Memoirs of Childhood

There is something about a mature author reflecting on their childhood that I find enchanting. Perhaps it's that sense of a golden era, the fog lighting on the past. Here are a few that I've read, reread, loved, and recommended.
1. Where the wings grow by Agnes DeMille
This memoir is by the choreographer, niece to Cecil B. DeMille. He, however, barely appears in this marvellous story of an eccentric and large family, and their existence in early 20th century New York. Her aunt marries a Japanese man around 1910, they all spend summers en masse in cottage country, and the story has the requisite amounts of bittersweet nostalgia and mature reflection. Wonderful.
2. Two under the Indian sun by Jon and Rumer Godden
I adore Rumer Godden and feel that her work has been sadly neglected. Growing up in still colonial India, these sisters have a great facility for making you feel the heat and the sun and the dust and the snakes and the people... more straightforward and more accessible than her fiction set in India, I think.
3. Testament of my childhood by Robert de Rocquebrune
A book I lit upon by chance, and it was a fantastic find. The story of a second son, from a distinguished line of Québecois. Published first in French in the 50's, it is set in the 1890's/early 1900's in the Québec countryside, and yet it feels as if it must be set in the 1700's -- it is really difficult to comprehend what the culture was still like for this family, related to all the who's who of Québec history. An astonishing glimpse into a vanished era.
4. Memories of a lost Egypt by Colette Rossant
A memoir of a small girl of Jewish and French descent growing up in pre-WWII Cairo. A tiny gem of a book; and it includes recipes! Another serendipitous find; just enough family history and social commentary, it makes for a gorgeous read.
5. The Book of Small by Emily Carr
A memoir by one of my favourite painters, West Coast artist Emily Carr. When she became too ill to paint in the woods in her advanced years she turned to writing -- and thank goodness! Her books are like small sketches in themselves and all well worth reading. This book is a set of short pieces about her childhood in Victoria,B.C. at the turn of the last century. Further autobiography follows in Growing Pains. What a woman!

Eons of rock

When I was recently in Alberta we drove through the Rockies a couple of times. It is really awe inspiring -- who are we to worry about our small, short lives when faced with the longevity of a mountain? Time moves more slowly for things like mountains and glaciers. Gazing at them really highlights the brevity of human life. However, mountains are not always eternal, as we discovered when we went to see the Frank Slide. This landslide occurred in 1903, and it was so enormous an estimated one hundred million tons of limestone slid into the valley and onto the town of Frank. 76 people died, making it one of the biggest landslide disasters ever in Canada. Only when we were there and looking at it did we comprehend the huge nature of it. Even after all these years you can still feel the immediacy of it; it's more than a hundred years for us and yet only yesterday for the mountain.

This mountain seemed sturdy enough on the misty day we visited, though. The mist sitting on the peaks made us feel as if we had stumbled into a fantasy novel by mistake...

Tea time

I am a tea drinker. That's to say, rather than a coffee drinker. I adore tea, I have to have it all day long. I like everything about it; the taste, the routine of making it, the history of it's manufacture. I drink it and I read about it. Here are some of my favourite places to read about it online:
Distinctly Tea * Stash * Mellow Monk * Tea Council of Canada * Murchies * Tea Connexions *
And of course, I order it too :)
Perhaps I also adore tea for reasons explained in Marika Cobbold's novel The Purveyor of Enchantment :
"Coffee was for sharp minds and tight schedules. Tea was for comfort and putting your feet up. Clementine had a suspicion that tea drinkers, on the whole, did not set the world on fire."
Ah, yes. A good cuppa and a rest and I'm ready to face the world again.