So this is the Garden of Eden
In dreams it was never so grand
Let’s never leave again
Adam and Eve again
Hold my hand

– Don Cornell

On a sweet afternoon on southern Vancouver Island in late April, when the warm sun helps you forget the dreary winter rains of yesterday, I am convinced that I have emigrated to heaven. From my vista in Ladysmith overlooking The Pacific Ocean at Oyster Harbour, the North Shore mountains of the mainland still snow capped, define the north eastern limits of the horizon and to the south east, Mount Baker’s creamy, white peak suggests that a trip to the Dairy Queen just below our house on the Vancouver Island portion of the Trans Canada Highway may be a desireable after supper walk. CNN may declare otherwise, with earnest analyses by experts in terrorism of the latest suicide bombings somewhere out there, but the apple and cherry trees in bloom and the passionate songs of finches in love speak to me of paradise.

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Street vendors, it must be noted, were predominantly female. One further attribute of the itinerant, independent sales woman would hold me transfixed, in sheer awe; the ability to stop her march across the city, in mid stride, squat down on the road still balancing her basket of produce on her head and urinate luxuriously and abundantly on the ground inside her skirt, the skirt providing the privacy for this necessary act, there being no public facilities for this function. Having relieved herself, she stands up, gracefully regains her stride and resumes her sales pitch.
“Come get you sweet, fresh, nice, blackie mangoes!”
Evidence of her relief sparkles in the sun, trickles down a slope, steams on the once dry asphalt…
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Once again around the tamarind tree, they decide that to search out and get fruit they must now climb, since the neighbours are now extra vigilant. The climb up the tree for the first fifteen feet is uneventful, the sturdy limbs providing a stable perch from which to reach for the next limb. All three of the adventurers reach this plateau. Twenty feet up, the branches get somewhat smaller and bend on contact from the weight of the lead climber. One of the boys fearing the effects of gravity, decides to stop at this level, the other two continue to climb. Twenty five feet up a second boy decides to abandon the quest for tamarind and sits bouncing on a limb while Sir Edmund Hilary, the third climber strikes ever upwards, where the air is rare. And then it happens!!!
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Earlier in the evening we had watched apprehensively through a glowing orange haze as towering clouds displaced the sun. The night approached with the atmosphere quietly radioactive. The sky was remarkably beautiful for the menace that it held. For those among us, the very young and those still naive, who marvelled at the magic of electricity, who still found inconceivable the reception of utterings of voices remotely placed in some distant radio studio, the prophesy of the hourly radio broadcasts warning of the possible, then the probable arrival of the hurricane was like an epilogue to the book of Revelations.
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“Manners also reflected our preoccupation with things British. Eating had form. It was something done with knife, fork and spoon seated on chairs around a table. Food was introduced into the mouth with the aforementioned tools. Food was not eaten with the hands, on the run, while walking, while playing, and especially not on the roads and thoroughfares of the city, where the disapproving eyes of family friends could makes judgments about our lack of decorum. “
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