2023 First Prize Winner – One Book: One Aurora Short Story Contest

They settled into the Black community in Montreal where dad worked as a machinist. But he was always restless. I remember him as a melancholy man of few words, solid but distant. The look in his eyes reminded me of someone searching for something just out of sight.

As a child, I was surrounded by family. My memories are of food, laughter, music and warmth. I remember trudging to the convent school with my friend Maria (who drank warm milk mixed with a raw egg for breakfast every day) and competing in spelling bees and reading comprehension for the honour of wearing the shiny Virgin Mary medal for a week. I also remember watching my dad, a machinist, work the lathe at the shop. One day he took me to visit a friend who lived on the Caughnawaga Native Reserve. What sticks in my mind vividly – this was 1954 or so before the St. Lawrence Seaway ripped through their community – was that the family lived in an enormous birch-bark teepee with a television aerial attached to one side.

He built us a house outside of Montreal. It was awful. Things began to fall apart when my dreamer-dad got the notion that we should move to Liberia, Africa and buy a coffee plantation. Thank goodness my mother quashed that madness, else we’d all be long dead. A few months later though, he announced that he’d bought a 16-acre farm in Beamsville, Ontario and that we’d be leaving Montreal. 

They packed up the old black Studebaker and the three kids and drove the thinly-paved two lane road for 12 hours to a stark farmhouse in the midst of a small fruit farm. There was had no indoor plumbing, no running water, a coal furnace and a dirt floor in part of the basement. We were, quite literally, dirt poor. Barely above sharecroppers. My mother learned to make jam and preserve everything that didn’t move. We wore hand-me-downs or homemade clothing, but as self-absorbed kids sheltered from the world, we didn’t know any better. Thank goodness my dad was a skilled tradesman.

I now understand what a wrenching tragedy that move was for my city-bred mother who’d never lived anywhere else but a diverse city filled with friends and family. Lord, how she must have wept. But for us children (my youngest brother came along in February 1956), those were times of freedom and play. The fields would flood in the fall and we could skate for miles and miles, tripping over tufts of weeds but breathless with the joy of outdoors.

I remember freezing in the winter – inside and outside. Walking 45 minutes along a gravel country road, crossing the highway then hunching at a tiny desk at SS#1 Lakeshore Public School. At the age of 10 I learned to drive the told Case tractor so that my dad could operate the sprayer. We all picked rocks to clear the fields. We picked and packed our meager crops for sale. 

After a couple of years, though, my dad had reached his breaking point. We were simply too much for him; no, our life was simply too much for him. He sold the farm, moved us into town and a few months later, boarded a bus for Toronto and life in England. 

We found out later that he left us to live with a woman he’d met during the war in England. She was the one who’d been sending those crisply thin airmail envelopes with a cat drawn over the flap with a number written beside it. A clever security feature to indicate whether the letter had been tampered with. If I’d known what they were, I’d have tossed them into the ditch beside the mailbox instead of dutifully handing them to my mother.

Stoic, never saying a bad word about the man who left her in Nowheresville, mom learned to drive, she went back to school to become a nurse and we relied on the church and the charity of white-gloved ladies who’d bring us baskets of food and used clothing. They couldn’t understand why the four of us were intent on graduating from university instead of working in a store or in a factory to ‘help out’.  

My three brothers and I are still very close. In part our relationship was forged strong in those days of adversity. More specifically, it was our mother’s teachings – family is all you’ve got, be strong, stand up for each other, always lend a hand – that set us on a straight track to being competitive and taking pride in our work, whatever we did.  We’ve endured the loss of our parents, knowing that we are their legacy and proud of what we are and where we came from. We’re all avid gardeners (dad), writers (mom & dad), readers (mom & dad), optimistic (mom), with a dash of melancholy (dad) and killer smiles. We are greedy consumers of books and learning because the world is an endlessly fascinating place. We adore our families and each other.

As the only black kid I class until I reached high school in St. Catharines, I knew that the best I could do was to be better than my classmates. And I was an honour roll student. Drum Corps, Glee Club, drama club, debating club, track and field, cheerleading – I threw myself into all of the activities I could. Still have the medals and ribbons, I fact. The friend I made in 1961 during grade ten – Jessie – remains my best best friend to this day.

My first memory of politics and of being afraid of the world was the Cuban missile crisis. We had television and radio and the news was dire. The Cold War was terrifying to a kid who knew little of aggression. I learned to hate being afraid and vowed to toughen myself up so that I could exert my own control. I also found refuge in school, books and family.

University was something I had to do. A minor challenge. I really had no plans. Luckily, I had a series of jobs I loved that kept me going and led me to other things. As expected, I married at 22, had two children – my greatest accomplishments, along with grandchildren – stayed married for 32 years and then it was over. I prepared myself to grow old solo, as do all of the women in my family. I bought a little house in the country – the first thing I ever owned by myself – and learned to white-water kayak, build things, fix things and like my own company. Then life shifted again. At the urging of my friend Jess, I went online one night, filled in a profile and met the love of my life, Leif. So you just never know what’s waiting around the corner.

I retired officially in 2000 and the Pension Fairy comes every month, but I’ve been working as an organizational development consultant since 1993. My future isn’t finished yet; I’m not done yet. I think I’ll finish working in March then turn my mind to the hundreds of stories and three novels waiting on my hard drive for me to finish them. I’m a blogger, a walker, a grandmother, a sister, a wife (x2) and a friend. I love my life and have no regrets. I do, however, want more of it – life, that is. 

As Frank Sinatra said, “Regrets, I’ve had a few…but then again, too few to mention.” I feel the same about secrets. The few I have are mine to hold close. They are of no consequence to anyone else.