Family history - a red hat and a lawn

April 1959

My sister's christening - the youngest of the three children, and how glamorous Mom looked in that so-1950s red hat!

We had moved "down the road" in Pitt Meadows, BC, to an uncleared site some 18 months before, into a house that was being built around us, starting with two rooms; it grew and grew for the next 10 or so years. Beyond the lawn is "the ditch" and beyond the fields across the road is "the dyke", holding back the Fraser river when it flooded, as had and would happen when the snows had been heavy and the spring runoff was great. Now there's a recreational path along the dyke - a greenway - but back then it was purely functional.

Ah, memories... but my sister still lives there, the house very different, the lawn extended. Conifers that had been planted for privacy grew large - enormous - and cast too much shade.

That lawn just over a year later, with its telephone pole, and
 trees and bushes growing in west coast rainforest conditions