By J. Jill Robinson

When I was a little girl, each summer my three older sisters and I travelled from Langley with our mother to Hornby Island, where we stayed at the Lodge, then owned by the Stonehouse family, and now Tribune Bay Provincial Park. We ate meals together at big tables in the Lodge; played checkers on a giant cement board with ‘men’ made of wood and big staples moved with poles. We rode Shetland ponies in the Lodge’s yard and, when we were older, we rode horses along the beach. At four each afternoon we ate cookies and drank orange Koolaid from white enamel pitchers, and we washed our faces and brushed our teeth each morning after hearing the call “Good Morning! Hot Water!” at our cabin’s door. It was a quick walk down to the beach by the tennis courts, past the BBQ shelter, and along the beach until we got to the cave. I’m sure every family that visited that cave named it after themselves—for us it was the Robinson cave, of course.

In my ‘then and now’ project, I try to visit the exact locations where previous pictures were taken. I am enchanted by the idea that the passage of time is erased when I’m standing in the very spot where significant others have stood—that the echoes, or vestigial remains, are present.

The first picture is of the four girls – Jane, Cathy, Jill, Martha – with their mother, Dorothy, in 1958; the next is of my sister Cathy and me in 2016 when we visited Hornby when she was unwell; the next is 2019, after she died, and I visited alone. Though the times were somewhat sad, I strongly felt my sisters’ presence in this place, a place where we made memorable family history. It’s interesting to notice, too, how the openings of the spaces changed over the years.