worked. "Mom. You'll like it."

"I don't want an infra-red sauna," I said. "I want a regular sauna. How can it be a sauna if you can't throw water on the rocks? I can't sit in a dry sauna. What is this infra-red energy? Is it even safe? What? Am I going to be micro-waving my body? I don't think so. It doesn't make any sense to me. Get me a regular sauna. Forget this infra-red stuff."

Months passed.

"Mom. Canadian Tire has an infra-red sauna for sale this week. It's $799 from $1200. You'll like it. It detoxifies; it warms up like a regular sauna; you'll sweat, feel relaxed. You'll like it. You just have to get used to a different kind of sauna. Don't be so stubborn. So, it's different from what you're used to. Mom. Don't be so stubborn."

"No, I don't want an infra-red sauna. I want a real sauna."

End of the week came.

"Mom. Dad says let's get the infra-red sauna. It's easy to put in; a regular sauna is way too much work to build. Look at it this way: we'll use the infra-red sauna for awhile and if you don't like it, we can sell it and then put in a real sauna."

I could see that I would not be getting a real sauna any time soon.

"Whatever...Go get the infra-red sauna then. I don't care. I don't think I'm going to like it, though."

dinner at Manuella

One late afternoon on our way back from a day in Beirut, we stopped to eat in Jounieh at Manuella Restaurant, a large, popular seaside restaurant with both indoor and outdoor options for seating. We sat by the Mediterranean sea, under the thatch roof in the open air. For your famished eyes, they first treat you to some fresh brilliant hues. You don't know whether to stare at it or eat it. We did both.

Shortly after filling our eyes with colour and popping some pumpkin seeds and peanuts into our mouths as my brother and sister-in-law planned what we will eat, the mezze was laid out before us. Among other plates, this included grape leaves, a large artichoke, hummus (chick pea dip), tabbouleh, (parsley salad), baba ghannoush (aka moutabbal, coal charred eggplant pureed), purslane salad, and shangleesh (dried yogurt balls in spices and oil). We also had a dish of raw kibbeh (lamb meat with soaked wheat--although it really looks just like a plate of raw pounded ground meat), which my brother- and sister-in-law have to eat at every restaurant. I usually just have one scoop in my pita bread wedge. My husband doesn't eat it. I always say with a twinkle in my eye, "What kind of Lebanese are you who doesn't even eat raw kibbeh?"

 We also had a dish of fattoush, a salad which is my favorite and that I have to eat at every restaurant in Lebanon. If made correctly (and it usually is) it is very lemony, with an extra tart kick from a smattering of sumac. It is a perfect summertime dish. If I recall correctly, the plate at the fore of the photo is moo-zhaddra (that's a phonetic spelling); it's a brown lentil and cracked wheat dish with fried onions on top. There was also a plate of delicious stir fried greens which I can no longer remember the name of but it's something that is special to the Lebanese. This summer I ate all sorts of green plants in Lebanon that I have no idea what they are.

And that was just the starter.

After filling our bellies, the waiter cleared the table and laid out various seafood dishes from shrimps, squids, octopus and inky squid. The inky squid looked....very inky.

Looking over all the food, I exclaimed, "Goodness gracious! Who's going to eat all this food?"

My brother-in-law said with solemnity, "Don't forget, we still have the fish to eat. I ordered fried fish for us."


I munched and munched and the more I munched the more I felt my stomach push against the waistband of my jeans. 

 "Keep eating!" my sister-in-law laughed when I slowed down.

Time for a break.

Visual Songs are found on the walls

Invitation to see Visual Songs, a special art showing of the work of my sister, Katja Maki, who is the next featured artist at Calico's Coffeeshop. You can find her art on the walls from June 7th until August 2nd, 2010. Visit Katja's blog for more detail and her artist statement.

If you don't know where Calico's is, find it right beside Hoito Restaurant on Bay St. in Thunder Bay. This photo is from the Definitely Superior Art Gallery's FB page, taken by Heather MacArthur as part of the downtown Port Arthur bike lane inauguration.

