Clear, cold morning, perfect morning. Mountains painted onto the sky morning. A morning when a Cooper's hawk shadowed part of my walk in, gliding from a cedar tree on the edge of the park, swooping up and into a bare cottonwood tree whence it surveyed the road.It was an easy morning to be distracted, pulled away from the computer and the general paperwork, to forget the new programmes coming up in less than a fortnight and instead feel an absolute urgency to go and view another site where we could, maybe, possibly, perhaps in the not very near future do some classes.
Well, to be fair, Rich was going anyway, so Alex and I just tagged along.
It's a tough part of the job, but someone has to check up that the herons and red-winged blackbirds and snow geese, finches, Cooper's hawks, red-tailed hawks and bald eagles were all where they should be.
Someone needed to gaze across the water at the airport runway, and walk through the Japanese garden.
The Japanese garden. There is a heritage house nearby and surrounded by all that beauty it irritates, causes a scratchiness, haunts.It was owned by a family called Shimano before the war. There is a picture of the extended Shimano family happy, standing and smiling in the garden.
But when the war started, Canadians with Japanese backgrounds were interned and their homes, their fishing boats, their farmlands were taken away from them, confiscated. They might have fought for the allies, for Canada, in the Great War, but they still lost everything in the second.
The Shimano house was sold by the Canadian government to another family in 1957. Stolen property that was fenced.Did this happen to Canadians of German descent? I don't know for sure, but I don't believe so, and nor should it have.
And looking down on us with an air of judgement, was this beautiful bald eagle, two in fact.
I guess it was just that kind of a morning.
6 comments:
Interesting that it was sold in '57. I think my mom's Dad's property was sold during the war, to pay for them being incarcerated.
Brilliant photos
Your detailed descriptions of the beauty and the accompanying photos pull like gravity, luring me to plan a visit. My recent escape from desk work was a bowling trip last Friday with six students. Rural beauty was in the sighting of a herd of ten deer in a corn field and two eagles overhead. Dawn
Raymond - The people who bought the house from the government had been living there since 1954.
I hadn't realised that that was how the government rationalised and justified it, that it was paying for their incarceration. That's even more outrageous.
Sleepy - Ta, but when I have a day like that to photograph I do regret that I don't have a really good camera, on the other hand, that little one does fit in my bag.
Dawn. Thank-you, and actually, that's my plan, it's all just advertising :)
I heard a story on the CBC about Ukrainian internment camps during WWI (had to google it just now to be sure). I believe the last known survivor had just died. She told her children about it when they were teenagers and they didn't believe her as they'd never heard of these Ukrainian internment camps and the place where her camp was no longer existed in Quebec. LINK
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for the link Gail.
Post a Comment