When Mother Made the Beds

I was making the bed the other day, pulling the bedspread up over the pillows, when a picture of my mother making the beds popped into my head – something I hadn’t thought about in years, if ever.

My mother could put the army to shame the way she made a bed. I think even the dust mites used it for a springboard. When I got in at night, my scrawny little legs were never strong enough to push the tight sheets up from the corners so I could move my feet. Until I was ten, when she finally stopped tucking me in, I slept like King Tut - mummified.

My mother also used to roll the pillows before she covered them with the spread. When she was done, it looked like one long bolster cushion at the top of the bed. At the bottom of every bed she placed a home-made quilt. Then she would give the upper edge a little tug, right in the middle, to make it look like it had a big V- pleat in it. “It looks fancier,” she said.

I remember when coloured sheets came out. My mother bought a bottom and top sheet (only Wabasso) of every colour – pastel pink, pastel blue, pastel yellow – forever to be known as “The Pastel Sheets” or “My Good Sheets”. She proudly showed them off when she got home, but it would be a long time before my father and I ever laid eyes on them again.

One week-end we had overnight company. Out came ‘My Good Sheets’ from the cedar chest. Apparently, these were strictly for company. Finally, because of progress and sales pitch, flowered sheets made their way into our house, and because of this marvelous invention, my father and I got to have ‘The Pastel Sheets’ on our beds. From that day forward they were never known as ‘My Good Sheets’ again. They were now replaced in the cedar chest by flowered sheets - forever to be known as “My Good Blue-Flowered Sheets”, “My Good Pink-Flowered Sheets”, and “My Good Yellow-Flowered Sheets”- where they lay waiting their turn for overnight company.

Mother kept a lot of things in that cedar chest – The Hope Chest, she called it. When I got the cedar chest after she died, I found every one of my Valentines, Christmas cards and Birthday cards that I had received as a child. She had kept them all. Toys I was given as a child, too young to remember, were in that cedar chest, and even the receipt for the cedar chest itself – bought at Lounsbury’s when she was young and making $8. a month doing housework; the payments at Lounsbury’s: $2. a month. And inside was a beautiful pair of pillow cases with 4-inch hand-tatted lace on their edges. I took one of them out, tucked its open edge under my chin, and slipped a pillow in it. The pillow slipped right on through. They had rotted. They had been “My Best Pillow Cases”, and they had never been used.

I wondered many times during my life why my mother always hoarded things. She would work hard to get them (She was a foster Mom to many, many children.), yet she would never use them. About 10 years ago, I met my mother’s brother, Eddie Morton, for the first time in memory. By then he was in his late 80’s and had lost his sight and much of his hearing. In spite of that, we had wonderful visits, and during those times he told me many things about my mother as a child. I knew she had run away from home in South Branch, Kent County, when she was eleven, but she never talked about her childhood much, except to tell me that she used to scrub the floors with sand and a hard brush, and her dresses were made of flour sacks. Uncle Eddie said there wasn’t wood on all the floors; the kitchen floor was a mud floor. She never had anything nice, anything to call her own, he said. She worked “just like a man”, he said. When her father felt like it, she was beaten.

Now I understand. But I wish she had used and enjoyed the things she had worked so hard for. Yet, then again, maybe she enjoyed them more than I know, just knowing they were there... and they were hers.

Happy Mothers Day Annie Elizabeth (Morton) Powers,
Margaret

Thanks Dad

I think about my father, Nelson Powers, a lot. He was about 5'4" and he couldn't read or write, but he was my hero. He was the bright light in my childhood.

One day I took the scissors and went out to the tall grass just behind our back lawn and began to cut the grass as best I could so I could make a dollhouse. My hands got tired, so I only managed the front doorway, not exactly the livingroom, kitchen and bedroom that I pictured myself making. That evening, my father noticed the gap in the grass and asked me what I was trying to do, so I told him. He went and got the clippers (the 'grass shears', he used to call them) and cut the grass low enough to mow. He even marked off my rooms where I told him I wanted them. Then he took the push mower (no electrics then), and mowed me a wonderful dollhouse.

What a fun summer that was! I worked like a beaver. I brought out my dolls, made tables and beds out of cardoard boxes, served imaginary food made of pebbles, mud and marbles, and had a grand old time. When it rained and the tables got soggy, I would to wait until grocery day when I could get new St. George Food boxes.

That fall my father gave me a space in the basement near his workshop where I could once again set up housekeeping. I took some of his two-by-fours and outlined my playroom, as it came to be called, and pretended they were real walls. Dad was a carpenter, so I had oodles of scrap wood. I nailed one piece to another and made chairs, footstools, little tables, and what only I recognized as doll beds. To me, it was a fine house, it couldn't be better.

