outtakes

A few photos from Crystal Crescent beach and my grandmother's farm in Saltsprings, Nova Scotia. All taken and edited on an iPhone 4S...pretty much the only camera I travel with these days! Thanks for looking!

places I've been lately, things I've been seeing

 

home movies

home movies from the 1930s from the Nova Scotia Archives

homecoming

Images from the Nova Scotia Archives.

three generations

grandma

mom

grandma (note that calendar in the background!!!)

grandma and me

mom (bowl cut, so rad!), me (bday hat), sister (yellow dress, so cute!)

mom and me this spring

It's Mother's Day and I thought that I would share some vintage photos with you of my mom and her mom and also myself. I've talked lots of times about how proud I am of the accomplishments of my family members. My sister and I are the first generation on my mom's side to not live on the farm and the first kids to be born and grow up in the bustling city of Halifax! My dad's parents were also incredible people, and I'll share some photos of them soon. There was one picture in particular that I was looking for but couldn't find today. My mom is 25 years old and holding baby me. I saw that photo when I was 25 and was so struck with how much we look alike. I can see the resemblance in these photos, too. Note the birthday party shot. That's gotta be most of the moms in our neighbourhood! And that's my sister in the yellow dress, proving once again that she was the cutest kid in the freakin' world!

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there, including my own, of course!

nova scotia: rural outtakes

At the end of the school year last year I went back to Nova Scotia to visit my sister, brother-in-law, dad, grandma and the rest of my family. I had such a fabulous visit, the details of which will be revealed over at Yuppie Love on Saturday. I thought I'd share some outtakes of my photos here. These are the ones that I didn't include in my post on Kait's blog because her series is more city-oriented. My ninety-two year old grandmother lives on a farm in rural Nova Scotia and these are some of the photos that I took there last summer.

The house above is not the one my grandma lives in. It's one that we've always called "the other house". It was also a chicken coop at one point. My grandma has lived on this same farm for about ninety years. One of the most inspirational stories about her is that she finished high school in her 70s. Perhaps my mother will correct me on this detail, but she had made it all the way to grade eleven as a teenager, which was rare for girls of her generation, and then had to drop out. I think it is absolutely amazing that she went back fifty years later to get her diploma (in Nova Scotia that's pretty much always called your "grade twelve").

She's also been feeding the birds on this property for almost as long as she's lived there. As Jeff found out when we visited together a few years ago, there is a very specific way to go about feeding the birds. For example, he was asked to go clockwise around the circle in the driveway to feed the pigeons, not counterclockwise. They would hate that. This picture of one of the feeders I'm including for Danielle. It's great to visit my grandma's farm, you can birdwatch from the kitchen window. I also had to get a bluejay out of the screened-in porch when I was last there. That was a bit insane!

This is "Kitty". Dreamcat extraordinaire. Its tongue is sticking out because it has no teeth. When it wandered onto the farm a few years ago my grandma (ever the animal lover) took it to the vet to have it checked out and mentioned that it was a nice kitten. Well, though Kitty was small, the vet was quick to point out that this was no kitten. Estimated age of this cat: 78 human years. So cute.

The "new barn" above and the "old barn" below. "New" might be a misnomer. No idea when this barn was built. The old barn has always been off limits due to structural integrity issues. It looks like it conceals some amazing treasures, it may have been a house in a previous life, and I'm pretty sure it was dragged onto the property by members of my family that first moved here. I have dreams of doing something with some of the wood with its beautiful patina.

Below is "the black cat". Does this cat have a real name? I have no idea, though I think it's name may be "the black cat". I love this photo of it and the black cat is way softer than Kitty, though less likely to sit on your lap and drool. I hope you've enjoyed these images of the farm where I spent so much of my childhood. Take a look at some older photos from this little corner of the world here. Where did you spend childhood weekends?

guest post: 6 days 6 cities

This week my friend Kait is running a new series on her blog (one of my favourites), Yuppie Love. Starting tomorrow six different bloggers/creative minds will be writing about their favourite cities in the world and sharing what I'm sure will be some amazing images, too. Check out Kait's post on Tuesday. She's sharing her love of Santa Monica/Venice Beach and I know that I for one would rather bet there right now. I guess for now we'll have to live vicariously through her lovely imagery and description. I have an exciting guest blogger series coming up here on the Sadie blog, too, but I'll wait a little while to share the details.

