In the summer of 1931, family friends took 9-year-old Anne on a driving trip to Vancouver, BC, so she could spend 3 months with her mother. The 2-week trip from California was in a big old touring car, equipped with running boards full of camping gear, staying in river-side campsites on the way north. She remembers being…
In January 1931, Anne was living with Claire, who had some limited correspondence with Florence, Anne’s mother. The period from 1923 to about 1930 was quite difficult for Florence, but the detailed information is a little scant. The details are probably available in her voluminous correspondence and notes (much of which my mother still has),…
Image by CIFOR via Flickr An adventure in the Amazon is always at the top of my bucket list, even though I’ve could have crossed it off after my 2009 trip to Peru. The Unconquered is subtitled “In Search of the Amazon’s Last Unconquered Tribes” and that pretty much sums it up. Published in 2011, the…
I enjoy unbuttered popcorn as an evening snack – generously sprinkled with Spike seasoning. I just googled “spike” and had to go to page 5 of the search results to find my family’s favourite all purpose seasoning. We’ve been studying the variability in popcorn efficiency – defined as the percentage of kernels that fully pop into edible…
Here’s a photo of Mom’s Grade 3 class at McKinley School in Gardena (Compton) California. Mom is seated, third from the left. Her classmates were mostly children of Japanese and Mexican farm workers. Update: Due to popular demand (100% of commenters so far have requested it) I am including the Grade 4 class picture below. It…
Lying in bed this morning, I lazily checked my email on my ever-handy iPhone. Suddenly I bolted up in excitement. (The truth is that I continued to lie lazily, but my brain did perk up.) I had received by email, a blog comment from a hitherto unknown half-second-cousin-once-removed, who found my post about Charles Douglass Waddell, who happened to her great-grandfather.…
Not long ago I learned a new word: “mondegreen,” from Throw Grammar from the Train . A “mondegreen” is a misinterpretation, most often of song lyrics, by a listener. The word comes from author Sylvia Wright who heard the words “Lady Mondegreen” in a Scottish ballad. She thought they sang: Ye highlands and ye lowlands Oh…
As I left off in the last post, toddler Anne was living with a foster family while her mother was in a mental hospital in British Columbia and her father was finding his way in California. (Society didn’t have the same expectations of fathers in those days.) Anne soon went to live with her mother’s older sister Vera on…
Seeing Clarely 