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I don't remember our first home, an apartment in Rosemount, Montreal. I think of this neighbourhood and our next one,
St. Laurent, as the first ring of homes around the downtown centre, certainly not suburbia, where we would later move, when
Dad earned more money. He also required homes near the Dorval Airport, where he worked as a flight dispatcher.
I imagine this apartment had hardwood floors, that Mom got down on her hands and knees and waxed. She stopped working
in offices just before I was born, and enjoyed daily life, as many young Canadian families did in those days.
Simple things: listening to radio shows, sewing dresses for herself from paper patterns, writing letters with fountain
pens to our grandmothers in Vancouver and Toronto. We did not have a television set yet.
Housework demanded different activities: there was a meat grinder in the kitchen, to grind hamburger. Darning tools in
her sewing basket, to mend socks, and the rubber catches on girdles and garter belts, and needles to repair frayed elastic
on underpants. When clothes wore out, they shredded apart to be used as household rags. Sometimes spare fabric became doll
clothes, a magical transformation for little Canadian girls.
The scents and smells of Canadian homes: Johnson's Paste Wax for the floors. Scorched irons on clothes on the ironing
board; the sudden blackness on white fabric, the burning crispness in the air. Coffee percolators on stove plates, with the
coffee sprouting up into the glass thimble at the top of the pot.
Plastic was less in evidence. Shoe boxes smelled of real leather, even for children and people with not much money.
Leather was everywhere. And fabric stores which I knew well, as Mom was a whizz with Vogue Patterns, the hardest to sew
of them all. The amount of fabrics: dotted swiss, Madras, denim, sateen, voile, chiffon, velvet, raw silk, brocade, and the
air in stores not yet blankified with plastic blends.
She must have had a lot of spare time, because my brother was still an idle thought in heaven. The home was small. I
know Dad had a car, because he was the type of guy who always had a car.
He walked to the tennis courts in Rosemount most summer nights, because my only photograph of me in Rosemount is holding
a little kid's tennis racket, and to top it all off, I wear a white cotton sundress and white cap with plastic visor. I stand
in front of my Dad's tennis court, looking hopeful that I am a real tennis competitor, though somewhat diminuitive.
This photo is what I think of from Rosemount: the love, the thoughtfulness that our parents poured into us, the playfulness
and the innocence of that Canada, everything our society wanted to give us to compensate for World War 1 , the Great Depression,
then World War 11.
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