Chlorine

Yesterday I took four girls to the local outdoor pool for the first time. At only 19 degrees or so, I wasn't that interested in jumping in, so I read my book on a comfy deck chair.

The smell of the chlorine, laughter of the children and Janice Joplin and Rick Springfield on the radio all reminded me of my years at the Riverside Swimming Pool where I grew up. I think the pass cost in the neighbourhood of $50 for our family and we raced to get in line when they went on sale. It was prestigious somehow to have a low pass number.

For our family, that pass meant 9 people were allowed to swim every day from 1:00 - 9:00, and the kids did almost every day. We had to take a break for supper and the rule was that we had to be dressed when we sat at the table. If we were dry enough, we could slip a t-shirt over our bathing suit and trick my parents though. Why change if we were just going to jump right back in? Waste of time.

We couldn't afford swimming lessons, so we'd sadly watch the lessons take part in the mornings through the chain link fence. My own kids have done that with the soccer taking part a few feet from our house now. At noon, if we were keeners, we could get into the pool a bit early by joining the swim clubs - lane swimming, racing, and synchronized swimming. I did all of that and loved it.

I'm sure we were supposed to have adult supervision if we were under 7, but I don't remember swimming with my parents often. Maybe I squeaked under the radar by being tall and looking fairly competent in the water. I think we probably weren't really noticed in the hoards of kids rushing in the door at 1:00. Were there really that many kids? My memory has a full pool, but I know the local school wasn't that full.

At night, because 8 hours of swim time wasn't enough for some people, I remember boys climbing onto the low roof and swimming in the dark after hours. I also distinctly remember some of them riding BMXs off the roof to land in the water below. I didn't participate in that. I'm a rule abider for the most part (my current civil disobedience is not in character).

Anyway, sitting on the deck chair brought back all those memories. Our community league membership allows us to swim free for 2 hours most days in our local pool and we intend to use that priviledge a lot this year. If you've got a league in your neighbourhood, check it out to see if they offer anything similar. It's so worth it!

Gone but Never Forgotten

This is my Mom's title, but it could also be "Wasteful Endeavours" or "Now is the Time for Sadness" or numerous other things.

Mom emailed me this week to tell me that our childhood house has been torn down. We lived there for ten years, my most memorable childhood years from ages 7 - 17.

Now, it wasn't actually old. It was built in the 70's. Not a pretty time for home design or clothing or style in general, but this house was built with classic style, meant to stand and be lived in and loved in for a very long time. And it was beautiful.




The interior reflected the '70s while we were there and by the time we left even we knew that many of those things needed updating. A wall of gold-flecked mirror and spanish-theme red/gold/black shag carpets are not timeless. But those elements had disappeared since we moved out, to be replaced with all of the beautiful flooring, walls and bannisters that I'm sure Dad had in mind when he built it.

When he built it I'm sure he compromised some of his own style to accommodate a house full of children. We were all allowed to pick our own carpet and wallpapers for our rooms and the end result was that each room was entirely different -- blue and red sailboats in one room, mauve shag carpet in another, gold-flecked shag in another. I loved the purple room that I shared with my sister and I'm sure that was the intent.


The house was for sale a few years ago and I did have a walk through it again. Everything had improved with time, always with the vision that this was not a temporary home. It was gorgeous inside now with hardwood floors everywhere and the oak bannister following the curved staircases were exactly what I pictured always should have been there.

After returning from Holland once, Dad told us that he had carved his name in the closet of his childhood home there and had had a chance to look for it again many years later. It was still there. So we did that too before moving out. That house was meant to stand forever and I always thought I'd be able to return and find my name in the closet, maybe showing it to my children. It's not fair really.



Dad wouldn't look at it. It would have brought different memories for him, of recession and hard times, but he should be proud to know that those are not at all the things I remember from my years of living there. This is what I remember:

• laughter
• hide-and-seek games (new friends never thought to look for us inside the laundry chute where you could climb up a bit so your feet wouldn't show - that trick only ever worked once)
• badminton in the yard - there were enough trees that we were sometimes sheltered from the endless wind
• skiing on the paths behind the house
• canoeing on the paths behind the house!
• weiner-roasts with cousins at the fire pit
• "camping out" in the playhouse
• big dinners (with 9 people living there, there was no other kind!)
• lots of overnight visitors
• skating on the river behind the house
• toboganning down the hill to end up on the frozen river
• learning to ride my bike by being pushed down that same hill

...the list could go on. I was given everything I needed for a very good childhood.


