I tiled a hallway floor once. It was the 1960s, so there was no internet or YouTube to tell me what to do. I had to go to the hardware store and talk to the guy who sold paint. He didn’t know anything about tiling floors, but he knew a… Read More »A Senior’s Early Years—Floor Tiling For Dummies
I am halfway down the stairs, feeling each step with my foot before I go down further, since the flashlight beam doesn’t go very far. Suddenly it goes out, and I am in complete blackness! I look up quickly. The kitchen lamp sends a wash of light over a few… Read More »A Senior Remembers: Secrets of the Root Cellar
We got a parcel from Eaton’s once. We all helped Mumma pick what we needed and then we helped her write the order. She didn’t need help doing the writing. She just needed us to help her decide. We all had something to say when she showed us the pages… Read More »A Senior Remembers: A Parcel From Eaton’s
We had Christmas at our grandmother’s once. It was almost dark when we started out. Fanny and Baldy were stomping their feet and snorting in front of the house, wondering, “Where are they?” They always wanted to get going as soon as their harnesses were on, but today Mumma was… Read More »A Senior Remembers: A Long Ago Christmas
We seniors have been blessed with an abundance of years. In our western culture, that means an abundance of Christmases. We have the perspective to look back and observe how Christmas has changed for us. In our grandparents’ time, everyone was included at Christmas and Hanukkah; grandparents, aunts, uncles and… Read More »The Joys of Christmas As We Age
All I could think about all day was the stage. It was there, filling up the whole front of the room, with big planks of wood going right across, and stairs going up one side and down the other. We all took turns walking on it at recess. The boys… Read More »A Senior Remembers: Her First Christmas Concert
I cooked a perfect turkey once. It was the 1950s, so I was trying hard to be perfect, like Margaret Anderson. Or June Cleaver. I prepared carefully for this, reading several cookbooks, clipping out recipes from magazines and newspapers, calling up my mother and big sister so I knew what… Read More »A Senior Remembers: The Perfect 1950s Turkey
Canadians, and especially Canadians who grew up on the prairies, all came from somewhere else. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, apart from roaming Indian tribes, a few trappers, and employees of the Hudson Bay Company, the Canadian prairie was open land, wild, and uninhabited. After Ottawa acquired… Read More »Canadian Seniors and Their Prairie Roots
My research for this post took me to Cassini, Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel, and back to Cassini. Images for the fashions we wore as young women in the 1950s just don’t resonate accurately with the pictures I see in historical references to the designers. Long before we saw the fashions, we… Read More »From Runway to Real Life
Today The Heiress seems such a simple story— a Harlequin romance, without the feel-good ending—but at the time, it got my attention, and I remembered it for decades. The movie was filmed in 1949, but didn’t reach the northern Canadian community where I lived until I was thirteen, in 1952. … Read More »“The Heiress”, Smash Hit of 1949
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