Sunday June 12, 2005
3:30 - 5:45pm
“Are you Julia Baird?”
I nodded. I was a little bit shocked to be recognized by name by someone I’ve never met.
“I’ve read your website and I’ve been reading the posters when I’ve been walking around. I know the people who live in your Grandparents’ old building. It’s another little old couple.”
“Really? At 18 Franklin?”
“Well…I think so – somewhere around there, anyway. You know, I was thinking about this: I have a journal that my Grandmother wrote and it’s exactly the same as your Grandma’s. People our age, we write page after page…them, they wrote it in point form.”
“We write down our thought and feelings and they wrote down what they did every day.”
“Exactly! Listen, I have to go, but it’s nice to meet you. My name’s Adam, by the way.”
Maitland enlisted in the war in 1917. Luckily for him, he had experience working with animals, so instead of enduring the hardships of the battlefield, he became a part of the Forestry Corp, working with horses to clear forests, providing the lumber to create trenches in France. After contracting TB and returning to Ontario, a doctor suggested that the dryer climate of Western Canada would help his lungs. So off Mait went to Saskatchewan.
In 1924, Dora’s widowed Grandmother decided to visit her daughter Edith in Winnipeg. I suppose in those days, it was not considered proper for old ladies to travel alone, so it was decided that Dora would accompany her Grandma on the train. I’m not sure the reason why, but Dora didn’t want to spend three months in Winnipeg with her Aunt and cousins. She was left with a quandary: what would she do for those three months? Someone suggested that she should continue travelling on to Regina and stay with Wiletta Wilson, who grew up in the same community as Dora. I think that was great advice, and apparently so did Dora. For three months, she helped the Wilsons with the mending, cleaning, childcare and especially with cooking and baking to feed the hungry farmhands.
You can probably see where this story is going. As fate would have it, the name of one of the farmhands was Maitland.
My Grandparents grew up less than 15 miles away from each other. I’m not sure why, but the stars had it laid out that they both had to travel to Saskatchewan in order to meet each other.
“You know who’s doing that?”
I thought he was talking about putting up the posters, so I said that it was me.
“No, I’m talking about who’s ripping them down! It’s those kids, walking on their way to school.”
“Oh…is that a huge litter problem for you?”
“No, not at all”, he said as he flipped a burger on his grill. “I just feel bad for you.”
“I guess I can’t control what people do when I’m not around.”
“I told them off the other day. I told them, ‘You feel better now for having done that?!? Huh?!?’ ”