I wonder how many of us know the people we live with, know what they really think about things?
I mean the "in your gut" philosophical things, not just whether they take their coffee black or really hate artichokes. For that matter, I wonder how many of us ever reveal
our own true feelings to those we live with.
My Mother and I lived together, off and on, for probably more than thirty years.
I'm still not sure how well I really knew her or what she thought about things. I do know I was really surprised at passages she had underlined
in some books I didn't look at until after her death. Things about happiness, about being lonely, things about religion, things we had never really discussed.
Or was I just not listening?
She was probably the strongest person I've ever met. That was a mixed blessing. From the beginning, she
was the ruling force in our home, the proverbial "iron hand in a velvet glove". How she would have laughed
at that description. Even when Daddy was alive, it was Mum who looked after the finances and did most of the repairs
around the house. She had no patience with weakness in herself and ill-concealed distain for avoidable weaknesses in others.
This apparently did not apply to smoking because she smoked like a chimney up to and including her hospital stays. The two words she had the most disdain for (if I'm remembering
accurately) were "I'm sorry".
She was a pushover for every stray animal, be it kitten, puppy, guppy or skunk. It was our family that looked after the school mascots and classroom pets on long weekends and holidays. She also had a
habit of "adopting" stray people, like the Fuller Brush man. He was a skinny little fellow, with a gaggle of children and he didn't sell
very many brushes on his door-to-door forays. I would often come home to find her feeding him at our kitchen table, having
already purchased one or two strange looking things with handles that we would never in the world of time ever use.
She was a night owl. When my brothers would come home from doing who knew what (and might have been a little
the worse for wear), she would be waiting in the living room, watching some old, late-night movie on TV.
Because she hadn't earlier had a satisfactory answer to her questions ("Where are you going?" the reply invariably being "Out"
"What are you going to do?" Answer: "Nothing")...she would be expecting to hear a few
details about their evening. Whichever brother was in the least bad shape would be the decoy,
going to tell Mum about their evening while the other one quietly slipped into their bedroom. I'm
not convinced she wasn't aware of their strategy, but if she was, she didn't let on.
I had always thought this was very amusing, until she began waiting up for me
to come home from my dates. As a grown-up and mother of one small daughter, I
thought this was a bit uncalled for. That, however, did not deter her. And if I
brought him back for coffee, she would happily settle back into that uncomfortable red leather sofa
(a hand-me-down from the airforce barracks) and take over the conversation. There
was no way she was going to go to bed until every single other person in the house was
fast asleep.
I don't remember ever having "that" conversation with her; you know, the one about sex and
the birds and the bees. I do remember that I acquired my earliest information from a Reader's Digest
article and was absolutely horrified. But I don't remember going to her to ask any questions. Mum
was not a huggy-person. You would get a peck on the cheek but no big hugs. The day I came home from Dr. Ian's
with my big news, she was ironing in the kitchen. In order to cover my real
emotions, I was off-hand and rather brash. "Guess what! you're going to be
a Grandmother". She dropped the iron on the floor with a great crash, but she never asked me any
awkward personal questions. It was with her that I debated the pros and cons
of what my baby should be called (as soon as I stopped referring to Laurie as "my little kumquat").
Mum was stoic and optimistic - and stubborn (pigheaded) beyond belief. A year or so before we moved to Ottawa,
she was at somebody's cottage at the beach. I have no idea what she was doing there, but she jumped
off the roof of a small shed, on her bare feet into some rocks and smashed her heel bone to smithereens.
After several bouts of surgery to try and put the bones back into place, the doctors told her she would probably never walk
properly again. She was in a cast up to her hip for over nine months and in
a walking cast for about another two or three. She just laughed at them. She had a wheelchair and a walker; by the next year she was
racing around as usual, wearing silly sandals with high heels.
We were always a rather "volatile" family. We yelled. We slammed doors. I guess we all inherited my Mother's temper along with
my Dad's almost-red hair, although she would never admit to having a bad temper. She also never admitted
that anything bothered her. Menopause was a breeze, she claimed. I, on the other hand, remember watching her
stand in the kitchen and methodically hurl most of an entire set of rosebud-covered dishes at the wall, one plate and saucer
after another. Then she calmly cleaned up the whole mess.
