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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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