I realize that my memories are of the building as a "home" and any new owner is looking at simply a "house". There's a big difference there. But even just as a "house" it was beautiful. This was not just a beautiful piece of property.

Although, the property was beautiful too. I sincerely hope they kept some of the trees. The old poplars near the river end of the lot, all of the now-mature fruit trees (different types of apples, plums, crabapples, and even grapes which covered the back of the garage when I last saw it), the willow in the front yard (that twig in the first picture was now 30 years old). Dad recovered that land from native riverlot mess and did an awesome job.

This could easily be a post about inconsiderate waste. Mom told me that they threw a $13,000 air conditioner into the hole before filling it up. Couldn't they have looked for a buyer or a charity who could use it or sell it? What else did they throw in there without considering what would leach through the soil to the river that was only feet away? Did they donate the hardwood flooring to someone? Anyone? Did they keep anything to re-use? I don't know the answers to that so I can't condemn them without knowing.


I'm going to stop now because I realize that this post is rambling about things which maybe matter only to my heart and not to you. And in the manner of my heart, it's jumping from point to point with seemingly no point whatsoever. My thoughts about this are scattered and upset. Sorry about that. I'll be better later. I do wish I could find more pictures of the house though.

Things that make me smile

There are some things that always make me smile even when I don't feel like it.


Wild animals. I can't explain why, but if I spot a coyote or antelope in the country, a deer in the mountains, or even a jack rabbit down the block in the city, it always makes me smile Maybe it's the surprise (although a spider in the garden doesn't have the same effect) or the out-of-placeness of them in my city life.




Early spring flowers and buds on the trees. Can you blame me? After almost 8 months without, it's easy to see why this would cause pleasure.


But this does it as well.

Sometimes I see the name "Redcliff" on a Medalta crock at a garage sale or antique show, or it comes up in conversation with strangers also hailing from southern Alberta. The older I get, the more often I find I tell people that I was born in Redcliff instead of the Hat where I actually spent all of my growing-up years. Why is that? Is it because there's more family history there? Or does the obscurity of the small town just sound more interesting and add a "where is that?" to the conversation?

In this context the name conjures up memories. There's a local group called the Raving Poets who ask for the colour of the piece and the mood before creating music to accompany a poetry reading.

In the case, the mood is slow, hot and lazy and the colour is a combination of dry dust and brick red.

If you're family, you know the memory that's coming: the Year of the Brick.

It was probably only a few weeks for some of us. Dad had torn down an old brick building, a bank I think. He had predicted that the old bricks would be valuable to others building new houses (made to look old) or new/old fireplaces. I hope he made a profit from the venture, but I know that he made memories.

Many young kids and teenagers in the town spent time on the rubble site cleaning the bricks and stacking them on pallets. That meant painfully hacking the mortar off each brick with a small hatchet. Paid by the brick, we had the choice to work hard in the sweltering, unprotected heat or just make enough money to pay for the necessary Slurpies and Slushes to get through the day. A lot of socializing went on. I remember kids cheating - creating hollow pallets and collecting on a complete pallet. I remember a kid with huge feet (you couldn't say "Act your age, not your shoe size"), a lot of BMX stunts and one broken bone. Our 15 or 16 year old foreman took care of that, bringing the kid to the clinic.

Sometime after that a local authority shut us down, based on the ages of the kids working at the site and the relative unsafety of our attire. We all had gloves and hatchets but I think it was up to us whether we wore shorts or jeans, long sleeves or tank tops. It was really, really hot, but many of us didn't wear hats, some didn't have safety goggles, we were all bruised and scraped and sunburnt. But we were happy. We had some pocket money and we made friends, and we could wash the dust off our bodies in the neighbourhood pool every night. Only the few older teenagers got to continue. I was only 12 so I was out of work, one of the few times in my life I've been laid off. And there were no severance packages.

A good friend is cleaning bricks this week. Carefully knocking off the mortar of a neighbour's old foundation to make her kids a brick playhouse. What luxury! My kids have to live with a plywood playhouse and I'm anxiously waiting to kick them out and convert it to a chicken coop.

I have been gifted with bricks by a neighbour and don't have to remove any mortar. Just wheel them down the road and make paths. I've turned the Redcliff bricks face up so that I can smile as I see them.

Have a great day!