Canada Proud

On the evening of June 13, 2017 I proudly attended the of launch of The Spirit of Canada, the Chicken Soup for the Soul edition honouring Canada’s 150th birthday and celebrating the diversity of our country. I am proud to be Canadian and proud to be one of the book’s contributors.  Together, the stories provide a mosaic of Canada’s diverse geography and cultures with the clear message that Canada’s greatest treasure is how  people connect with each other. The Canadian spirit extends a hearty welcome, it shares freely and is always there in times of diversity. It is in every family’s experiences; it is in our laughter and our sorrow, in the ordinary and in the extraordinary.

In my story Where Ravens Fly Backwards, I recalled my experiences as a young teacher in Payne Bay, an Inuit community in Northern Quebec. However, on the day of the book launch my thoughts were flying back even farther. My father, Sidney Smith, was third generation Canadian—his great grandfather had come from Scotland. My father fought for Canada’s freedom and my mother, Selma (Kater) Smith, was welcomed to Canada in 1946—a Dutch war bride eager to embrace her new home.

Heritage Proud

My mother lost her mother, Johanna Roels Kater, in 1939.  I lost my mother in 2004. To honour my mother and the grandmother I never knew,  I wore a precious family heirloom.   Continue reading →

I am visiting my brother and he tells me this tractor on his lawn is a 1946 Ford. The one our father purchased many years ago was the 1947 model, also in classic grey. If it was not new when he bought it, it was only a couple of years old and a lot newer than any car he had at the time. Sidney liked mechanical things and I am sure he was very proud of his tractor, with its 3-point hitch and a power take-off.  The plow could be raised and lowered mechanically and I remember the whine of the wide belt that would run from the power take-off to a bench saw, making it so much easier to transform long lengths of trees into stove wood sticks. My father was able to adapt some of the equipment he had used with our horse Cappy and some he sold or bartered for things he needed for the tractor or for the car.

My mother noted in a letter to her brother that they could till so much more land with the tractor . . . then added that the more land they cultivated, the more work there was to be done.  It appears that the labour the tractor saved on one end was just added on to the other end.  But those were optimistic times and neither my father nor my mother were afraid of hard work.

My mother’s story was still on my mind as we landed in St. John’s, NL. We had planted our vegetable garden before we left, the daffodils and tulips had been fading fast and there were dandelions everywhere. The leaves in the trees were not yet full size but they were  lush and green.  Not so when we left the airport. It was cold. And in the coming days we heard a common refrain. I can’t remember when we have had such a cold, late spring.

Is that what it was like when my mother arrived in New Brunswick in May of 1946? She had left the colour of her familiar Dutch spring and, in the optimism of a March  burst of false hope that spring was close, my father had written that the weather is nice all the time.  But, in reality, the Maritime spring that year was late and cold.  Continue reading →