With the passage of time and without care, I believe we are doomed to forget.

Elsie Reford made a study of remembrance; shortly after hostilities ended, she embarked on a pilgrimage to the battlefields of France and through the battered towns of Belgium. This was her way of honouring the memory of the men she had known who did not return. Her son Bruce was wounded, but among the fortunate who survived.

Elsie tended memory, much as she tended to her garden. She kept her wartime correspondence her entire life, a keepsake of a lost world.

– Viveka Melki

 

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Optical Crystal

“An Edwardian couple visit their son’s grave after the war, and as time passes his memory fades into the past, as the forget-me-nots wind around the silhouettes.”
– Mark Raynes Roberts

Olfactive memory

“Nightfall awakens the memory from the past and sublimates the perfume of the lily. A refuge of time that is being written.”
– Alexandra Bachand

 

Elsie Reford (1872-1967)

“Elsie Reford was one of the leading women of her generation. In the early 1900s she committed her organizational skills and wealth to improving Montreal’s hospitals and playgrounds. With Julia Drummond, she founded the Women’s Canadian Club of Montreal in 1907 to provide women with an opportunity to participate in the political and public debates of the era and to bring together Montreal women, divided by language, geography, politics and religion.”
– Alexander Reford

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Cantlie’s Letter