Writing is posing a challenge this week – I have no idea where inspiration goes or why it takes confidence with it but I’m lacking both at present. Here is a snippet of the Storyworth project written a few weeks ago.
a little backstory — soon after we moved to Calgary my aunt and her three children came to live with us for a while. We were six kids under the age of five: four darling little girls and two really bad little boys. I’ve coined those little boys the scallywags…
Scallywags
Things must have settled down after the circus arrived – I couldn’t tell you where we all slept or who slept with who, but we all eventually got to sleep. The logistics of doubling the size of a family over night must have been enormous.
Dad was on the road again almost before we knew it.
We didn’t fit around the kitchen table anymore, we ate in the dining room like every day was Sunday. All the meals were served in the kitchen and everybody’s plate was the same – Mom didn’t have favorites she had an assembly line.
To this day I wonder why nobody could figure out why one of the scallywags was gaining weight while the rest of us were complaining about food going missing off our plates.
“You must have eaten it and forgotten,” was the party line from the kitchen.
Nobody cared if you knew you hadn’t eaten it. Nobody cared if you were saving your piece of bacon for the end because it was your favorite or that it was finally your turn to get the cherished cherry in the fruit cocktail and somebody stole it. Nobody cared… nobody had time to care.
Small potatoes – kid problems were small potatoes. But they weren’t – not to the kids. The scallywags formed their version of an old boys club and stuck together it didn’t matter what. And that’s when the real trouble started.
Having had children myself I have no idea what Mom was thinking when she dressed those two little boys and sent them out into the world unsupervised.
The episodes were never innocent but they didn’t start off deadly. The first one involved a garden hose, an open basement window and a tap. The second one actually came in threes: rocks, glass and a greenhouse. More rocks, more glass and the same old greenhouse. Plastic stretched tightly over window frames, that same old greenhouse and pointy little-boy fingers. The scallywags were becoming a neighborhood nuisance.
But the episode that confirmed their place in family lore, that lifted them to legend status, was the day they set the Calgary hill on fire.
More than half a century later, nobody knows for sure who had the matches – the scallywags never told.
Mom packed peanut butter sandwiches and apples into makeshift backpacks – my brother carried Dad’s old canvas shotgun shell bag and my cousin an old purse of Mom’s. They looked the part – young pioneers on the western plains – voyagers, explorers – as they headed up the hill on a crisp autumn afternoon.
I imagine Mom breathing a sigh of relief as she waved them goodbye and closed the front door. She probably served a similar lunch to the little girls seated around the table and carried on with her busy day.
The sound of sirens in the distance may have alerted her but would not have been alarming. The two little boys crouched by the retaining wall in the backyard was more curious – hadn’t she just sent them packing up the hill? As the sirens grew closer something may have twigged.
The boys were out of breath and shaken when she asked what happened. They looked at each other and subliminally agreed on the story.
“Two bad little boys set the hill on fire.”
The scallywags secured their place in history.