| Newfoundland 2003 |
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| Tuesday December 23, 2003 -- 4:10pm Today would have been Nan and Dad Noel's 63rd wedding anniversary. It's gray outside. On the next sunny day, I want to walk around and take pictures. We went to the mall today. The mall has a WalMart on one end, the Dominion grocery store on the other end, a bank, a Tim Horton's Donuts, and about a dozen shops in between. I circled the entire thing twice, then stood in line for a coffee before Mom, Dad and Aaron got back from their run to the liquor store. The mall was jam packed too. I might have bought a couple of things, except the lines were so long, it didn't seem worth it. All of the old men hang out at the mall, as much as, if not more than, the kids. They sit on benches together, like a bunch of grey crows on a wire, and gossip. Who died. Whose car went off the road in St. John's. How things aren't like they used to be. They aren't either. I went to the root cellar with Dad Noel earlier today to get a turnip for supper. The cellar was so well built. There were plenty of potatoes, fat squatty carrots, turnip, and heads of cabbage wrapped in newspapers to keep them fresh. I asked Dad Noel who had built it. He told me it was built about 100 years ago, by his grandfather. "It used to be we'd fill this right up with vegetables!" |
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| When he and Great-Uncle Pat go, what will happen to that cellar? There will be no one to fill it, no one to get a turnip out of it because they think one would go well with supper. So much is going to pass with that generation. I guess it's what happens, but it's hard |
| to watch, especially here, where things were essentially the same for hundreds of years. I guess it guess it really changed with World War II, my mother's generation. It makes me sad. |
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