poetry in the prose of life

Good day Family!

Coming up following this is a guest post by Hendrika Haasen.  Some of you may remember Hendrika from her comments on the blog, and the poem she wrote about Malcolm...

https://greataunts.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-poem-for-malcolm-by-hendrika.html

A huge thank you to Hendrika for her friendship and generosity, and for her interest in our family - an interest which has been a real gift to me.  That interest has sparked a redirection of my own view, away from what has come to seem to me as a dissolution of our Vincentian heritage, towards new adventures in the family saga.  The Vincentian base is thriving in new ways – Rachael (Catherine) returned from ‘foreign’ after decades in exile to create her own paradise on the homestead of her childhood, and her charming Airbnb provided a base at Queensbury for Hendrika and Randy to experience Vincy first hand.

My youth, when Daddy and his brothers and all their children called the Valley home, always seemed to me blessed and, dare I say, magical? With Granny as an anchor, the family met every day. No doubt there were adult stresses – financial, marital, personality differences – but the connections were always solid and in play. The family fortunes and adventures had fluctuated wildly over the centuries, but there was always a sense that we were people with a core that endured. A core and culture of decency, respect, humility, gratitude and kindness, and an abiding love for our terroir. That heritage transcends national boundaries.

Photos that Cousin Patricia thoughtfully shared with family members recently tell a story of love and loyalty and delight in each other as she and Niall celebrated (at the orchestration of their fine young people) their 50^th wedding anniversary in the Lyragh Estate Hotel, outside the town of Kilkenny where Niall lived as a child.  

Riceal, Ross, Aisling, Brioc, Niall, Patricia

Louis, Melanie (Brioc), Delilah, Aisling, Amelie Michael & Brioc

This Spring sister Bunny got a chance to drop in on the McHughs as her husband Brian O’Brien finally got to visit the land of his ancestors.

Uncle Langley’s brood also had celebrations this summer – in Ontario.  A big birthday for Cousin Jennifer and a wedding for Beej’s handsome grandson (Amanda’s son) Dax, to Lovely Marlena.  Beej, who lived in the U.S., Canada, Jamaica and Barbados, and returned to St Vincent to live years ago, also visited Maureen’s tribe in Tanzania this year. 

The family is growing in the United States too.  On June 17, Adam Yaseen, son of Raneen and Roger Bacchus, and grandson of my sis, Brenda, was born. 

Also thriving in Ontario is brother Colin’s posse.  As Hendrika relates in her post, it is Colin who provided her introduction to our story and our selves.  Colin and Tamara and their children (Daniel, Paul, Nathan, Sarah) have a dog training business, which built on his uncanny connection to canines.  In our family, you think Colin, or his mother Auntie Eileen, you think dogs!  Check out his website and see what his clients have to say about his work...

http://www.mellowvibesiriedogtraining.ca/testimonials/

Here he is, early on, always with an animal in the picture...

Thanks, Hendrika - you've added more to my life than I can say!  

Thanks Family - I'm grateful you're mine.

One love,

Lisbie x

“When we share -- that is poetry in the prose of life.” 

Sigmund Freud

"...the universe remains

an incomprehensible wheel of
grave attraction."

Eleanor Lerman

Mellow Vibes

“Well, to tell you the truth, my first wife was a Timmins.” Boysie (Colin) replied to my question about what he might have heard about the town of Timmins, the place that George and Louie Blencowe (née Fraser) eventually moved to with their family, and the place where I grew up.

Lisbie has asked me to write about how I have come to know the Punnett family and I’ve started with a bit of a conversation that I had with Boysie.

This exchange came after our Sadie had spent almost four weeks with the Punnett family in order to reverse the canine anxiety that had led her to claw a hole through our bedroom drywall so deep that some of an outer brick could be seen. By the time of the above conversation I had come to a deep appreciation for Boysie’s wisdom, which focused on but was not limited to dogs, and I had developed an equally deep curiosity about the place that is so often in his conversations and such a part of who he is, St. Vincent (a place with much more sensible dog owners than Toronto!). On the web I had found the TV program Crab and Callaloo, Stuart Hall’s series on the Caribbean, Redemption Song, articles from Searchlight, and Letters from the Great Aunts. On that blog there was mention of Louie Blencowe, and this unusual last name was known to me from my teenage years. I was in the same class as Michael Blencowe and his siblings also attended our small Catholic high school. I had a vague memory of Michael answering that typical Canadian question, “Where are you from?” with the answer his family was from a small Caribbean island that no one in Canada would have heard of. Could this Louie Blencowe be the Mrs. Blencowe I knew who was a friend of my mother’s through church and whose husband did some mechanical work for my father on the farm? I found Mrs. Blencowe’s obituary that included the first name that I had not known (my mother always referred to Mrs. Blencowe when she spoke of her) and listed Eileen as her sister so it seemed true that through our dog I had gotten to know extended family of the Blencowes.

