You Can’t Go Back
You can’t go back, murmur the pundits. You can learn from the past but you can’t go back.
One of my sisters and I don’t follow rules very well. We did go back. To our childhood home in SmallTown, Ontario. Where gossip and wild spaces and fresh garden vegetables and yes, even sexual innuendos, educated us city slickers in a way no other place could.
Chimney Fire
Like, I still hear the fire sirens in my brain. I was in Grade 5, Marlane in Grade 1. We shared a second-floor bedroom in a heritage brick home on Main Street: complete with a multi-angled ceiling, one small window, and a long no-door closet with steeple-shape interior.
It was 6 a.m. on a freezing morning. My father was up already, stoking coal into the basement furnace, before heading to his job via commuter car to the Big City.
Suddenly he burst into our bedroom where we were still sleeping. “Get up! Get out! Chimney fire! Forget dressing! Just get out!” Then he headed for our brother’s bedroom next to us.
That’s when I realized the fire sirens were heading to our house!
Marlane and Bro shot out of bed. Disappeared down the stairs.
But, me, well, I had rollers in my hair. Good grief, I couldn’t go outside with rollers in my hair! What if people saw me like this? I quickly crouched before the mirror whipping out the curling rollers, styling my hair into some sort of presentable shape.
“Good GAWD!” yelled my father as he tore back into the bedroom. (Fire engines stopped outside now. Sirens still howling. Firefighters scrambling out. Hoses unloaded. Hordes of spectators.)
“But…!”
Yanking my arm, he tore me away from the mirror. I stumbled down the stairs with him, out into the cold, onto the street before the searching eyes of curious onlookers.
Ah, but at least, I sighed within, there were no curlers in my hair.
School Days
Smalltown introduced me, Marlane, Bro and L’il Bro, to an entirely new world of life experiences.
Marlane’s blonde hair was fine and wispy when she was in Grade One. Yet she insisted my mother pull her strands into a ponytail. Except by the time we had walked to her Grade One class in the Old Town Hall, her wisps had escaped to fly around her cherub face. She never realized her pony tail had disappeared among dozens of bobby pins and coloured barrettes.
My Bro and I had to walk 5 km to and from the only elementary school in town on the other side of the railroad tracks. (“You live on the wrong side,” came the taunt). Bro, small for his age, was constantly bullied and taunted by a couple of local boys. He lived in terror each school day. My Bro is a big guy now. No-one would dare assault him.
