The following are the first two entries in a series that the author intends to expand to a dozen or so pieces under this title.
Even at Nineteen (Aunt Elsie)
Even at nineteen, she felt daring enough to travel a thousand miles north and take on a room full of strange children, children confined by the tough scrubby woods of North Ontario to lives of hardship and isolation and wonder. These children knew how to chop and stack wood by seven years old, they knew to avoid the sides of the trails where muskeg could suck you down, and they knew how to bask their bodies in woodsmoke to ward off the interminable black flies. These children had never seen fertile lands like where Elsie had grown up, had never seen wheat or potatoes or apples grow.
Elsie was as strange to them as they to her, and Elsie had never been so very far away from all that she had known. Daring was not enough. Elsie returned the following year to a job closer to home, having done what she could to teach reading and writing in a northern world too remote for even her Strathdee hardiness to handle.
The Peony in Her Hair
My mother grew peonies in her garden, big fat round blossoms filled with delicate layers of tissue-like petals and dripping with sweet syrupy scents. She had bushes of pink ones, and white ones, and once, a small bush of cranberry red ones too.
Before the peonies blossomed, they were little tight-fisted balls of green. Slowly the fist grew bigger and began to show the color of the blossom underneath, as the tight green skin cracked and spread a little wider every day. Even when the color of the blossom began to show, it stayed tight and waxy and stuck in a ball. That's when the ants came. A few ants, and then a few more, and then dozens of ants crawled all over the flower balls, eating up, as my mother explained, the sweet waxy layer so that the blossom could open.
I do not know what possessed me to cut one of these flower balls and put it by my sister's head when she was sleeping. But I do know that I did not do that again. Ever.
