2000-06-04
Dear Diary:

Family can be such an elastic word, don't you find?

The seed packet Zubby emptied for me.  Go have cats, eh. I was thinking about that while Zubby and I were planting what I call Paul's garden this morning.

(Actually, I was doing the planting. The cat was rolling in the freshly cultivated soil, bunting me and begging for some attention, and chasing the nasturtium seeds as they rolled from my fingers into their trenches. Then, as his pi�ce de r�sistance, he somehow managed to bat the package off the rock wall so the unplanted seeds would spill into the grass ... yes, Zubby was a BIG help.)

Fortunately, Paul's garden is a very simple flower bed. It only has nasturtiums. Period.

Everywhere else in our yard, the flower beds contain a complex mix of perennial, biennial, and annual plants interwoven to create a wonderful kaleidoscope effect. Every three weeks or so, the gardens are completely different.

Except Paul's garden, which only has nasturtiums. Period.

Nasturtiums make him think of the Burnetts and for Paul they were family even if no blood tie existed. They're all long gone now, but they live on in the heart of my husband and in the little swath of nasturtiums that graces the flower bed near our woodshed.

The original Burnett farmhouse is gone now, a wealthy Montreal publisher has built a huge home on the farm. The Burnetts were a most unusual clan, four unmarried sibs, two brothers and two sisters. That's Paul with Esther (on the left) and her sister Elda May on the right.

Very big people, as you can see. To be weighed they used to stand on a grain scale.

Very strong people. Paul can remember one of the sisters coming in from the field with a bag of freshly harvested potatoes in each hand--a fifty pound bag.

When Paul's parents moved here to this valley over fifty years ago they really didn't have the skills needed to survive in an uninsulated shack of a house without electricity or indoor plumbing. Both came from cities, and Norma had come from a fairly affluent background.

Poppa had it in his head he would write a book, so for their first year here the only cash coming in was the family allowance, which ran about $11 a month. Tough doesn't begin to cover it, and when my mom-in-law Norma talks about those times, she does it through clenched teeth.

The Burnetts had lived at subsistence level for generations on their farm. None of them had gone past elementary school, but they were well schooled in what you had to do to survive under these conditions. They took Paul's people under their wing, shared those skills, and opened their hearts to the kids big time.

Even when electricity came to the valley a few years after Paul's folks' arrival, the Burnetts never did get power. They did have some amenities--a telephone, gas-powered equipment such as chainsaws, a battery powered radio so they could follow the larger world--but otherwise they lived as people had lived in this valley several generations past.

It was a very hard, bone and spirit crushing type of life. Many hours of each day were spent in doing things we accomplish in minutes. If you wanted to do laundry, winter or summer, water had to be heated in kettles on a wood burning stove and hauled to the washing machine. The agitator was a hand powered crank, there was no popping the clothes in the washer and coming back later.

Once they were washed, they had to be hand cranked through a wringer, the washer emptied, new clean water put in, clothes rinsed and cranked through the wringer yet another time. Everything was dried on a line, ironed with a cast iron flat iron which had been heated on the top of a woodstove.

Without refrigeration, things were kept cold in a bucket in the sink through which icy cold spring fed water flowed. Without a freezer, every bit of the winter's food, both meat and vegetables, had to be hand canned in glass jars, everything done on a wood burning stove.

Paul and his brothers spent a lot of time at the farm, saw first hand what eating meat means. There were no little styrofoam, shrink wrapped containers in a farm like that. It was all up close and personal.

He can remember many weekends spent there, doing his homework by the light of a kerosene lamp, waking up during a winter's morning in a bedroom so cold you could see your breath ... It's odd to think about how my husband grew up with one foot in our time, and another in a century long past.

Cash money, as the Burnetts called it, was hard to come by. They did some logging from the farm, sold milk, sold maple syrup and Esther sold her hooked rugs, wonderful little bits of folk art which hint at what she might have been had she been born into different circumstances. She was a very creative woman.

Esther is the reason I plant nasturtiums in Paul's garden.

I didn't know her. Norma said she could be very generous, but she could also be a hard woman at times, judgemental, and with a fearsome tongue. She once said of a local woman who was rumoured to be "easy" that "if she had as many sticking out of her as had been stuck in her, she'd look like a porcupine." Oh my.

But Esther also had a softer side and that came out in her garden, in her wonderfully intricate rugs that often showed scenes from everyday life around her, and in the way she welcomed my husband's family into her life. These were people who had very little, but didn't hesitate to share what they had.

Like I said, there wasn't a lot of extra money, but Esther always found what she needed so she could buy her flower seeds. In a life that was extraordinarily hard and filled with the kind of drudgery that grinds down the spirit, she insisted on her little frivolous patch of beauty.

Nasturtiums, simple unassuming plants that will grow in terrible soil and endure neglect with good humour, were among her favourite flowers.

That's why Paul's garden only has nasturtiums. Period.

--Marn

Old Drivel - New Drivel


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Want to delve into my sordid past?
She's mellllllllllllllting - Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012 - Back off, Buble - Monday, Dec. 19, 2011 - Dispersed - Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 - Nothing comes for free - Monday, Nov. 21, 2011 - None of her business - Friday, Nov. 04, 2011 -


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This template is a riff on a design by the truly talented Quinn. Because I'm a html 'tard, I got alot of pity coding to modify it from Ms. Kittay, a woman who can make html roll over, beg, and bring her her slippers. The logo goodness comes from the God of Graphics, the Fuhrer of Fonts, the one, the only El Presidente. I smooch you all. The background image is part of a painting called Higher Calling by Carter Goodrich which graced the cover of the Aug. 3, 1998 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.

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�2000, 2001, 2002 Marn. This is me, dagnabbit. You be you.