Though not as well known as the Cypress hills, the  Touchwood Hills in Saskatchewan are another height of land left by the glacier as it receded. The Touchwood hills are the point of land on which Henry Kelsey, the great overland explorer,  turned back east after his epic travel  (1690  to 1692 ),  a century before any other white man visited the area. There is a cairn on a hilltop in Punnichy to mark his furthest point of exploration.
      I grew up in the Touchwood Hills.  Our land for the little town of Lestock became sequestered from the Muskowekwan reserve when the Grand Trunk Railway was built and a depot was needed. The original land treaty for it was signed by the Cree Chief Muscowequan in 1874 at Fort Qu'Appelle with the other Chiefs of Little and Big Touchwood Hills and the Grand Trunk.
      My friend and I from Lestock. played midget hockey with the Indian team  from the Oblate Father's  Mission School.  We were all 15. The Cree Nation boys from the Muscowekwan reserve welcomed the two of us and we felt part of things. There is nothing like sport to unite young men. We traveled extensively in the Misson Panel truck to play hockey in southeast Saskatchewan. We were a good team but we only had two forward lines and two defensemen. We must have been in good shape.
        The outdoor rink we practiced on was at the Mission  and the roads were often impassable on the reserve. A local batchelor farmer from Lestock liked to watch hockey and took the two of us out to the Mission on the back of his tractor. As we stood on the back of his tractor, wind whistling by our cheeks,  tractor bucking the drifts, He told us it didn't snow in Burnaby. He went there every year after Christmas. As we  held onto the tractor seat for dear life, I kept  thinking to myself, ," One day,  I will go to Burnaby."
         

.My brother Ken,  four years younger than me,  has  a more accurate long-term memory of the events of our youth than I have.  Whereas I recall the emotional effects of the events on me in vivid detail, he has the greater acuity for the events themselves.  I knew enough  to never argue with him because he was almost always right.
       For example, my father's brother, Edgie, a corporal in the South Saskatchewan regiment,  I knew was captured in the Dieppe Raid during the second world war and spent the next almost three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Stalag 8 B in Germany.  Ken's son and I were speaking of this recently and I told him that while in prison Edgie had wagered with a fellow prisoner  that he could swallow a dead mouse they had for a dollar..  Ken interrupted me to say I was wrong and that he had bet that he could  bite the mouse in half for a dollar. He apparently did! Now neither Ken nor I have talked about this, to my knowledge, for  60 years, but  his superior acuity does not take away from the horror I felt in learning of the event and whether biting or swallowing, is beside the point. The point is the raw and outlandish behavior of the state of young men as prisoners of war and my feeling of revulsion.  So far this story has nothing elevated to teach or learn.
        But I have been reading Roger Lundin's book, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief.  He says, "----for her,  (Emily) memory meant the recollection of intense experiences or encounters, rather than the rituals of general commemoration."   In addition he says, "  It usually involved a revival of sensory impress. She was only intrigued by the memory of what went on within the dwelling of her conscious life."  I think that summarizes the difference between Ken and me,  memory as feelings and acuity.
     Ken was a journalist and a school teacher.  He saw and remembered the details of what went on, vividly and accurately. My recollection of the same set of  facts that we would have heard so very long ago is completely colored by my  recall of the feelings. The acuity is swept away by the feelings which are the  more powerful in me and others.
       In a world today of law ,testimony, false memory syndrome, accusation, redemption, recall, regrets, hurt, loss, acuity, recompense,  redress, damnation and justice ,  and the passage of time;  it requires we stick with the reporter,   rather than the poet.
       

Some of the honey bees overnight, on selected flowers! Sometimes a flower's anatomy provides a quality petal cradle adjacent to the bee pantry. The bees are choosy where they sleep.
    Jomanda is a ball dahlia that has smallish upturned edges  to the petals that are form-fitting for the demanding bee body and suitable for an overnight retreat. It also keeps them close to the pollen larder. They are worker bees so they don't have to go home at night to a mate if they are busy bees. but just have to bring home food in the daylight.
      If they don't bother going home, they can start early in the morning which is admirable in the eyes of the workaholic, though I found this llttle lad a bit sluggish at 6;30 that morning. I roused him but he only showed modest enthusiasm about leaving.  When he left, the cradle was empty except for a messy dropping or two.
      We had bee hives early on, but then encountered escape variants that Mother Nature harboured in tree hollows or some dry refuge. Whatever! They were welcome here and perhaps had escaped the possibly mite-vectored disease, Colony Collapse Disorder that has assailed so many of their colleagues in close quarters.  While we celebrate their hard work bringing home the bacon, we know that fresh air, sunshine and freedom from crowding is the healthy answer for them, and  frankly , for all of us!  We are also less likely to succumb to Colony Collapse Disorder  if we embrace that same environment and spend more time in the flower cradle,  freedom and sunshine.

David Lowenthal wrote a book in 1985 called The Past is a Foreign Country. It's a wonderful book describing history , memory and reliquary amongst other things ;  plus the desire to relive or collect the past.  One of our daughters,  two of our granddaughters and the pianist and I , made apple cider , a day in time past, from some of the good Gravenstein windfalls. We made 30 quarts of juice heated 200 degrees to pasteurize.
     Our press is a 30 year old hand crank and our routine was long established. The design of the press is probably hundreds of years earlier. The apple mash makes good compost. We have a country kitchen and we press on the grass outside the kitchen door so we are neat and don't make a mess. This link to the past is lived by us in a real sense. The soft ware we call a brain, somewhere, has a face book page that records my father's farm where he grew up, and my grandfather's orchard. It is indelible and structural.  My granddaughters, as sure as the sun rises tomorrow, will one day press their own apples in their own  orchard.
       After  all that cider pressing,  we went to an old folks home after church the next day.  Some are blind and some have short term memory, but they respond to the old chestnuts we sang in the past that a long term memory always allows to reappear.  Old ones like  "Jesus loves me , this I know" , but  now modified for oldsters as " Jesus loves me, this I know, though my hair is white as snow." . We try to get "With it " !  They also like  " In the garden. "  I liked that song too since both my mother's and dad's funeral's had that hymn at their request.
       The old folks have intact long term memory. For them and for me, the past is not a foreign country. These linkages to the past for me are evocative of the connection  to my grandparents and my parents. I do not long for the two-holer, or the town pump, or the kerosene lamp, nor do I wish to see flypaper any more. But I don't believe the past is a foreign country.