Laundry Lines

Poems and Stories

Ann Elizabeth Carson

• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781771332705
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

With grace and courage Ann Elizabeth Carson looks to the past from the perspective of a contemporary feminist. A lively evocation of her aunts and their home in Cheltenham, Ontario, reveals the rich and powerful ground for the poet's own emerging sense of herself. As Toronto in the '30s, '40s and '50s comes to life in a rare blend of poetry and prose, the poet is caught unawares as the stories collectively uncover events that shaped her social-political outlook and reveal how our untold stories are inevitably woven into the fabric of our public lives. Laundry Lines: Stories and Poems is about the imperative to tell our stories for our survival, the complex emotional inheritance and painful undertow in families, the slow reconciliation with the blows and beauties meted out by life that comes with age, and the deep sensual salve offered by surrender to nature.

Weave and Mend1

MY LAST VISIT WITH GERTRUDE IS AT BELMONT HOUSE IN JUNE of 1994 just before I leave for Manitoulin Island for the summer. For the first time she is lying in bed in daytime, head propped on pillows, and I know she has finally surrendered. While she always seems glad to see me when I visit, she hasn’t known my name for a year, knows I am familiar, but not who I am. She calls out “Oh oh oh” on and on, stops for a while when I squeeze her hand, stroke her arm or cheek. Gladly. What stories are in these sighing moans? What thoughts never spoken or feelings expressed? We hold hands. I speak; tell her how much her quiet, steadfast, loving strength has meant to me all these years. Of course, I am crying, just as I am now. She turns her face towards me and there is Getty, looking at me, blue eyes clear and alive. “I love you, Ann.”

“I love you too, Getty,” and I lean forward to tuck my head into her shoulder.

I find myself in the hammock with a young Aunt Gertrude telling stories about her childhood with her sisters and brothers, and about Cheltenham.

ARRIVING

Spring

This is how my child’s story of Cheltenham always begins. It’s a Sunday in early spring of 1936, the roads almost bare of snow and warm enough for a road trip. That means a first of the season lunch at Cedar Close with “The Aunts” as we call them. I and my younger sister Jane — a plump, fair not quite six to my dark-haired twiggy seven-year-old frame — pile in to the back seat of the Ford sedan. We set out from our suburban North Toronto home on the 36-mile drive northwest to the tiny village of Cheltenham to visit my mother Grace’s unmarried sisters, Damaris and Gertrude (Getty) Beattie.

A long drive through gently rolling countryside — Jane and I count cows or join Dad and Mom as they sing old favourites like “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “Good Night Irene” or the latest hits like “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “Pennies From Heaven.”2 Then a right turn from the now boring Highway #9 in Caledon Township to tree-lined Creditview Road. Swooping down the hill our high voices call out the names of familiar places: Station Rd. (to the tiny “flag your stop” station on the hill); the Anglican and United churches on our right, one with gingerbread trim, the other plain, as suits their persuasions; the Cheltenham General Store on the left, stone-built in 1877, now the village’s oldest building in the valley where the village itself lies.

Cheltenham, founded as a mill town in 1822 on the banks of the Credit River, is northwest of Brampton. Even in the pre-war years, as history will name that time, and not yet post-Depression, Cheltenham is a small place, a scattering of buildings easy to miss. A gas station, several houses on either side of the country road, a few more on John St., then an unpaved track wandering to the left, across the Credit River, and we are in the outskirts again. Up a steep hill now, car window open, I watch for the high, impenetrable cedar hedge, smelling it before I see it. Voices stilled a moment for the sharp right turn on a blind hill into the driveway just past the hedge. Dad hates that turn, especially when we back out, Damaris standing sentinel on the other side of the track.

And there they are, waiting for us on the front porch, the green wooden floor and steps and the white railings in their springtime coat of paint. Damaris: slim, salt and pepper hair, blazing blue eyes like her father’s (but I would never have said so), quirky sideways smile, in a smart sweater and a skirt of her own tailoring — I remember shades of navy, blue, and mauve with a touch of red. Gertrude, five years younger, half a step behind: round face, pink cheeks, china blue eyes. She wears plain, simply cut dresses that Damaris makes for her in flowered prints whose colours change with the seasons, though even then they were a touch traditional.

Damaris had bought Cedar Close for a song from a cheese-maker in 1934 as a weekend retreat from her busy teaching life in Hamilton. My father had his doubts: “Damaris, you will never get the smell of cheese out of this house.” My aunt was very fond of my father. Nevertheless, to be told by anyone — man or woman — that she could not do something was sure to produce the opposite. Leaving home at seventeen, Damaris, now in her late thirties, had long since learned to navigate her determined way through domestic and professional worlds with pleasant courtesy.