My post about my hometown and favourite place, Halifax, Nova Scotia, will be running on Saturday. I'll be sure to send you that way near the end of the week, too. In the meantime, have you entered the Sadie Designs giveaway yet? You have until Friday, March 4 to throw your name in the hat. And, yup, that's me at about three or four years old in Halifax. It looks like someone's been throwing snowballs at me, too!

christmas past

My family and I are all originally from Nova Scotia, so I thought I'd share some photos from past Christmas times tell a little family story. The top picture of the pony and sleigh is a picture of my mom, my grandmother and Charlie Norris who my mom says was from "up above us"...that must mean he lived on a hill above my grandmother's farm in rural eastern Nova Scotia. Not exactly a Christmas picture, but what a fun thing to do. My mom thinks that was their pony, Tammy, who had a sweet tooth. The sugar maple in the front yard was tapped and this horse would drink all of the syrup from the buckets before they would get to it. It was also a "miserable damn thing"...a biter. So you see, idyllic as this picture might appear, that there is a horse that would drink all of your maple syrup and then finish up by chomping on your hand.

This next picture is my mom and I sorting presents on my grandmother's kitchen floor. That's an oil stove in the background that keeps the kitchen toasty and is the main reason that this is the central gathering room in my grandmother's house. You can tell it's an old photo, not just from the rounded corners and colours, but from that cat-choking tinsel that's dripping off the branches of that tree. We were always allowed to open one present on Christmas eve, and it was usually a stuffed animal when we were little kids. They gave us something to cuddle when we were too excited to sleep.

This last photo I've had to ask for my mom's help with, because the story is pretty weird...like a lot of stories from my family. That's my uncle on the far right, and as you can see, he's about to pass a bowl of something or other around to everyone at the Christmas dinner table. Now the story goes, he passes the bowl and everyone else at the table dies. I mean, it's not so dramatic, it takes ten years or so for them to all pass away, but they do. Every one of them except my uncle (that's my grandfather, great grandfather, and my great uncle Johnny from left to right). So, my mother asks, what was in that bowl? 

I love looking through these old photos and having the chance to ask my mom about them. There are lots of amazing photos from her side of the family that she has unearthed over the years, and I'm glad she's got stories to tell about most everyone in them. Christmas at my grandmother's farm was always so nice. I got to talk to her yesterday, she's 91 and still on that same farm, sitting next to the oil stove in the kitchen. I hope she has a pretty tree set up and had a wonderful Christmas, and I hope the same for all of you. 

dream cats

My grandmother lives on a farm in Nova Scotia. Her collection of living animals over the years has been eclectic, found somewhere nearby or on the farm as they nearly always are. In the days of the place being a poultry farm it was also home to a maple syrup-drinking horse with a mean streak and a swift bite. When I was younger, there were two cats named Samantha and Tabby that my brother and I would lock in our shared bedroom so they'd have to hang with us while we read comic books. There was also a dog named Rachel that we weren't supposed to touch. Then there was Jenny, a long-lived black lab and the perfect exuberant farm dog. Now there is the black cat, a few strays, a dog named April that was found at the roadside and has gained quite a bit of weight in its new home, and Kitty, an orange (or used-to-be orange) cat.

Kitty has no teeth (or maybe one tooth?) and can't hold her tongue in her mouth. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but she's also really, really small. My grandmother told me that she is a miniature cat and asked me if I've ever heard of that before. Now I have. Regardless of the drool, dust, and dander that makes Kitty who she is I've always thought she's pretty special. I'm not even sure that it's a girl. A photo I took this spring of Kitty has been featured on dreamcats. Check it out!