But one day, while I was at school, my father made it better, indeed. I came home and went to the basement as usual (as soon as I changed my 'good school clothes' for my 'old clothes' - a house rule that had to be followed as closely as Mother's Pythian Sister handbook.) When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I screamed, I jumped up and down; I giggled with glee! My playroom had real walls! Mother would have to pass through my 'house' to get to the laundry room, but that was even better - when she wasn't in there, I just pretended it was mine, too, adding to the magnificence of my already perfectly splendid place.

During the winter when my father was laid off, he surprised me again... with furniture! He had made me a stove out of masonite and plywood. It had an oven drawer that worked and he had etched 'burners' on top. And he had made me two doll beds; one was flat, with short legs and head and foot boards, big enough for my cotton doll, and the other was a crib. It's legs were short, but it's sides and ends were all rungs. Two rubber dolls slept in that. I had a little table and two small chairs where I served lovely sawdust cakes decorated with wonderful-smelling cedar shavings. It was bliss! (Today they would call it aromatherapy.)

I spent many hours in that room. I began teaching in that room. I had a blackboard and chalk and three very attentive students. I created a library and had sign-out cards in the back of each of my books. I wrote stories and read them to my 'class.' Within those few sheets of gyprock and two by fours, I had four careers, three of which I've pursued. I wish I had told my father what a wonderful thing he did for me by making that room, and how much it has meant to my life. It's always the personal efforts that make the difference, isn't it? Happy Father's Day, Dad, and thank you. Love, Margaret.

Remembering Remembrance Day

Remembering Remembrance Day
By Maggie Harriman

During the Second World War, and I expect during many wars before and since, there were those who fell in love before they were sent off to an uncertain future overseas. Maybe that love was for just a few days, or even a few hours, but regardless, it felt so much better than having the fear of the unknown gnaw away at your guts. Many left not knowing whether they would ever see home again. And among them was more than one soldier who left port not knowing he had left behind someone who was carrying his child.

It was not a time of abortions. It was a time of family shame. It was a time when young mothers stood before judges who said, “Reason for adoption?” and replied, “Unable to keep.” My mother was among them.

The majority of adoptions were kept hush-hush by both sides. The adoptive parents whispered it among friends and family, but it was not up for discussion at the dinner table.

I would be approaching my teens when I found out from a neighborhood kid that I was adopted. On days when I was mad at Mom or Dad for one childish reason or another, I thought that was a mighty good thing, because who’d want to be related to those old meanies, anyway?

On other days, I wondered who they were, these real parents of mine. I tried to make up a picture of them. I wondered if their eyes were blue or brown, if they were big or slim, tall or short, or one of each. Then one day I was told that my father had been shipped out overseas, but he never made it back. From then on, I pictured him as a soldier.

When we moved into Moncton in 1959, our house was near Victoria Park, and that is where I would spend many of my days – at the Cenotaph. I would read the names over and over on the soldier’s monument and wonder which one of those names was my father’s. Remembrance Day was special to me, because after everyone left the park after the ceremony, I would have my own Remembrance Day. I would take my poppy off and put it on the base of one side of the statue, for all the soldiers listed there. Then I would remove it and, in turn, do the same thing on each side of the statue, just in case my father might be on one of those lists. As I went along, I would tell my father about my life and how school was going, and who my friends were, and who I had a crush on. Teen stuff. I felt closer to him than anyone.

The day I married for the first time was a crisp, fall day, complete with a fairy tale snow fall. I spent an hour sitting at the soldier’s monument before I went to the church, telling my father about my doubts about getting married so young and crying because he couldn’t be at my wedding.

It was over 40 years later that I found out he had, indeed, come back home safely. But all that is known about him is that he was a laborer of French descent, who went overseas.

I know I will probably never know who he is, but I cherish those memories of sharing my growing years with him, my Unknown Soldier, at Victoria Park.

November 5, 2005
Edited Nov. 8, 2005

Me An' the Kids

Ever notice how you are never sure whether to kiss or kill your kids when in the midst of a household trauma-center occurance. Well this column's for you.

"Me An' the Kids", a popular column that appeared regularly in the Rural Report in the early '90's, as well as in other publications, has been brought back to life.
Here you will be able to read the archives of previous columns and get Maggie's take on the growing suburban life of Salisbury West and surrounding countryside, and the "yesterday years", when it was just "Me 'N' the Kids".

Put another bag in the pot and take a teabreak with Maggie Harriman as she remembers the days when she tried to decipher what children were all about when they became affilicted with teenageitis, for which there is no known antibiotic. (Viral infections of teenageitis can be up to 8 years in duration.)

