The Editor
Allow me to suggest that signs at the approach of East Road and Sunnyside now read: “Welcome to the Village of Ignore.”
The Village of Ignore is about to lose its history — and its only public place of memory. The founding Ma (and George) Murray homestead, which resolutely served as village hall, will meet the wrecker’s ball after dodging it some years before, when the village was incorporated.
Too bad no one on village council today is familiar with the English 19th century literary giant George Elliot (a woman writing under a pseudonym, unlike Ma Murray) who eloquently explains in her landmark novel Middlemarch: “Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.”
Spirit Park, adjacent to the physical culture of the Murray home, will be ever more devoid of meaning, as will Ma Murray Day — nothing but a wistful recollection of hand-me-down impressions of a woman who caught the nation’s imagination by publishing newspapers, a life today impaired by Ignore gentry.
There were efforts to find funding for restoration of the homestead, but the problem was that former MP James Moore was a Conservative and the Murrays were Laurier Liberals. No federal money was going to go to “lost” causes, so the Village of Ignore got ignored by the Harper Conservatives’ pre-election largesse.
So it’s so long Ma and Pa Murray — after a centenary. I particularly enjoyed the green moss on the uneven roof, the low slopes and crooked character, signs of time well-worn and passed. I hope you find solace in the fact that in the next hundred years, everyone in the Village of Ignore will be forgotten too, just as the majestic trees here get reduced to stumps in the mounting haste to replace what has been.
Joerge Dyrkton, Anmore
