Category: History

Trees are singing

Beach, Beauty, Folklore, Genealogy, Ghosts, History, Knitting, Minimalism, Music, Passion, Photography, Picnic, self care, Tea party, Wellness

In this beautiful place for a couple nights while I work at HMCS Acadia with cadets. I’m one of the wonderful bunch of nurses on staff at the clinic. I’m grateful to be able to stay at my uncles cottage in Smiths Cove while I’m at the base over the next 6 weeks. So many kids on buses arriving from all over the provinces and the world for training and fun. It’s been interesting to meet up with about 500 of them yesterday and over the next couple days. Great bunch of kids and young adults. I remember my Air Cadet camp days at Greenwood. It is a fantastic opportunity. They seem to have developed the camps into a fun place. I always felt I was getting in trouble by forgetting my cap or my hair was below my collar. I remember we borrowed the beautiful airforce blue uniforms for our final parade. Base staff loaned them to us. We were informed please do not get food on these uniforms. The minute I picked up my tray of spaghetti I had a bad feeling. Crash! My tray landed smack into the back of a regular officers beautiful blues and I got the coldest look from my commanding officer. Oh boy!

Peace is easy in a place like this:)

The missing

Genealogy, History, Knitting, Life lessons, Minimalism, missing people, Movies, Music, Passion, Photography, self care, Tea party, volunteering, Wellness, World

I’ve been obsessed with finding the missing lately. All the podcasts dealing with the missing are queued up on my device. Recently I listening to the CBC podcast, Finding Cleo with Connie Walker. It was heartbreaking but so real. We should be all made to listen to the terrible tragedies that have happened to the indigenous people of Canada. Governments we elected have done wrong. Police agencies fail these people daily.

So one day I was on another missing persons site and a little face on a missing poster staring back that me connected with something inside of me. Compelling me to look further. She had a name Diane Lee Todd, 18 years old.

With little information to go on I search around a bit more and find out what she was wearing when she went missing.

No other picture is available and when I searched ancestry there was a birth but nothing else. I searched year books from schools around Annandale. No other photos have been found.

It struck me as sad that a young girl could disappear and there’s no activity ongoing to find out what happened to her. No pleas from parents or newspaper articles at the time talking about her disappearance. I searched Jane doe sites looking for a possible match and came across this reconstructed skull.

Her bone structure is similar. So many things are missing. This skull had to teeth, so no evidence of braces.

I reached out to some podcaster a and websleuth’s online forum and posted both pictures there.

Anyone have any more ideas?

Dawn

Anne Frank poetry

Books, Folklore, Genealogy, History, Knitting, Life lessons, Museums, Passion, Photography, Poetry, self care, Travel, Wellness, World

Death March

By Dawn Illsley

We marched like dead souls,

Through hallways, not stopping.

Not daring.

Like the end was our fate.

I feel the shame,

The disgrace.

We quietly weeped,

As we shuffled upstairs,

It’s still, silence I heard,

On that ghostly trek.

My life faded away,

I was stuck there in that place,

Reality dissolved,

Time took a break.

Those little rooms,

Housing ghosts.

The walls paper thin like a dolls house.

Why is it,

Words pour out,

When tears are flowing.

I saw a pile of shoes

They didn’t need anymore.

Telling a story

Of loss,

Of life never led.

A pile of shoes,

In someone’s porch,

makes me think,

Of that day in May.

The deafening silence.

That I witnessed.

The life that was erased.

(Visiting the Anne Frank Museum)

Fallen leaves poetry

Annapolis Valley, Beauty, Environment, History, Knitting, Life lessons, Poetry, self care, Wellness

Fallen Leaves

I wish I could collect fallen leaves,

Like I did when I was five,

They were beautiful to me,

I collected one of every shape and Colour,

Just to be fair.

I wanted to save them, give them a home that was warm, and dry.

I thought they would stay alive forever,

If I cared enough.

But like everything,

Their beauty faded,

Dried up, cracked, turned to dust.

I didn’t understand like I do now.

Trying to keep something alive that is dead is futile.

Now their beauty reminds me of the fragility of life.

Dawn Illsley

Good morning poetry

Annapolis Valley, Beach, Beauty, Books, Canada, Folklore, hiking, History, Knitting, Life lessons, Minimalism, Poetry, Resolutions, self care, Wellness

Good morning

By Dawn Illsley

Roaring wind lulls me to another place.

Quiet breathing in the margins of my mind.

Pressing thoughts, bossy and demanding,

yank me from my reprieve to reality.

There’s a call for spring outside the window.

An urgent call from a little bird whose hungry.

Then out comes the sun, like a little answered prayer.

The light creeps across the room,

Warming the spot on the floor,

Soon to be occupied

By a little furry beast,

Desperate for warmth.

On the windowsill,

The pink blooms are dried up,

Not the end,

But it seems hopeful for more.