In The Move Groove.

It’s only been seven months since I started blogging and already it has changed my world. If it wasn't for Heidi constantly nagging me - asking me every other day “when was I going to FINALLY start a blog?” - I may have never begun. Heidi, you’re going to make someone a ‘fantastic’ wife someday...

Now I am totally obsessed by my blog statistics, especially how many people read my posts and where they are from. Initially, these stats were pretty boring. If 30 or 40 people read a post, it was miraculous. The majority of my readers were family and friends from Canada, with a healthy smattering of US citizens and a few from the Commonwealth countries.

Then the tsunami and earthquake hit Japan in early March. After trying to explain nuclear fission to my husband, Peter, one night, I decided to write about the Nuclear Meltdown that was (and still is) occurring at the Fukushima reactors. Overnight this post found an international audience. Countries like the U.K., Australia, Japan, Germany, India, Indonesia and Iran began popping up. Then my post was reprinted on a medical site in Slovenia that dealt with the aftermath of Chernobyl and I am still getting readers from this country. Now I can hardly wait to see how my international audience has grown. Peter is getting used to me shouting out the names of countries the first time they appear, like “Iceland! Kazakhstan! Bosnia!” or more recently, “United Arab Emirates!”

This international audience has made posting blogs much more fun. Since I wrote Sense or Censorship two months ago, it has garnered over 1000 visits. That's totally blown me away! I really have to thank my friend and writing partner, Methodius, for pushing me to write about this topic. I never expected literary censorship to be such a hotbed of interest.

Currently though, I am surrounded by a new project. I am in the midst of many boxes. Hundreds of them to be exact, mostly filled with unknown ‘treasures’ I have yet to discover. You see, we are moving. That very statement brings to mind a famous line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men – “The horror! The horror!”

Those of you who have ever moved a vast amount of baggage know what I mean. If there was a huge dislike button, I’d be pressing it. In the 21 years Peter and I have been married, we’ve moved once. That was over 17 years ago and we have literally gained a ton of stuff since then. UGH! But a wonderful opportunity has come to us and it’s time for a change. (Also time to hit the ‘dislike’ button again...did I tell you how much I dislike change)?

And this change is radical, not like just moving across town. We will be leaving the city and living in a house on 40 acres of wooded land. So instead of watching the police bust a drug house down the street, we will be watching the deer sleep in our back yard, listening to a thousand birds sing, and making sure we don't antagonize the moose.

Although every city neighborhood has a few villainous individuals, we have been blessed to live near some pretty remarkable neighbors - who have now become very close friends. I will miss the ebb and flow of these people coming and going from our house. I grew up in a country setting where we never locked our doors or closed the blinds on our windows. And I still maintain an ‘open door’ policy where friends are encouraged to just ‘drop in.’ But sometimes other creatures have decided to drop in too...Once a mouse took up residence in our living room for a few days until I saw his shadow scurrying across the floor. Then there was the cat that wandered in and began exploring our basement. It was as much a shock for Peter as it was for the cat when they encountered each other.

The great thing about our new place is that family will be living close to us. That will be a huge blessing and an opportunity to get to know some of our nieces and nephews better.

But how are we supposed to get all our junk from here to there? We don't have a lot of experience and both me and my husband are pack rats, of sorts. I like to think Peter is much worse than me, having inherited the ‘pack rat’ gene from his mother. But as I am wading through box after box of personal correspondence, I realize I must have a genetic predisposition to be a hoarder as well.

I found my baby bracelet from the hospital, a birthday card from my first birthday (which was quite some time ago now), a tiny stone from the Roman Coliseum my brother brought back for me, (this was before security guards stopped people from absconding pieces of their historical monuments...unfortunately my brother encountered police at Stonehenge otherwise I might have a piece of that too)!

Then there are all the letters, notes, cards and postcards from the Fat-5, other friends and family. I have kept every meaningful and interesting card and letter anyone has ever given me. Since there are artists on both sides of our family, many of these are amazing and unique. But hey, I did throw out all the original Bloom County and Doonesbury comics I had kept from the 80s.