So the next time Sadie stayed for boarding I had a chat with Boysie about Monica, Michael, and Margaret (I don’t think Mark and Marie came up at this time). I asked if, from the communication between Boysie’s mother and her sister, the family had formed an impression of what life was like in Timmins, since I imagined that it was a stark contrast to St. Vincent. Boysie’s response was the sentence that I started this with, and that I still find rather incredible. This conversation confirmed a feeling that had been growing in me that meeting Boysie and the Punnett family was, for some reason, what the cosmos intended. How else to explain knowing two branches of one Vincentian family in Timmins and Toronto?

This blog was a very important part of the cosmos’ plan. Lisbie had a post concerning memory and language as elements of personal identity that I found very interesting so I responded and since then we have been corresponding by email about identity, St. Vincent and the Caribbean, fiction and poetry, and the nuts and bolts of our lives. This correspondence has been the basis of a friendship that has also taken me once to Ottawa and twice to Annapolis Royal for some wonderful in person chats originally with Lisbie, but later with Arthur as well. On the first trip to Annapolis Royal Arthur confirmed for me that the woman with the Timmins last name who Boysie had been married to was indeed connected, through an earlier marriage, to the Timmins brothers of Montreal. They had made their fortune during the gold rush that created the town to which they gave their name, where Michael spent his teenage years and I grew up. (Feel free to fill in the appropriate cliché here.) On that first Annapolis Royal trip, which by chance coincided with Lisbie’s birthday celebration, my sister-in-law, Ivy (of Nova Scotian heritage) and I were introduced to the experience that I’ll hazard to guess Arthur has often known and that he helped create on this occasion, of being enveloped in the web of connections, or at least some of them, that characterizes Lisbie’s life with her family. Bunny and her people were an important part of that celebration, so I had the chance to take a lovely morning walk with her and I got a glimpse into her life in Atlanta and she shared some of her memories growing up with Lisbie et al.

Ivy (Hendrika's sister-in-law), Hendrika, Marlene (Max Serrao's daughter, so Lisbie's sister's sister ~ i.e. Bunny's sister), Lisbie, Bunny, Brian O'Brien (Bunny's husband)

Three years or so after the first consultation with Boysie and Daniel, my husband, Randy, and I were fortunate enough to meet other members of the family when we stayed with Catherine (Rachael) in what we learned was once Malcolm’s pool (or is it snooker? I can never remember) room. Perhaps pool house would be a more accurate term for the space that is now a lovely AirBnB suite. Here I experienced one more Timmins connection when I told Catherine the “Well, to tell you the truth, my first wife …” story, and she told me about the two years she and Rocky spent living in Timmins with the Blencowes. By this point I was almost not surprised. Later during our visit John and Denise were kind enough to invite us to a wonderful lunch that ended up lasting into the evening, and we have Catherine to thank for getting us, Brenda, and another guest of hers to the other side of the island for a day of conversation and family history. Of course we enjoyed a few meals at Zen’s bush bar and heard more stories about Boysie’s way with dogs and talked a bit about raising children. Mike Kirkwood kindly shared some of his own history as well as that of the family and the island, including the story of Ashton Warner, who was listed in the slave census for Cane Grove near the time of emancipation, a document which I have seen, on line, in the original form. Catherine’s guest invited us into Malcom’s tree house and we were able to experience that view of the sweep of the Buccament Valley. This and our other experiences confirmed what I had read from Lisbie and Brenda’s accounts of the beauty and the spirit of the place. The donkey’s visits near our patio rounded out our experiences.

When asked about the interest I have developed in St. Vincent I explain that I see the island as a microcosm of the effects of the currents of history that have washed over and shaped the world we know now. The Punnett family represents, with compassion, intelligence and charm, an expression of those currents that have reached as far as Timmins, and I’m sure even farther still. I’m so glad I’ve gotten to know some of you and look forward to more stories, both in person and here, about both the past and the present.

Randy, Lisbie, and Hendrika in Chester, Nova Scotia in June 2019

Hendrika

“It is not every day that

the world arranges

itself into a poem.”

Wallace Stevens