in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
November 07, 2024
Photo: GMB VISUALS and ArtistGNDphotography
BY SUZANNE SLOAN — How do I recognize November 11th, Armistice Day?
I hug my pillow.
"Why your pillow?" you might question, with a laugh.
Because it reminds me of my father, and my father-in-law — both survivors of years in Europe, fighting in WWI. My father was a member of the Canadian forces, my father-in-law of a Scottish regiment.
It was in the 1940s that I obtained my father’s Eiderdown, and in the mid 1960s, when I obtained my father-in-law’s. These two gifted Eiderdowns made me wonder how many other WWI veterans still retained theirs.
Dad was already a graduate mining engineer working in western Canada when war was announced, July 28th, 1914. He told me that he hopped a train and returned to his home in Burlington to enlist.
In those far off days of the early 1900s, all newly enlisted soldiers were allotted a kit containing personal grooming essentials: toothbrush in holder, clothes and hair brushes, small mirror, straight razor. Added to that was a sleeping bag. The bag, covered in canvas, contained Eiderdown, the under feathers of the Eider duck.
Eider is the warmest of all down feathers and has been collected in the northern polar regions through generations of Eider duck protectors, who walked the tundra to pluck down from their nests and bits caught on stunted shrubs. The protectors also guarded the nesting grounds against hunters of these rare and precious fowl. Canada and Great Britain utilized Eider feathers in the production of sleeping bags for all army issues.
My father and father-in-law had saved their army issue sleeping bags. "For what reason?" you may wonder. Because, in the mayhem and unpredictability of war, these bags had been their refuge, their security blankets, so to speak — their protection from the trauma of the nightmares facing and surrounding them.
Think! Just think of all the years between that first day of their enlistments and the days they relinquished their treasures to me for safe keeping! How precious a gift?! The very thought of those feathers traveling from a nest on the Arctic tundra to the European continent, across so many battlefields and countries, returning safely to the homes of these two men.
The feathers must be preserved so I might treasure the memory of the givers. On Armistice Day and on every day of the year I rest my head upon them — feathers so indestructible, so tiny, yet so strong.
Removed from their grime encrusted covers that had been packed over ruined farmers' fields, rubble-strewn towns, rat-infested trenches, the tiny bits of down were now placed in new pillow, free of ticks, washed and hung to dry in a brisk summer breeze. The two bedrolls filled many pillows to produce a new product from the old. Pillows to fit all bed styles: king, queen, double, single.
Pillows with the down from birds that soared through the Arctic air currents, a hundred years ago and more. What better gifts for my children? These surviving remnants of the past give sweet dreams, memories of loved ones now passed, and promise that some things, like hope, should never be abandoned.
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