August Break 2013 – Week Four
August Break 2013 – Day 18
“Looking Down”
So, I’ve been puttering about the house all day, trying to get things back to “normal” after camping – putting away the food, doing the laundry, washing the last batch of camp dishes, airing out the sleeping gear, finding a place to store it all again, etc. All of a sudden, I hear these squeals of joy coming from the back yard. I go out to investigate only to find Monkeyboys Jr. and Sr. using the camping tarp to toss the wee one up in the air. Much. Too. Cute. =)
August Break 2013 – Day 19
“White”
This month, I’ve also been participating in the Oprah & Deepak Meditation Challenge. Most mornings, before the wee one gets up (if I can muster it), I get comfortable in my white chair and sneak in some inner quiet time. Happily, it made for a pretty picture today too. 😉
Then I was trying to think of other white things I enjoy… and flowers came to mind. Although, I enjoy white flowers more for the contrast they provide with colourful flowers, rather than in and of themselves. When you take away a flower’s colour, you are more apt to notice it’s form however.
Lastly, being one night before the full moon, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to sneak in a quick snap of another one of my favourite white things… la bella luna. Sadly, by the time I finally got a chance to head outside, the clouds had rolled in. Ah, well. A different kind of bella, then. <3
August Break 2013 – Day 20
“Taste” (take 2)
I was too lazy to get too creative about the second “taste” prompt… so, instead I made fresh juices. Pictured here – beet, cucumber, apple, lemon, and ginger juice. Recipe as seen in this post.
August Break 2013 – Day 21
“Something Old”
The story goes something like this (strap in, or skip ahead)…
Both sets of my grandparents hail from the Baltics – Latvia on my mother’s side, and Lithuania on my father’s. They both emigrated before/during WWII, my mother being born in England, and my father in Germany, before everybody ended up here, in Canada. Here, they had to start from scratch – learning another language, working multiple jobs, and living with friends just to save enough money to get their own houses kinda thing. There have never been any real family heirlooms to speak of (although I treasure a few items I’ve kept from my grandparents, and the few photographs that have somehow survived). Even collecting histories to construct a family tree has been… well, challenging. All of my grandparents are gone now, and I often find myself longing for some sort of tangible connection to the past that I will simply never have.
Now. Somewhere along the way of trying to discover my family and it’s history, my estranged father gave me a silky, black dossier which contained information about his parents. Amazingly, enclosed in it I found all sorts of ephemera (various documents written in English, Lithuanian, German, and French, at the very least): passports, school certificates, letters, payment receipts, note pages, Catholic school mementos, hand-stitched hankies, and even maps. Very little of which I can actually read. However, the most curious finding in the whole lot was discovering two different last names listed for my grandfather, on two different documents. And not in a bastardization of ethnic sounding surnames for WWII immigrants… or even some gender-based suffix confusion (i.e. ~skas for males vs. ~skiene for females) kind of way. Different enough to make one… confused… curious… suspicious even. Especially with a rumored linkage to royalty via my supposedly Tatar great-great-grandmother.