Hope you enjoy my contributions as I cast an eye on what strikes my fancy and of which I have an opinion. (Check the archives for "Adamantly Yours") You can also ask a question by simply sending me a post here at Kids & Kane, my new library on the Web.

Write often, ask anything, and I will respond.

You can find me on LocalintheKnow.com in the Local Perspectives section.
Maggie

"Mickey"

(First published in "The Sentinel" October 27, 1999)

I'm excited! My daughter, Mickey, is planning on coming home from New York this week. I haven't seen her since she surprised us in Bermuda last April.

She tells me she's taking a creative cooking class. I asked her if it was one that would teach her to cook a chicken right side up. She laughed over the memory of her first cooking venture, but said no, her cooking class is totally pizzas. She said they made a great one with caviar on it. (Yeah, I bet.) She says she is going to make us some great pizzas when she comes home, and she will be bringing a pizza stone to cook them on, so I scratched 'pizza pan' off my list of things to buy at Stedman's.

Mickey was a funny kid. I mean that literally. It used to take her about a week to get a joke, then she'd crack up. None of us knew what she was laughing at. Then she used to put on plays for me with her siblings, those who wanted to participate, or got forced into it. I would go and get groceries, and when I got home there would be two chairs in the livingroom with the broom across them, and a sheet hanging from the broom. This was the curtain. Behind it, they would get ready, their lines all rehearsed, and I, an audience of one, would sit and watch these performances. I should have known then she would become an actress, and she has.

A while back, she asked me to send her copies of this column, so I did. She handed out seven different ones to seven different actresses in her theater group, and they read them onstage. She never told them the author was her mother.

Her director sat there and listened to them and afterward he said, "What does this woman do, sit home and knit?" (I'd like to meet that fella!)

The others said they (the articles) couldn't be from the same author, that several people must have written them. They critiqued them for a while, then gradually, one by one, they started recalling their own memories of their childhood and home. Come to find out, none of them were from the Big Apple; they were all from small towns. But they did agree that ours must have been a pretty wacky household. (It was!)

Mickey told me all this, and she told me that the next time they got together, three of them had started writing their own columns. I thought that was neat.

It's funny about kids. You never know when they're born what they'll grow up to be, where their paths of life will take them. Mickey was always a workaholic, even at home. Then she worked for years at the Urban Corral amid the cigarette smoke that made her voice hoarse for days on end. Then one day she said she was going to university.

She moved to Halifax, held down two jobs, and went to Dalhousie University and studied theater arts for five years. She was in a series of Atlantic Lotto commercials, and with the money from that, she made the big move to New York City. (The blond girl (Sandy) who played Amanda on Another World became a good friend of Mickey's - they had done a benefit fashion show in Halifax together - and Sandy got Mickey sponsored in the US through her agent. You just never know how a chance meeting can change your life.

I can't wait to see her and listen to the wonderful, crazy stories she tells me about New York and its people. I'll be as restless as a cat until she gets here. Oh well, I suppose I could take my mind off it easily enough; I could finish knitting the sweater I started two years ago.

Remembering Parkton

(First published in "The Sentinel" July 7, 1999)

I had to stop for a red light the other day by the newly-expanded Canadian Tire store on Mountain road, and as I sat there my mind jumped back fifty years. I used to live there, on that same lot. The pavement ended where Headstart is now (then called the Parkton School). Mountain Road was much narrower, and for a Sunday drive we went to Magnetic Hill in the '41 Plymouth, its windows rolled up to keep the dust from the dirt road getting into the car. We didn't go every Sunday, because my father was usually busy working on our house. It was his only day off. He was always a carpenter, and at that time he had a job making $1. an hour, a good wage for those days.

We had moved from a big house on Cedar Street that Dad had built many years before I came along. There, we had been one of only two English families on the street. At five years old I was fully bilingual, had a pet Guinea pig, and an old tom cat named Tom. When we moved (less than a mile away), no one spoke French. Within three days we had made as many trips back to the old house to retrieve Tom. He misssed the old neighbourhood and kept running back to his home. Finally, we stopped going to get him.

To accommodate us while Dad built the house, he had built the garage first and we moved into that. The people who bought our house had agreed to keep the Guinea pig until our new house was built. They meant well, but they didn't know much about Guinea pigs and, soon after, it died.