She was interested in everything and read voraciously. She loved the specials and documentaries on TV.
I'm sure the whole high-tech, internet revolution would have fascinated her. I'll bet she would have had her own website within a week.
I've always thought that under different circumstances she could have been one of the women who made
it to the top in some corporation or other. Timing.
She sent me my first long-stemmed red roses on my 21st birthday. She filled my
hospital room with daffodils when Laurie was born. She had a green thumb which I've inherited
and when I decided to see if I could sprout and grow a seed one of my brother's friends brought back
from Mexico, she didn't say a word. The marajuana grew like (you knew I was going to say it) a weed in
the window in the bedroom that she and I and Laurie shared. I had just wanted to see
if I could grow it from seed in an apartment that didn't get any sunshine. It was about 5 feet tall when
I finally got really nervous one day because I'd heard the RCMP were cracking down, so I threw it down the garbage chute.
She was fun. Always ready to do something new, to drive somewhere we'd never been, to
spend hours on school projects. I have a picture I'll put up when the photos are scanned where
she's standing in her slip in the kitchen, with a wash cloth on her head, knighting my brother Mike.
I wonder if she'd roll over in her grave if she thought she'd ended up in her slip on an obscure site on the
internet. Probably not.
The Knighting (at the Salter Place)
It seems so unfair that we couldn't afford to live in the apartment I have all to myself now.
It has nine feet of windows with a nine foot balcony, facing south and overlooking wonderful green space. She
would have loved it - and having a second bathroom couldn't have hurt much, either. But life's like that...
you have to be careful what you wish for. You may get it, but probably not when you expect.
I'm sure she missed backyards and gardens because she had never lived in an
apartment before. She didn't complain, but she did prowl the neighborhood
with Laurie in tow, looking at other people's gardens along what I call "Embassy Row"
in Sandy Hill. Sometimes she brought home souveniors from her jaunts, other people's
castaways being nicer than a lot of our stuff. I still have a set of cut-glass
decanters she acquired from somebody's back yard. (It's the packrat genes at work again).
It must have been an extremely difficult thing for her to have to relinquish her independence when she became
too ill to even bathe herself. But she never complained and we used to joke that I would probably drown
her in our bathtub long before her illness did her in. We've always been a family that faces up to what's happening and
she certainly knew she was dying. This was the same person who had on the one hand asked if she could
come and live with me and then moved in and reorganized all my furniture and my drawers; she was left-handed and I
came home one day to discover everything switched from right to left.
When she was at home for the last time, she gave me her diamond ring which I will give to Laurie
when the time is appropriate. She also hid $500 in cash in a plain, brown envelope under her mattress with
a note that it was to be used for her funeral. She must have been squirreling it away for a long time.
I didn't find it until I was dismantling the bedroom after her death. I think I handled her death better than
I had that of my Grandmother or Daddy.
I did not, however, do things the sensible way in arranging her funeral.
I'm not sure I remember why now, but I had her body shipped back to Nova Scotia instead of having her cremated and
her ashes shipped neatly in an urn. She would have been "tsk tsk'ing" all over the place! In order
to meet railway regulations, I also had to find somebody in Nova Scotia who could claim and identify the body.
We had a private ceremony here. We couldn't afford to go back home with her and this time there would be no bagpipes in the Auburn Cemetary.
But we'd been gone so long and Mum had been so sick for so long that it was no easy task. In due course, I
remembered that the funeral director in Westville had also been an old friend of Mum's years back. And
he agreed to meet her at the station and do what had to be done.
So she went home to Nova Scotia and is buried with Daddy, close beside Jean and Willie. Laurie and I
made a visit to the headstones when we were on our camping trip. It's lovely, with trees and little
hilly, grassy spots just made for having picnics. If we were closer, I'd do just that. Mum loved picnics.
The midi is "Those were the days". I thought about Bonnie Dundee and Loch Lomond. I
chose this one.