To the internet I went… where instead of crowning myself Contessa Kate, I found some otherwise disturbing things. Allegations that the grandfather I had known, however briefly (he died when I was 4 or 5), was not everything he had seemed. Not just the laughing, mustached fellow in Klondike Days clothing… not just the kindly old man sitting on the floor, cracking nuts for me… not just the nurse-orderly being generous and helpful at the nearby hospital, painting in his spare time. According to my grandmother, he had also had a military career in Europe – vestiges of which were seen in photographs of him in uniform, and a collection of photographs of dead soldiers that my grandmother said he had taken, to inform their relatives back home…
But. According to a source on the internet, he also had a dark and secret side to this military past. At least one of his aliases did. And it was sinister enough for this woman to curse him and all of his future generations to hell for eternity. Which was enough for me to put away the dossier for a good, long time… while I sorted out how I felt about the whole thing. I mean, how would you feel discovering that one of your ancestors was quite possibly capable of that kind of thing? Granted, it is the internet… But, still. It was also enough for me to finally change my last name to my husband’s, years after our marriage. And enough for me NOT to want to share those names with you now…
Anyhow. Today’s prompt about “something old” got me thinking about this dossier again, as it contains the oldest things I have in my possession. I pulled it out and examined it once more, and even went so far as to finally photograph all of the contents. Some dating back to the 1920s. All of them puzzle pieces. Especially with the multiple language barriers. Here, I have photographed a few of my paternal grandfather’s items together… on my maternal grandfather’s old oak desk. My maternal grandfather being yet another of my ancestors who has been accused of dastardly things – document and internet-allegation-free, however. But that’s another story. *sigh*
Fact is, it all happened so very long ago, goodness knows under what circumstances, and I was simply not there. Everything I know and will learn is second-hand and beyond, so I doubt I will ever understand the whole truth of either matter. The past is past. And it’s up to me to figure out how I want it to affect my present. Although, I don’t think that I’m quite ready to revisit the allegations again… I think it’s about time to start translating the bits of ephemera (thank you Google). To find out what the sentences underlined in red pencil are saying. What the slips of paper are for or from. Maybe even try to figure out what the arrows on the map were indicating. (Any WWII buffs out there interested in helping out?) And quite possibly, I see an art project or two in my future.
So, yeah. Heavy stuff. But it was time. Besides, who doesn’t love a good mystery?
August Break 2013 – Day 22
“Midday”
Found a stack of old journals when I was looking for the silky “grandparent” dossier yesterday, and have spent the better part of today reading them. At midday, I was howling at myself and my 20-something insanity. Hindsight is a truly lovely thing. <3
August Break 2013 – Day 23
“Sacred”
I am finding that some days, these prompts kind of stump me. Not being what you might call a “religious” person, I don’t really have a church, or any relics or texts that I consider to be sacred… heck, at this point, I don’t even have an altar of any kind set up. So instead, I posted a photo of an old friend and I out for drinks and a catch-up last night. In which case our friendship, our shared history is what is “sacred” to me, as in “regarded with reverence, with deep respect”. Although I am sure many would consider such a thing “sacrilegious”. 😉
In my mind, I am more of a “nature worshiper”, so it’s this kind of image that comes to mind when I think of something, someplace sacred… (The above photo was from my recent camping trip with the boys…) However, I had a bunch of errands to run today, so getting out to commune with nature didn’t exactly happen.
And then I remembered photographing the papers in my grandfather’s “dossier”. Tucked in a little blue billfold were these items. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure what they all are – most of them are blank on the back. One is titled “Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary” and appears to be written (in English) for Baptism purposes; two appear to be Lithuanian funeral announcements (from what I can translate on Google) for what I am guessing was a friend; one has a bible quote in Polish and some difficult to read hand writing on the back, dated 1923; two have French writing and date from after they landed in Quebec, one being a “Prayer For Religious Vocations”; and one, Google had no idea what it was trying to say (at least, not without me finding the appropriate keyboard with accents and an “l” with a line through it…). I know that he went to Jesuit school as a youth, so I am thinking some of them may have been “achievements” of some kind… but some are just a mystery. Religious imagery and prayers to help him (or perhaps my grandmother) “keep the faith” perhaps?
Anyhow. I find it interesting to have these items in my possession – I appreciate them, but likely not at all in the way they were intended. I mean, I value them artistically… symbolically… as a link to the past… but not religiously. At least, not in the Catholic sense. I just read a book which touched on the many faces and historical representations of Mary, and so I am finding the images of her particularly intriguing and thought provoking – but again, I am looking well beyond the patriarchal religious depictions of her. All this to say, I thought these items were interesting and would be considered sacred by some, so I wanted to share them here. Whew.
August Break 2013 – Day 24
“Hear”
Stewie (Family Guy): “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mama! Mama! Mama! Ma! Ma! Ma! Ma! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mummy!”
Some days, you try to hide for a few minutes, just so you can hear yourself think… but they always seem to find you. 😉
Some days, you need a little song-therapy. Yes, I am one of those people you will often see making a fool of themselves in the car, belting out songs (and chair dancing) as they drive…
And some days, the squeak of the swings… the squeals of children playing… the singing of birds in the trees… all come together to create a harmony of happiness.
