Barb and I were chatting today and realized we shared some classic BC summer experiences as children.
We grew up only a few blocks from each other, only a few years apart with some strikingly similar memories. Summer vacation always seemed to include the drive up Highway 3, past the Hope Slide, through the tunnels up the canyon, stopping at the Keremeos fruit stands, through Penticton, past Westbank and the water slides and finally across the buzzing bridge into the town of Kelowna for a week or two at little cabins on the beach with bunk beds and sand everywhere from all that barefoot running about.
Victoria was a favourite destination too – riding the BC Ferries, visiting Butchart Gardens and Fable Cottage along the way. Barb visited her grandmother in the summertime in Victoria on Mystic Lane, just a few blocks from the beach.
A woman entered her grandmother’s children’s clothing store one day when Barb was visiting and said, ‘Excuse me, but do you realize your granddaughter is talking to a mannequin?’ Barb’s grandmother replied with confidence, ‘Well yes, of course she is.’ Barb and I agreed that mannequins are good listeners and they don’t talk back! What good memories to be in safe haven with grandparents, elders and family, remembering the journey to get to them and the journey home. When Barb shared this story with Shelley, she remembered that her grandparents had a store in the same little mall as Barb’s grandmother – what a small world!
There is a magic to summer, the slowness, the heat, how our brains just want to turn off and think of nothing but the moment we are in. Not everyone has the luxury of slowing down in the summer but all of us have memories of a time when things were perhaps a little simpler, when we felt in wonder of the world around us and didn’t need to think of the next task that needed doing.
Do you have a memory when time seemed suspended?
What happens when you seek that memory and find it?
Is there a way we can return to how our bodies and hearts felt, even for a moment when the present moment was all that mattered and our senses were alive?
Even taking a moment to close our eyes and simply remember can bring our shoulders down, help us to feel our breath in our bodies.
My conversation with Barb made me realize that memories, even though we may not have shared the event, can connect us – place, time, events, feelings can be shared with a simple trip down ‘mystic’ memory lane.
I invite you to share a summer memory! Email me at hello@plan.ca
– Sophie Yendole