So you can see why I need your advice. What do we move first (we have a month to get it done) and what can we move last? What do we do with the old boxes of black and white photos we have? Does anyone remember slides and slide projectors? What if I want to throw out a couple dozen boxes of junk but Peter thinks they’re worth more than gold? How can we not kill each other? Does anyone want a used process camera? (It’s free if you haul it away).

I’m going to share a BEFORE photo of a small section of our basement now. And yeah, this is also BEFORE we started packing. These boxes and CDs normally lie all over our ping pong table.

Have you heard my cry for help???

Remember Life Before The Internet?

Fifty years ago, when I was born, there were no mandatory car seats to take me home from the hospital. We didn't even have seat belts - my Mom simply held me in her arms.

There were no computers, no email or Facebook to tell all our friends and relatives (and people we didn't even know) the good news.

We had a Brownie box camera so it was impossible to post photos of me when I was just minutes old.

The cell phone was merely a dream (Maxwell Smart was ahead of his time with the shoe phone in 1965). Since the hospital only had a pay phone and we were poor, my parents waited until I came home to call people up. As for the relatives that lived a long distance away, my Mom mailed them a note. Yes snail mail!

I grew up with a rotary-dail phone and a party line. I would spend hours listening in to conversations other people had in our neighbourhood, until my Mom caught me in the act.








We had a whole whack of 8-tracks and I would become totally frustrated when they cut out in the middle of a song, with a big click, to switch to another track before the music continued. There simply had to be better technology than this.

When me and my 12-year-old best friend both got transistor radios for Christmas, we would tune them in to the same station and set them up at opposite ends of the room, cranking up the volume - ahhhh, stereo...

Vinyl was all the rage and I had my share of 45s and 78s, some of which are worth a lot of coin in today's market. 

Different artists used "backmasking" to put messages on their albums that could be heard only when played backwards.

This became a marketing tool used most notably by The Beatles on their White Album, where the phrase "turn me on, dead man," fueled rumors that Paul McCartney was dead. Other artists like Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa also used backmasking to sell millions of records.


Our world seems like the Dinosaur Age compared to the children today, growing up with lap-tops, iPhones and digital cameras.

Yet this is not unlike the stories my grandparents and even my parents told me when I was young.

• My grandparents and my father were persecuted for their faith in Russia. I heard tales of forged passports, gunshots in the night, brothers and sisters forceably separated, having to leave the country with the clothes on their back, long train rides and then ten days at sea before reaching Canada.
• My Dad told me what it was like to feel hunger, every day. He and his brothers would shoot deer, rabbits, gophers, anything – just to try to feed a family of 12.
• My Mom talked about rising at 4 am to milk the cows. One of her younger brothers would always follow her, squeezing one of the cow’s teats to send a jet of warm milk on his oatmeal.

• During the Depression, my grandfather was one of the first people to drive a "Bennett Buggy." Unable to afford gasoline, he took out the engine of his Model T and hooked the emasculated vehicle to their two horses driving it proudly into downtown Winnepeg. My Mom and the rest of the family were ecstatic when they found out the Winnipeg Free Press published a photo of him and his horse-drawn carriage on the front page. 

• My Mom yearned to read, write and draw but only got through Grade 6 before she was “needed” at home. I tried to imagine how she must have felt when her whole family gathered around the radio after WWII to listen with horror and disbelief to the atrocities that killed millions of Jews. My grandfather proclaimed Hitler as the anti-Christ and Armageddon near.

Both my parents encouraged my brother and I to go as far as we could with our education. They wanted us to live out the dreams they had to forgo.
My parents sacrificed so much so that we could have all the things they did not.

I feel a debt of gratitude I can never repay, except with a life well-lived. It was what they wanted most.

I now have all the photos from my grandparents and parents, some of them dating back to the late 1800′s, when photography was just beginning.

It is a treasure to have this family history and look back on the time before the computer and Internet; a time of countless family gatherings, fruit-filled perisky and other Mennonite foods cooked by my aunts, simple games we would make up on the spot and stories told over and over again.

What are some of your memories before the computer age?

Check out Lisa's inspiring blog on the same topic but from a different point of view.