I have been knee deep in my StoryWorth project for weeks – I’m having a lot of fun with it but I’ve been neglecting my blog in the process. So in an effort to kill two birds with one stone I thought I would post a snippet of the memoir.
Seasons
We lived in Calgary for five years – a drop in the bucket of years of my life. I’ve lived on the west coast for half a century and yet the memory of those handful of seasons on the Alberta prairie is crisp – like someone outlined that picture with a black crayon. Sights and smells, fears and feelings. A picture of a vulnerable little girl trying to discover who she was when she wasn’t holding her mother’s hand.
I started school in the fall of 1959. My class landed at the tail end of the biggest wave of children to hit the education system in the history of Canada – the baby boomers. As kids we had no idea the term would define our generation, no clue we were a strain on the system or that schools were already crammed to the gills and the patience of the teachers stretched to the max.
I remember assembling with a noisy ruckus of children in the school yard on the first day of school – the clangs from a handheld bell being muffled by the mayhem. It’s a blurry memory and I don’t care to try to bring it into focus – elementary school and I were not a good fit.
My class was relegated to the dark space behind the closed curtains of the stage in the gymnasium of an overcrowded high school. Rows of desks were butted front to back in the dim light of the musty alcove. For me going to school became something akin to walking into a nightmare.
My teacher had to raise her voice to be heard over the muted sounds sneaking through the heavy fabric curtains from the gymnasium crowd below. She had an accent, one my mother said came from Scotland, and a short temper. She was quick to shout and had a variety of expressions I had never heard before. I was terrified the day she yelled that she would ring our necks like little chickens if we didn’t behave. I was too young to know little chickens had their necks wrung but I had little doubt this intense little Scots lady was up to the task.
I was lumped among an entire class of misbehavers – we were done for whether or not we’d done anything wrong. We were little chickens and we were at her mercy. And this was school. And I hated it.
In the winter the entire hill became a playground. Mom would dress us in handed down snowsuits and homemade mittens to go out to play. By the time the last kid was sufficiently bundled the first one would have to pee and so it would go until we were all successfully pushed out the door into a drift that easily went over my sister’s head.
But all that changed when I started school.
In my olden days girls were not allowed to wear slacks to school even in the winter. I remember long-sleeved dresses and beige ribbed stockings held up with a garter belt. When the temperature dropped we wore woolen shorts to cover the chilly space between the tops of the stockings and our underwear. My fat little legs were always chaffed. If it was really freezing we could wear slacks over the stockings but we had to take them off at school and leave them in the cloak room with all the thawing coats. Everything was damp by recess.
Winter on the prairie was dazzling. I remember breathing icy air and squinting into the glare of snow so bright it was blue and my breath freezing in the folds of the scarf my gramma knitted. They called that kind of cold ‘dry’ – the snow was like powder and snaked across the road when the wind blew – giant drifts formed against flimsy snow fences that were rolled out the instant the weather changed. Blizzards were sneaky.
Prairie kids know all about the perils of licking frost – they also know how great the temptation is to do so. The lure to lick frost is trumped only by the panic you feel the moment the frost grabs your tongue.
If you were unfortunate and at school when the lure of the frost overcame you – and the bell rang – and all the other kids raced back into the school leaving you alone and glued to the swing set – well, that was the moment a prairie kid found out what they were made of. You would have to decide if you were going to stand outside alone on the playground until the teacher noticed you hadn’t returned from recess or if you were going to bite the bullet and free yourself knowing it was going to hurt like hell. It was never an easy decision.
Our winters paled in comparison to the real olden days. My gramma used to tell us stories about her youth on the plains, stories about a time now written in history books. Stories about laundry frozen stiff on the clothesline; slacks that could stand up on their own – sheets with missing corners, broken off by a careless bump. She’d tell us about lunches that froze on the walk to school and about lobbying for a spot near the heater so your sandwich could thaw before noon. Hers were the olden days in the extreme. Those days were colder – those kids were tougher.
I don’t think swing sets had even been invented when my gramma was a little girl – and if they were she would have known better than to try to lick the frost off one.
When Chinooks blew and the snow melted the prairie was transformed into acres of brittle brown grass. We awaited spring like children promised ice cream for dessert.
Announced by a change in the wind the season followed giant tumble weeds bouncing off the hill. The prairie always had a surprise or two up its sleeve – springtime brought crocuses. Millions and millions of crocuses – the hill turned purple before our eyes.
If I close my eyes I can still conjure the feeling of the wind in my hair – I can feel it whip my sweater wide open and push the skirt of my dress between my legs – I can almost lean on it. The ribbed stockings I had worn all winter were safely stored in the cedar chest – we pulled out ankle-socks and saddle shoes when the weather changed. The wind was peppered with little particles that had settled over everything during the thaw – dirt and tiny rocks stung as they hurried past bare white legs. The sun was so bright I could almost feel my freckles pop.
The crocuses were delicate – they grew low to the ground and appeared before the long prairie grass could overtake them. Their leaves were fuzzy, their stems juicy and easily squished – the juice fell like tears after the flower was picked. Skirts full of flowers wilted before you got them home – Mom would try to revive them but they usually declined their second chance.
The crocuses were short lived but dandelions soon followed.
There are no wild crocuses on that hill anymore – the prairie of my youth has been buried under freeways and houses, cultivated into front yards or rolling acres of wheat and canola. The wild has been tamed.
Summer waited to arrive until school was dismissed, I didn’t have to miss a minute of it. Dads up and down the street pulled out push brooms and swept the road – they gathered winter dust into snow shovels and flung it over lawns before putting the shovels away – snow became a memory and a prediction.
The sky took flight over the prairie in the summer, the blue became bluer and the clouds more distinct.
I outgrew my first two-wheeler before I learned to ride it. My sister inherited a hardly used used bicycle and I got a new one for my birthday the year I turned seven. It was even more challenging than the one I hadn’t been able to master.
Dad ran for miles hanging onto the back of my bicycle seat – I would fall every time I realized he’d let go. Sometimes he would be standing half a block away when I looked up from the pavement. He would dust me off, wipe my tears and try again – over – and over – and over again.
One afternoon he took the bike and I up to the dirt road on the prairie – grass was growing between the ruts of the trail and the hill was still early summer green. Everything was bright and soft. Dad set the pedals up perfectly for take off and stepped in front of the handle bars. He held the bicycle steady as I prepared to climb on board. He didn’t move to his usual station at the back of the seat when I was ready for launch, instead he looked me in the eye, cleared his throat and said, “I will give you a quarter if you will just ride the damn bike.”
I rode the damn bike.