Yesterday, my mother and I headed to Rivers, Manitoba, after a stop in Manitou to meet a friend/colleague that I had only known on-line previously. We moved to the town of Rivers when I was 9, only spent a few months there before moving to the Air Force Base a few miles away.

This evening, we drove along the streets, seeking familiar landmarks… none to be found until the school! “I know where I am, I’m oriented now!” The house should be over on the next corner… we were looking for a large, salmon coloured, brick Victorian house with a large veranda on two sides. Well there was a house, but it was the wrong colour… and the yard didn’t look quite right! We continued to drive… my mother said, “I wish I had the ‘Green Book,’ I wrote down all our addresses at the front of the book!” The Green Book was where she and my father, really my mother, recorded important dates and events. My brother and his wife Amanda have it. In Nova Scotia. I said, “I’m going to call and ask.”

This involved me calling Amanda on Facebook video because I didn’t have her phone number, and was informed she was already on a call, I sent her a message to stop talking, calling my brother, who was working away, to get Amanda’s phone number AND to find out if he knew where the Green Book was. He did, I called, Amanda found the book, but as you can see from the front page of the book, only the date, not the address! Hmm… what to do?

Now, this Green Book has a page for every day of the year, so I asked Amanda to check July 1st, to see if there was a move in entry… no, there was an entry that my father was posted there on that day. But… that didn’t mean that we MOVED that day… I asked to check the next and the next…. until…. August 7th!

There was the address! We had seen Columbia St. while driving around so headed back in the general direction. It must be the house we thought it might be even if it was the wrong colour! I pulled up beside it, got out, couldn’t find any house numbers so decided to knock. Of course, as soon as I knocked I spotted the house numbers! In my own defense, they were faded brass on sandstone coloured brick A man and dog answered the door, I told him that I had lived there 45 years ago and asked if I could take a picture. he said sure, take as many as I wanted.

I took a couple, went back to the car and was telling my mother, when a woman came out onto the porch and was sort of gesturing to us. We both got out of the car, went over, she was very chatty, (she confessed that she had had a few drinks…) telling us how they had acquired the house 30 years ago, that they were originally from Nelson, some of the history of the house. When we lived there, the house had been split into two units, we had the main floor and basement, another family had the upper two floors. They turned it back into a single family dwelling, she invited us it to take a look around, which was delightful. The main floor was just as I remembered it. She told us how the salmon colour had been sandblasted off and the brick returned to its original sandstone colour, but pointed out a couple of places where you could still see traces of the salmon. A delightful encounter.

I could almost see my younger self heading out to school or reading on a blanket in the huge yard, which is surrounded by trees, or eating at the table that is under the window in the kitchen. I realized as I wrote this, it’s the first time I’ve been in a house that I spent any time in as a child. Another small piece of my history illuminated by geography.

And that’s my window on God’s world.