Red Shoes dancing on the grave of debt

My sister, Katja, shared with your her crows of debt. This was the prompt for our writing group, RedShoes on Court, which was from Margaret Atwood's book on debt, Payback: The Shadow Side of Wealth:

"Debt can have another kind of entertainment value when it becomes a motif not in a real life plot line but in a fictional one."

So, I asked:

What's so entertaining about debt? Not much so it seems
as our TV screens and movie screens are full of people who have made it,
nice homes, two cars, brand name clothing, dinners in nice restaurants

and no one seems to worry what the bill will come to
or chastise themselves that we shouldn't have eaten out.
We can't really afford it.

Debt is normalized --
join the neighbours!
for the barbeque
celebrating -- not the Olympics --
but the $96,000 / per family that buries Canadians.
The 96,000 dollars in the RED that follows us
as we go about our frantic lives earning less and less
-- but more taxes coming our way this summer.

Why aren't there more poor kids who become Olympic athletes? Oh, the media'll be sure to find the one who did -- this time the darling is Clara Hughes -- and splash her rise from "wild teen" of hardscrabble stairwells to Olympic star glory across our feel-good screens of made-it.

The story of against all odds, when truth be told,
it's about who has the money 96% of the time.

Why aren't there more Aboriginal hockey players, male and female, if sports can provide self-respect, a value system, a moral base that is missing?
Why is this not funded, then?
Why are we not funding this?

Debt. Why is the 'b' silent, anyway?
To what idiosyncracy of the English language
do we attribute the lost 'b' sound?
Deb - t. Sounds more like death that way.

debt, det, n. [O.Fr. debte (now dette), L. debita, things due.
That which is due from one person to another; that which one person is bound to pay to or perform for another; what is incumbent on one to do or suffer; a due; an obligation; the state of owing something to another (to be in debt); a duty neglected or violated; a trespass; a sin.

Today, more and more we think of debt as monetary
as our lives get sucked into smart cards that don't, in fact, encourage smartness and credit cards that are not, despite their self-description, golden.

Yet, debt can have a positive connotation, as in

"I am indebted to my mother for teaching me by example the importance of honesty, speaking one's mind and not backing down."

(My mother is not a liberal, she is not indebted to the school of thought of balance, that namby-pamby hand-holding that nicely explains that each person's point-of-view counts).

No. My mother has learned to read the power relations inherent in the engagements --although she doesn't have the language for that.
How could one who knows her history of poverty, and has witnessed the power hierarchies of small village life in Finland in the 30s, 40s and 50s, ever have come up with the idea that each person's perspective or interpretation counts the same?

Impossible.
She had only her life and that of her sisters
to know that no one cared what they thought.
My mother learned as a young girl that some people in the village had more authority to have their desires and needs known, respected, feared (loss of work/dependence on wages), and dominant, while others,
like my mother and her sisters, what they thought --
who would think to ask?
Why would anyone ask these hardscrabble girls?

Indebted: being under a debt; having incurred a debt; held to payment or requital; obliged by something received, for which restitution or gratitude is due.

So, the concept of indebtedness suggests that to have been reliant on someone,
to have been dependent on someone in such a way that one then learns a moral lesson or principle, actually strengthens one's sense of human decency and integrity, and thus is a good thing.

Gratitute is an acknowledgement of thanks, of having been taught something important to the development of one's character ('maine' in Finnish).

Gratitude is from GRATEFUL, having a due sense of benefits; having kind feelings and thankfulness toward one from whom a favor has been received.

So, the very thing that drives me nuts about my mother --
her adamant defense of her beliefs --
of holding her ground with strong conviction and
shrill powerful voice that can
stab one in the heart,
bowl one over as if hit by a boulder,
set one's ears ringing and clanging,
set one's heart and stomach into spasms and clenches
shock one into hearing her side
-- the way she sees it --
through sheer force of words,
well,
that has been a favor to me
a favor wrapped in a fury
to which I give thanks as I
stab others with my words
knock them down with the convictions
of my words
set their ears
and faces
afire
with the scorching
heat of my words

as I crush their hearts
with my words
kick their guts
with my words
shock them into
stillness
with what? why,
just the weapons of
my words.