She began renovations in the cellar, clearing out years of another life’s debris. When I’m eight I am allowed to go down the no hand-railing wooden stairs to fetch pickles for lunch. I look around in amazement at the shelves that line the walls, light let in from the below-ground window bouncing off the summer’s preserves and jams in gleaming rainbow rows. A nose-tickling smell from the geranium roots strung upside down from the wooden beams mingles with the bouquet of medicinal herb bundles hanging beside them. They look so merry with their code-coloured wool bindings. The vinegary taste of pickles in crocks wrinkles my tongue, along with the lingering sweetness of last year’s dandelion wine-making. But there is no curdled cheese smell, no trace of the cheese-maker who had lived there for years, except for the hard-packed dirt floor. You can crack a dish on that floor as I learn the remorseful day when I misjudge my step in the one-light-bulb shadows:

“Are you all right dear?” from the lit doorway at the top of the steep stairs.

Hurried steps. A pat on the top of my head, “A quick mop up now, we’ll just get another dish-full,” as Damaris takes my hand, letting me carry the brimming dish in the other one.

“I’ve been meaning to put another light down there,” she says ruefully to my mother. As if she’s at fault, not me!

On our next visit I see that I will still be able to go down the cellar stairs. Damaris has found a way to keep us safe, rather than forbidding an adventure. As well as another light she has made a plain wood railing for the narrow stairs. It isn’t as elaborate as the one rising from the first to second floor. She turned the spooled uprights for that one on a lathe in the workshop reserved for boys at the school where she taught domestic science to the girls and learned other useful skills on the boys’ side of the school.

It was clear to me, even then, that when money is scarce, and there’s no other way to get something done, you find a way to do it yourself. But I was too young to realize how unusual it was for her to occupy the male world of tools and machines.

A lunch of a casserole and the first asparagus — “Those spindly, tasteless spears you see in the supermarket are the last of the season, not the first,” one of them is sure to sniff — with rhubarb crumble or upside-down cake for dessert. Then a tour of the glorious front gardens. Damaris’s labour of love, a praise-song to beauty in the midst of daily frugalness and practicality, she has designed and built them from an untended meadow that had to be stumped and de-rocked. Damaris rode the tractor that pulled the stumper, an unbelieving Mr. Henry, her near neighbour, hovering close by. He loved the story, eager to tell anyone who would listen, “She near severed a foot the time she fell off, but she climbed right back on. She’s a wonder, that one!”

In just three years the rocks pile up into a low dry-fence at the back of the garden. Shaking his head at the scope of Damaris’s ambitions, Mr. Henry rumbles the turf away in his horse-drawn wagon to anyone who needs fill. The first beds take shape on either side of the renovated screen porch at the side of the house where the gangly hollyhocks grow now. What will be the showcase perennial beds curve, one scallop a season, as work-time and money permit, around the sunny half of the grassy space. A spring bulb and summer shade garden near the hammock under the trees stretches to the cedar hedge that gives the cottage its name, “Cedar Close.” No flowerbeds here. Even lawn-planted herbs like ground-thyme can’t grow in soil leached of nutrients and moisture from the greedy, water-sucking cedars.

During her teaching years Damaris lived near the Botanical Gardens in Hamilton and could buy the culls. “Not inferior plants,” she says firmly, but “surplus to their needs.”

Roses of every colour and size bloom in profusion throughout the season. There are heritage roses, including Grandma Beattie’s pale pink single with the yellow centre that grows from a root brought from Scotland. Her family, descended from the Monnies, a branch of Clan Menzies, emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario, in 1874, when Margaret Rodger was only a year old.

The Beatties were Presbyterian Scotch-Irish originally from Kilrea, County Derry, Northern Ireland. I remember my grandfather’s arrivals at our home in Toronto. James Campbell Beattie — J.C. I to the family — is on his own in 1937. A stern, unyielding Plymouth Brethren pastor who brooked no intransigence from parish or family, his unpredictable bursts of violent temper were legendary and feared. He was also an itinerant preacher, walking between towns in winter to preach to PB congregations.

Retired at 70, he is still “one tough man” as his son Campbell said years later, tall, upright, and vigorous, no cane, no hat on his full head of white hair, even in winter. Those blazing blue eyes...

Table of contents

• LAUNDRY LINES
• Copyright Notice
• LAUNDRY LINES - A Memoir in Stories and Poems
• ALSO BY ANN ELIZABETH CARSON
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Life Laundry - Prospects and Constraints
• We Must Tell Our Stories
• Laundry Life
• Mind Cellar
• The Play
• Weave and Mend1
• Border Lines - Loss and Redemption
• Testing the Spirit
• Quilt Trails
• Coming of Age During WWII and Beyond
• Necessary Housekeeping
• Again
• Birds of a Feather
• Ice Storm
• Fit for Survival
• Life Lines - Nature’s Lineage
• Tasting the Manitoulin
• Manitoulin Laundry Lines
• Forecast
• Lake Escape
• Shore Reeds
• Foreplay
• Skinny Dip
• The World Is Young
• Morning Rain
• Summer Carpet
• Twenty-four Hours
• The Fox Islands*
• Cover-up
• Staying Warm in Winter
• Last Day
• Twilight
• It Shouldn’t Feel Like Dying
• Appendix
• Acknowledgements
• About Marilyn Walsh:
• About the Author