If we don't know where we have been we can't see where we are going.


Memory plays tricks as we age or maybe it filters out the stuff that doesn't matter, leaving our most important memories whole and vivid; our memories of childhood when we were whole and vibrant. At least that is the way it goes for me. Having grown up and made my own way in life - going to university, teaching, getting married, raising a family, suffering many trials, heartbreaks, challenges and joys, one would think a childhood of so few years on the Old Black River Road would be wiped out and forgotten. Not so. It haunts me. It calls me. It infects me. But why?

When I was a kid, I yearned to get off the road. I wanted to see something different, to be someone different. I was lonely and bored and constantly thrown back on my little self to pass the time. My imagination helped make woodpiles, mud, sticks and stones, woods and fields and dusty roads, and foggy days go by....but life seemed to be passing me by. I was stuck. I was alone.

But now, how I yearn to be alone as I was in that time and place - in that special air blown in from the Bay of Fundy - air with a bite in it even in summer, air like a magical tonic that breathes life into things. How I grieve for the colours of the moss, the cranberry bogs, the blueberry bushes, the sky, both blue and gray, the spruce and the fir and the bracken down the brooks.

How I savour the memories of home made bread, apple sauce and chicken -haddie and blueberry dumpling. How I would love run out again with my tin cup to pick wild strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and cranberries. To pick for hours under the sky, all alone and with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. How I wish I could be that little girl I was then so I could tell her she was special - a real and perfect jewel, a girl from the Old Black River Road.

Even now. I am diffident when in conversation or conflict. Ron Myers said I had a nice mild way. It is also a shy and secretive way; a keeping to myself way those feelings to tender to release into the cruel world. No one ever really knows what goes so deep that words cannot tell. But the shy child knows. She was born knowing.

But how lonely I was is beyond telling...so alone and unprotected from forces applied to so called"poor" kids in schools by other kids and by teachers, by tall, bony, hard-fingered nurses at the publicly funded, "School Dentists", by relatives, and strangers.

How I was thrown back upon myself for comfort, for something to do, for education and for going out into the world. How broken was my heart when that beloved boy-friend betrayed, and the only comfort was found by crying into a dogs furry coat.

How long the days were for a child, a girl, a young woman who was "stranded" in the yard....playing in the woodpile, the dirt, the ditches and the woods.

How I have learned the lesson taught...learned it almost too well....I found the longed for companion....the interests that enchant, the something to do....all in myself, by myself and in the airy space where the self lives.






I LEARNED WHAT WAS DEMANDED TIME AND TIME AGAIN OF ME....TO BE ALONE BUT NOT LONELY...TO BE MY OWN FRIEND...TO BE ME...


I remember the penny candy in the store on the Old Black River Road. I would stand in front of the tall glass show-case and point with my finger to..onecent's worth of this and that until I had spent my precious nickel






There were caramels, jaw-breakers, licorice pipes and babies

and much more...

Cracker-jack was a favourite and held prizes too




A favourite breakfast was puffed wheat





and a big treat was big-sticky raisins. Christmas brought ribbon candy




and barley toys
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to be continued