I don’t think I’ve put that title out there publicly before but that is the tentative name of my novel. Now that it’s out there, I can tell myself this is the first step in it becoming a reality.

Anyhow…the point of this post isn’t to analyze the title, it’s to start teasing some of the locations that I’ve used in the book. I want to dive into why some of the locations seemed fitting and why they are important to me.

The first one is Tinkertown.

Tinkertown is a bit of a landmark just outside the east perimeter of Winnipeg. Between Winnipeg and the start of the Canadian Shield there is a whole lot of prairies (read: a whole lot of nothing), and if you are coming from the east into the city, Tinkertown is the first thing that you see that lets you know your drive is mercifully coming to an end.

How Tinkertown exists today, I couldn’t really tell you. Perhaps when I’m back in Winnipeg in October, I’ll make a point to drive by and view the current iteration, but how I wrote Tinkertown was very much with its heydays of the 80s in mind.

It is a small amusement part. The parking lot was gravel at the time but I’ll give them the benefit of doubt that they’ve had it paved in the past thirty plus years. In fact, I don’t remember paths of any kind, I assume it was all gravel or dirt.

You’d cross the Tinkertown train tracks to enter the park, both the CN tracks and the tracks for the park’s train ride that would take you alongside the neighbouring KOA campsite that also features in my book. You’d usually see some parents yelling at their kids to get something to eat or they’d be hanging wet clothes up on a line or something that would a voyeuristic perspective to short amusement park train ride.

Most of the rides in the park were geared towards a younger crowd, or maybe I remember it that way because I was young at the time and felt myself aging out of the park when we moved from Winnipeg. I went on my first roller coaster there. It wasn’t scary, but not overly fun either. The Tilt-a-Whirl was my go-to ride, and I want to say they had spinning apples as well. There was some sort of cage ride that flung you around, but I never had any interest in that. It was probably the most terrifying offering they had going.

Most of the park was set up for kids. A carousel, tiny cars that took you around a circular path, and boats that did the same. If you think of what is offered at every parking lot carnival you’ve ever attended, it was basically Tinkertown, but they had it set up permanently. (As I review their website it looks like they have paved everything, but the rides are almost exactly the same although I feel terrible for omitting the bumper cars.)

At least in the late 80s, having something like this a short-ish drive from our house was a luxury. It was usually a reward for school wrapping up, although the Red River Ex included free tickets in the end of year school report cards, so it eventually replaced Tinkertown as the first destination of summer.

Mostly, Tinkertown was always a destination I associated with grief and in a book that deals with grief it seemed fitting to have it there.

Often we’d visit Tinkertown after visiting my grandfather’s gravesite at the cemetery across the Trans-Canada highway. My family would bring flowers, say a few words, and while my sister and I on the young side, it was important for my mother to visit regularly, and now I appreciate that my parents were comfortable experiencing their sorrow over loss in front of us. It was a solemn moment that my mother would pull herself back from by watching her kids riding miniature boats while she ate popcorn and assume appreciated what in life brought her happiness.

It was such a regular occurrence that we’d visit Tinkertown and the cemetery in the same day that I still have the desire to let out some grief by distracting myself with rides.

While our visits were for my grandfather, the cemetery began filling up with other family members. Uncles and aunts, my grandmother, and most significant to me, and most relevant to the story I wrote, my sister. Someday my parents will be there too. The aptly named Green Acres Cemetery is in fact the place to be.

While not every location in my novel has such a personal link to me, this was one of the purposeful selections that natural fit the geography of the story.

I’ll try to post a few more of these before the book is available.