Happy Birthday, Mom
Mom was born on October 13, 1913, so she would have been ninety-eight today, if she'd lived. At the time, it was only 11 years since the death of Queen Victoria. The Queen of England was of course also the Queen of Newfoundland, the colony of Mom's birth. Newfoundland would not join Canada for another thirty-six years.
It would be just one more year before World War I began. The Halifax disaster, the biggest man-made explosion to date, was still four years in the future. When those two ships collided in Halifax harbour, my mother, age four, would feel the vibrations from the explosion in St. John's, hear the rattling of bottles on the shelf of the pharmacy where she stood with her older sister. They would think it was an earthquake.
Mom didn't know it, but she would survive the great cataclysms of the twentieth century: World War I, The Great Depression and World War II, before marrying, in her thirties, a serving sailor in World War II. Once Dad left the navy, she would leave her six siblings in St. John's and emigrate with him to the Canadian prairies, when the joining of Newfoundland to Canada was still three years in the future.
She would give birth to her first and third child in Edmonton, but I, the middle one, would be born in mid-winter in a small hospital in the town of Tofield, the closest to our farm. My parents, who had no vehicle except the tractor at the time, would rely on the neighbours to take her to the hospital.
The twentieth century is over, and the world is a very different place now. I wish you could see it, Mom. Happy Birthday.
It would be just one more year before World War I began. The Halifax disaster, the biggest man-made explosion to date, was still four years in the future. When those two ships collided in Halifax harbour, my mother, age four, would feel the vibrations from the explosion in St. John's, hear the rattling of bottles on the shelf of the pharmacy where she stood with her older sister. They would think it was an earthquake.
Mom didn't know it, but she would survive the great cataclysms of the twentieth century: World War I, The Great Depression and World War II, before marrying, in her thirties, a serving sailor in World War II. Once Dad left the navy, she would leave her six siblings in St. John's and emigrate with him to the Canadian prairies, when the joining of Newfoundland to Canada was still three years in the future.
She would give birth to her first and third child in Edmonton, but I, the middle one, would be born in mid-winter in a small hospital in the town of Tofield, the closest to our farm. My parents, who had no vehicle except the tractor at the time, would rely on the neighbours to take her to the hospital.
The twentieth century is over, and the world is a very different place now. I wish you could see it, Mom. Happy Birthday.