A woman's mouth.
Fury unleashed.
The dread of
big daddies everywhere --
sitting at the top of the institutions
they themselves have created to grant themselves
power.

Those victims of my wrath might be excused
for not knowing that my tirade
is a benediction
to my mother's lesson
to me.

Why shouldn't women's voices be loud
and biting
and shrill?

There is lots to be angry about.

Our dog Bullet

My workload has been keeping me too busy, cramming too many things into a day, so when I come across something that makes me smile, well, it's just too precious to pass by. Like this pooch with a grin and bright friendly eyes. I know it's silly, but how sweet!

This little dog looks a bit like my bird, Sydney. I know it seems improbable, but there is something in the expression, something behind the eyes that reminds me of my lovebird.

This little dog reminded me of the Pomeranian mix that my sisters and I had when we were little until we were teens and even in our early twenties! I think she was about 17 years old when she died. Our dog, Bullet, who we named after Roy Roger's dog from his tv show popular in the 60s, was a joy to us. She went everywhere with us, scampering along the dirt roads of Jumbo Gardens when we started grade school, playing with us in the back lanes of Windemere Ave. when we moved into the city of Port Arthur, grooving with us to our first records in the basement of the Kenogami Ave home our dad built--what she thought of Donovan's LP Mellow Yellow or the 45 Louie, Louie by Paul Revere and the Raiders, one cannot say but she seemed to enjoy them!--and she followed along with us when we moved to Jenny Ketola's old green shiny wood house on Empress Ave, and finally to the last home our dad built on Oliver Road where her stone lies in the back bush somewhere.

I have not gone to visit her grave in a very long time. The woods may be completely overgrown, I fear. I don't think I'll find her grave. Last time my sister and I went to try to find her stone, we were thwarted by heavy branches of balsam and spruce. We tried to find where Isa had buried her but the branches were scratching our arms, the ground was soppy, boggy, and full of roots and sinkholes, and the mosquitoes were eating us alive. Our Isa used to keep the bush somewhat under check when he was alive (although he was more of the live-and-let-live philosophy, of the belief in unlandscaped natural beauty) , but since he passed no one has gone into the woods back of the house to do any clearing or pruning.

Door of Roses

gate of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's house in the village of Bishmezzine, Lebanon

yellow jasmine shrub outside my mother-in-law and father-in-law's back door of their house in the village of Bishmezzine.

my garden mint, which grows outside my back door, drying in my all-purpose baklava pan.

Today, I am sharing with you an excerpt from "Door of Roses" by Munia Samara, trans. Amal Amireh

MINT

doomsday of wind
talk of the garden
ambush of rubies
hiding in its sleeves
the leaf of the scene
and painting
the tea of the poor.

....

JASMINE

embellishments on the shirts of houses
and a perfume for the hands of the passersby
it amuses the picture of time
and when wind shakes it
it releases its seagulls
toward the villages.

Munia Samara is a Palestinian poet; this poetry excerpt is from The Poetry of Arab Women, ed. Nathalie Handal

kahvipannu

vintage Finnish copper kahvipannu(coffeepot)

Try some Finnish today! Here is the pronunciation of kahvipannu

Which Finnish Canadian household does not have a model of this copper kahvipannu hanging around as a decoration somewhere? The "old way" of making coffee on the stovetop is still the way I make it everyday! I never use a coffee maker unless I have a huge crowd over. It's never hot enough. And besides, who needs to make such a large pot? I never throw coffee down the drain. How to make "old style" coffee? Just boil the water in a pot on the stove, take it off the element, add your coffee grounds, put it back just for a sec than put it on the side, preferably covered with what in our house is called a myssy. I use cream in my coffee, too. I will make a great old Finnish lady one day....although...while I make coffee every morning using the tried-and-true Finnish stovetop way, I use fairtrade organic coffee beans that I grind fresh (Kultamokka available here is not fairtrade) and my kahvipannu is actually a small Arabic coffee pot...hmmm. What kind of Finlander am I, anyway?

