Small Gestures Create Community Connections
I went to Riverside Veterans Memorial Park on Monday after the Public Services Committee meeting at City Hall to go check on the Poppy Garden. It’s kind of a pet project of mine, starting in 2023 when I went there to weed the garden beds. The following pics are from June 6 2023.
This year the City planted a ton of poppy seeds and they are now blooming beautifully!
I met a woman named Crystal there, she complimented me on my vest. She thought it was a lovely way to memorialize a loved one. Crystal has lived in Medicine Hat for a long time, she loves to walk everywhere.
The memorial patch on my vest for my late husband Carl. We’d been together over 31 years when cancer took him from us.
“Riding Free” is a biker thing.
Our favourite pet name for each other was “My Love”.
Carl always said that I “had his six” because I was his health are advocate, making sure he was getting the proper care.
He signed every Facebook post with !!! Freedom !!!.
We got to talking about the poppy garden and she remarked on how good it was looking. She asked if it was me that was down there weeding in the past; I said yes. She said since then there has been a huge change in the feel of the park, that it no longer felt neglected.
June 2 2024 Five local veterans groups banded together to install a plaque about Duffy the Tank after he had been repainted - it has been kept graffiti free since then by touching up the paint when necessary.
An unhoused person was nearby sitting under a tree. He got up and came and chatted with us for a bit. It was a nice conversation, we were all just members of the community engaging with each other. It did not matter that two of us had homes to go to and the other didn’t; we were all Hatters. There was no sense of an Us and Them mentality.
I love to see this sort of community spirit.
It just goes to show that small gestures can create community connections.
Who knew that a mere 2 years after I started weeding the park to make it more pleasant that it would actually become more pleasant?
This is the sort of Medicine Hat Community I love the most.
The following pics are from June 23 2025