I remember the first day we moved into that garage. Drapes had been strung on twine across the full width of the garage, parallel to the doorway, in order to separate the back sleeping area from the kitchen. More hung drapes divided the back into two bedrooms, mine on the right, theirs on the left. In the front part was the table, some chairs, and a wood stove. The stove was lit that night to cook us a meal. As it got hotter, there came a funny smell from it, gradually at first, then much stronger. Mother bounced around in what little space we had, wringing her hands and saying the place was going to burn to the ground. Dad went outside and checked the pipe; all was normal. He decided to open the oven door, and there inside lay our clock, its wooden frame burnt black. Mom had put it in the oven for safe keeping, and so she'd know where it was.

Beside us (toward Magnetic Hill) was a big house owned by the Lusby's. They had an outhouse and, since we didn't have any bathroom at all, they allowed us to use it. The path seemed a mile long to my little five-year-old legs. My father used to say, "It takes so long to get there, you forget what you went for."

Between the garage and Lusby's, Dad had stacked the new wood he'd bought to build the house with. One Sunday, while he was picking my mother and I up from Sunday School, the board pile caught fire and we lost it all. We remained living in the garage that coming winter.

I remember one of those winter days. It was sunny and the snow glistened all through the big fields beside and behind our house; a great expanse, really, leading up to the woods that now border Crandall Street. Dad had gone to the dentist to get all his bottom teeth out, and I had gone up the field to visit some new-found friends. Their mother advised me to stay outside while the kids got ready, saying that if I stood inside and waited with my snowsuit on, I would probably feel the cold worse when I went out.

As I stood outside, I spotted a patch of ice not much wider than our wood stove. To amuse myself, I decided to make a run towards it, do a belly flop, and slide across it. I had taken my mittens off earlier, letting them dangle on the strings my mother always attached to them, and as I made my head-long dive, my hands out in front of me like a swimmer (which I was pretending to be), I felt a sharp sting in my right hand. I stood up and saw the clear jagged piece of a bottle sticking out of the ice, its tip a bright red. I looked at my hand and saw my very own blood drip on the perfect white snow. I cried all the way home, leaving a red trail behind me.

I was so loud with my blatting and bawling and screaming, that my mother was outside before I ever reached the garage. Being a nervous person, she did little to relieve my state, but did get herself together enough to fill the basin with cold water and shove my hand into it. Within seconds the water was red, and each time she changed the water, the same thing happened all over again. All I can remember her saying, over and over, was "I wish your father would hurry up and get home."

Eventually he arrived, and by this time my mother had found an old piece of white cloth and had wrapped my hand up. When Dad came in, I looked like a little boxer wearing a red and white glove, too pale to fight. I was put in the car and taken to Dr. Stewart's office. When he took the rag off, I could see the deep gash all the way across the palm of my hand, just below my fingers. Dr. Stewart cleaned it, sprinkled some white powder on it, made me make a fist, then wrapped it all up like a dog's paw. I pouted all the way home because I wouldn't be able to use scissors and make cut-outs.

I don't remember my father ever being asked that day how he felt, nor do I remember him saying anything about the dentist. But years later, when the topic of teeth and dentists came up, I heard him tell someone that, when he had all his bottom teeth taken out, the dentist had offered him a choice: freezing, or a shot of brandy. He had chosen the brandy.

Graduation

(First published in "The Rural Report" June 1992)

I remember when I graduated. I was 31. I was quick to learn in school but a slow learner in life. I was slow to learn that staying in school meant something; I was slow to learn that homework contributed to the goal of Grade 12 and beyond, and I was slow to learn that, without it, I would put in longer hours for less pay from some employer who enjoyed capitalizing on my stupidity.

A couple of my kids were like me. Dropouts. Sleep in. Aggravate your parent(s) and, at the same time, smart enough to justify their latest 'stand on life'.

Some things I learned quickly: "No experience - no job". That made a lot of sense. How was I supposed to get experience if I never had a job? In later years, I caught on quickly to, "You're how old? You have only grade ten listed here." I felt like saying, "Yes, Ma'am, but now I'm a Momma-matic; all I have to do is say the word pregnant and I will be."

Well, my two kids that opted out like me learned a lot faster than I did. It wasn't long before they saw the game board of life as it was. "With education, PASS GO. Without it, stay where you are."

It took a while, all (6) of us graduated. It was a good feeling. I was even chosen as Valedictorian twice, once at school, and once at Jordan Memorial Home where I completed certification as a Geriatric Attendant. When I look back at them both, I know I had good marks, but I also had a love for public speaking, (and probably the biggest mouth).

As for the kids, they're not much different from me. Yesteryear, I worried that they'd be the same as I was - a little wise and a lot stupid. They're not. They have all worked and studied hard to get where they want to be. After all, isn't that what one generation is all about - hoping the next one will do better?