Embrace your heritage (2)

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When people emigrate, they bring with them the memory of their homeland. They bring with them religion, values, sets of behaviours. They have experienced life within their country and culture. They bring with them what they know. What they come to is the unfamiliar. For the Icelandic settlers the unfamiliar was forests, bitterly cold weather, water that froze to six feet, large wild animals, building with wood.
Once in Canada, a normal survival mechanism for every immigrant group is to live close together. That way, the shock of the new is alleviated somewhat. For Icelanders, their new communities were in New Iceland and in the West End of Winnipeg. There, they could speak Icelandic, eat Icelandic food, attend Icelandic churches, socialize with people like themselves.

These centres, created and bound by need, are not stable. Shortage of good land, greater opportunities, growing security in the new world, all of these cause some people to seek other places to live. First, one or two leave, find a place such as Argyle in Manitoba where the land was better for farming, they notify friends and relatives who then follow them.

Icelandic National League convention

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The Kaffi Tima choir welcomes the multitude.
Embrace your heritage. That was the rallying cry of the 93rd Icelandic National League convention.
I drove for three days from Victoria, BC to Brandon, Manitoba. To embrace his heritage, Henry Bjornsson drove from Seattle. Claire Eckley was late coming from Minneapolis because she was caught in a storm. Joan Cadham Eyolfsson and friends came from Foam Lake. The gathering of the clan was taking place.
In Brandon, Harold and Norma Jonasson, along with Bob Isleifson and the club volunteers, were taking care of the last details, preparing for over 170 attendees.
Over a year in the making, the convention was coming together.

At conventions, food matters and the free breakfasts that had been arranged were outstanding. I was fed ham and cheese omelets, vegetable omelets, light breakfasts of peach yogurt with fruit. The coffee was good enough to please even Icelanders, the world

Bus tour of the heart

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Bru church
The most memorable moments are often spontaneous, unforeseen, unexpected, flashes in time when something happens that will stay with you for a lifetime.
Today, that happened at the Frelsis (Liberty) Lutheran Church of Grund.
The day started inauspiciously with overnight rain, large puddles on the parking lot of the Victoria Inn in Brandon, Manitoba. The sky was heavy with grey clouds and no more than a small blue opening with the sun shining through.
We crowded onto the bus that the INL Brandon chapter had arranged to take us on a tour of the Icelandic settlement areas. There was an overflow crowd so cars were also filling up. They would follow us as we wove our way through a labyrinth of country roads.
We first stopped at the Skalholt graveyard. A small area of grass enclosed with metal poles and chain link fencing, it sits alongside heavy scrub bush, thin, ragged poplar trees just starting to leaf out, a few scruffy firs. Just before the graveyard, the land has been cleared and its rolling surface is ready for planting. The bus driver tells me that this is potato country, that just one area supplies all the potatoes for McDonald

Fill my soul with colour

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I posted an article with pictures of Playfair Park. It is a one acre park close by my home.One acre is not very large but part of the charm of pocket parks is their smallness, their intimacy, their sense of enclosing everyone in the park and, because they are small, the sense of neighbourliness. These are not parks intended to attract vast crowds. Few people drive to such a park. Nearly everyone walks. There is the sense of this being our park.

I am so enamored of this park and, remember how small it is, that I want to share some more pictures.

In the last couple of days, I was overawed by the mountains of BC, of the rivers the colour of pale jade, of vast forests but here, in the park, I am enclosed not by majesty but intimacy.

The rolling foothills of Alberta, the big sky, the mesas and arryos make a world so large it seems impossible to encompass it. And Saskatchewan with its horizons at the edge of the world, its vast fields and, up close, its copses of trees and pools of dark water. Everything is big, makes me feel like I should be able to fly, to soar over it. But Playfair Park nestles me, fills up my soul with colour.

These are the early colours but soon they will fade and be replaced by the poppies, white, red, purple, yellow. The flowers of summer will bloom many shades of yellow. The lillies will compete for everyone’s attention.

I have seen some of it, I’ll miss some of it, but there’ll still be flowers in Playfair Park when I return and I will walk there again and fill up my soul with colour to last me the coming winter.