Sunken Gardens on a Sunday afternoon

In the summer of '63, our family, who consisted then of our Isa, Aiti, older sister, Katja, younger sister, Della, and me, the middle sister (our brother wasn't born until '66), went to Hillcrest Park to the Sunken Gardens to take a family photo. As we are in our Sunday best, I believe the photo's purpose was to send it back home to the relatives in Finland and Sweden. We probably went for a Sunday drive first, because that's what families with cars did in the 60s--or at least immigrant families like ours who were striving to become part of the american culture. Getting a car was ....making it, man. Katja is taking the photo with our father's camera, and she's still taking photos! That's our mom, Ritva, on the left, with her summer purse beside her on the bench. In those days women had only 2 or 3 purses: a summer purse and a winter purse, and maybe an "evening bag" which was a small bag of some shiny material for dress-up evening parties or weddings. On the ground beside her is our dog, Bullet, whose name we pronounced Pulet-ti. Our dad had given Katja the honour of naming her when she was a new puppy, and as we were big fans of the tv show Roy Rogers, our new pomeranian mutt was named after Roy Roger's german shepherd. Never mind that our Puletti's looks did not match her namesake's. Lucky we didn't name her Trigger or Flipper, another tv show we loved to watch. I'm sitting beside my mother on the bench, wearing knee socks and my polished cotton dress...or was it a jumper?... of polkadots of various shades of brown. The fabric was soft and a bit shiny, making the dress very comfy to wear. Next to me is our baby sister, Della, who was called Baby Sister way past her babyhood. "Della on pei-pi" my mom would say, excusing her from all manners of chores. "Della's a baby" we heard over and over again, and hence treated her like that...way past her babyhood. Our father is on the other end of the bench. He's dead now; all the Maki boys have passed away, only Vellamo, the oldest sister, is still alive. She's 96 and a half now and the only Maki sibling left, as our uncle, Erkki, just died, may he rest in peace.

A few days ago, before the early morning frosts suddenly hit town to wipe out any delicate flowers, leaves, or tomatoes, I snapped this photo on my way back from my run. I had looped up the Bay St. stairs and cut across the Sunken Gardens, which are named so because they are a few steps down from street level. The zinnias in the garden were spectacular this year, a riot of rich colour. This is the same spot in the Sunken Gardens as that in the photo above. What's different today? Well, the bench is different; today's is just wood, no concrete on the ends. Is that the same house in the background? or is this bench slightly north of the earlier bench? A birch tree that has grown since '63 obscures the view. A different car, a more recent model, is driving by, heading down the hill on Dufferin Street. The zinnias splash colour, missing in the photo from '63. And, of course, no one is on the bench!

a trip to Kresges

S.S. Kresges was a five and dime store, which no longer exist, as shopping has changed. Kresges were the beginning of giving local businesses a hard time, just like the box chain stores today. But what did I care or know of capitalist competition when I was in grade school? All I knew was the thrill of going downtown to "just look" at Kresges, Woolworths or Zellers.

To get a sense of the what a five and dime store was like, here is an anecdote of a memory from iamkaym, who writes up a history of five and dimes like Kresges, Woolworths and the predecessor of chain stores, The Great Atlantic & Pacific Company, or A&P (which has recently changed its name to Metro...I guess it is leaving behind its colonial sounding name for something more urban):

"I personally always felt that dime stores were made with children in mind. The one I knew had a comic book rack just inside the door and nobody seemed to mind when kids spent an hour "just looking". At right angles to this was the candy section with solid squares of fudge in glass cases, ready to be weighed and sold by the pound, jawbreakers, jellybeans, licorice whips and other goodies.

There was a department in the back with goldfish, canaries, and white mice, together with assorted collars for the dog I hoped to have one day. Another area carried marbles, 20 to a mesh bag, with the larger "shooters" sold individually. There were pocket knives and cheap jewelry, racks of picture postcards, lurid masks just before Halloween, valentines in February, and a fairyland at Christmas."