Susanna Morash-Kent Staff, School of Architecture It was like someone had lifted a weight off my shoulders. Life started again. My mantra for everyone is, ‘If you can be kind to someone else, then everything else falls away.’ My kids know this. I say it all the time. There are opportunities out there to be kind. Just take them. An example of that, my kids when they were 10 would stop and pick up green garbage bins on the way home when they were walking away from the bus stop because they just didn’t want people to have their green garbage bins on the ground so they moved them and put them away for them. That was their opportunity to be kind and I said, ‘That’s great, that’s a really good thing to do.’ They continued that, so they are all pretty kind. I have two boys and three girls. The boys are bookends, the girls are in the middle. At one point, we had something like seven or eight people living in the house. We took in a boarder as well. We had a lot of people. It’s a big, old farmhouse that we live in. I like the kitchen. It’s old-fashioned and really large. You can have family dinners there. It’s awesome. As the kids were growing up, we had more people in our family than we could count because they were always bringing somebody in for supper. There’s always room for one more at the table. That’s the idea at my house. Whoever comes, they are welcome. When we bought our house, the last owners left a picture behind of the house in the early 1920s, so we know what it looked like. It hasn’t changed a whole lot. There were a couple of old luggage carrier things in the attic that were from an earlier time. Then when we were looking in the floors because they were redoing some of them and there were newspapers in there from 1896. That’s what they used for insulation. There was some interesting stuff. We kept some of the papers. The interesting thing is when I was a little girl my grandfather gave me a piano. He said it was mine on the condition that I learn how to play it. It’s from the 1800s. It was made in Nova Scotia. That piano was advertised in that newspaper. It was so cool to see it. Something I got in Cole Harbour, and then I go to Hortonville and in the paper was advertising for my piano. That was pretty neat. I always believed that marriage was forever, so it’s really hard to deal with the fact that it wasn’t. It was pretty bad. You know that MeToo thing? It was me, too. I just had to get out of it. It wasn’t good for me and it wasn’t good for my children either. I tried to make it work but it didn’t. You can’t make it work when only one person is working on it. Dealing with that was difficult. But I like to put that behind me and not think about it. I had two children with him. Then three with my new husband. I’m very musical, so I think what got me through that was just focusing on my music. It was like someone had lifted a weight off my shoulders. Life started again. I started out working in the jewelry department at Woolco and discovered that I have a real affinity for putting things together, so I love doing that. I do my own bead work. It started because I have really large wrists and I can’t wear watches or anything because they don’t make anything my size. I thought, well that’s nonsense, I can make my own stuff. So, I make things my own size. I also make beaded rings. I have clip on earrings because I don’t have pierced ears. I just love doing it. When I finish working, I want to take some courses on working with metal jewelry. I’ve made a few chains and stuff and put pieces together, but I’d love to learn a bit more about it. There’s so much jewelry at my house. It’s everywhere. ← Lisa ↑ Home Ryker →
