Category: Nostalgia

GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD MEMORIES

Nostalgia / tagged , , / / by

GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD MEMORIES

Slow driving west
down Saskatchewan 363

Paved now
but mud and gravel
fifty years ago when dad
came over from the home place
to help me build fourteen miles of fence

Half a mile from the old Fort Walsh trail
where the Mounties hauled supplies
for a starving Sitting Bull

A lot of history
and a damn good fence
still standing, still stretching
like time, and our time together

Smooth and endless
over the soft rolling hills

From this distance you can’t see
the barbs in the wire

A HUNDRED YEARS AND ACCOUNTING

Nostalgia / / by

A HUNDRED YEARS AND COUNTING

Old roll top just keeps on rollin’

My father’s mentor
sold him the ranch
gave his name to his first
born son (that’s me)
and left him this desk

More than a rancher
he kept his day job too
as municipal secretary

Taxes, foreclosures,
roads and bridges built
and all the books balanced

During the 20’s people paid a lot for horses
he’d have had nice cash in the cubbies
During the 30’s mostly dust

Once it became my father’s
Roll it open, count the receipts
Roll it open, pay the bills

Roll it open there’s the letter
your brother dead at war
Roll it closed – still dead

I roll it open now
Mister Fisher and my father
looking over my shoulder

Here’s something
from my six year old assistant

Look at all those colors
in Katherine’s new picture

THE AUSTRIAN UNCLES

Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships / tagged / / by

THE AUSTRIAN UNCLES

Already old when I was young
revered as I would hope to be when old

Two brothers married to
two sisters of my father’s father

Great aunts
always as they’ve always been
busily bustling round the house

while the uncles somehow stay
both present and out of the way

Little china cups in work-hard hands
black coffee and home-brew
sipping the day away

JAP ORANGES

Nostalgia, Ranch Life / / by

JAP ORANGES

Nothing racist in that term
for my sisters or me

Nothing but affection
gratitude and endearment
as we picture in our minds
little Geisha girls
at a giant Bonsai tree
picking and packing
The only vitamin C we’d see

Wooden boxes always
handy for something
and each orange wrapper
was luxury in the outdoor loo

The Charmin of farmin’
after spending most of our years
tearing pages out of Sears

CHINESE RESTAURANT

Nostalgia / tagged , , , / / by

CHINESE RESTAURANT

Sorry John Donne
but some men may be islands

or castaways
in small prairie towns
fifty miles by bad road
from any other of their race

Tall walled booths along one side
twisted-wire chairs and tables too
my father and his friends had coffee
I think mine was cream soda

We may have eaten there
but I don’t remember
certainly at five or six
I would not have imagined
that we were as strange to him
as he was to us

All I ever knew
of the inner man
was the pungent foreignness
of the old two-holer out back

Fast forward six years or so
to small town of Mossbank
on the South side of the lake

A chubby twelve year old
sits in a low walled booth
with his best buddies
and another Chinese man
in another Chinese café
serves up vanilla cokes
(when vanilla still had alcohol)
and marks our tabs with Chinese signs

I asked him what my three mean

Big – Small – Happy

THE BEER PARLOR

Nostalgia / tagged , , / / by

THE BEER PARLOR

Politics and weather

Little round seated chairs
no-one could have sat on
ten minutes completely sober

Little round tables
completely covered at last call
fluted glasses perfectly filled
to the well marked tide line
(no charging for foam here)

Smell of well aged
beer, barf and barn boots
but no matter, it was men only
and they didn’t seem to care

In the service of progress I guess
it was decided by the province
that each town could vote
on women being allowed
to enter these sacred halls

George, the owner,
a man of steady habits
and unshakable prejudices
thinly disguised as principles
said “If you vote for this I close the place”
They did, and he did