BUNNY CAKE

"The great gift of Easter is hope..." -Basil Hume

Day before Good Friday dawned  dull and boring. At least that’s how it started. My mother was working a half day. Making uniforms  for the Hotel. I won’t be gone long , she said, as she packed a thermos full of tea.

The tv blared away with Bugs Bunny running around like a mad thing, tormenting Elmer Fudd. I was only half watching. The rest of the time I watched the clock. Three hours to myself, I thought.

I was home with a cold  ( sort of).   She waggled her finger at me. “Don’t get into things,” she said. I grinned. I was 1O, I think. Something like that. I never got into things. Things  just kind of happened…..

  I was going to bake a Bunny cake, I had decided. For Easter. For Mrs. Bliss  from across the street. She was coming over later.

But first I was going to play.  So I took down the sheer curtains from the living room and fastened them  all around me like a huge wedding dress. I had done this on numerous occasions.  The sheers trailed behind me about 10 feet, as I paraded up and down the living room singing the bridal march, at the top of my voice.

I got bored of that. Time to teach school. I loved teaching school.

Then I set up my barbies and stuffed animals in rows, as if they were my students. Told them they were all in detention and they would have to learn their ABC’s. 

Then I  yelled at them that a storm was coming . They had to put on  toques and parkas. I yelled that it was now a tornado. Then I knocked them all over.

A knock . Tap tap tap. It came again. Tap tap tap.The living room looked like a tornado hit , my  curtains trailing behind me, I did something I had been told never to do. Open the door.

It was Mrs. Bliss from across the road. She saw me, saw the curtains, saw my dolls all over the floor. She asked after me.  Mrs. Bliss said my mother asked her to check up on me. 

“Just about to slay dragons, “ I chirped. “Ahhhh,” said Mrs. Bliss. “Slay away.  I will be back later.” She toddled back across the street.

I was bored again. So I got another idea. I would make the Bunny Cake this year.  

I got mixing bowls, a big spoon, flour, water and the bunny cake pan from my Easy Bake Oven. I loved that thing. Didn’t work. But I loved it.

I dutifully mixed flour and water, beating it till it was the consistency of pudding. Had to tuck up the train of my dress as it was sort of in the way when I walked over to the oven. Again, something else I had been told not to touch.

I turned on the inside light,  just like my Easy bake Oven. I plopped in the dough into my Bunny Pan and shoved it into the  oven.

Then I watched it.  I guess you had to turn on the oven. 

But no time for that now. My mother would be home soon. She was only gone a half day, before Easter weekend. The house was a mess, the Bunny Cake  looked like goo. I retrieved it, and the bowls of extra flour-pudding. Couldn’t decided what to do with them. I got an idea.I dumped all of the  flour dough down the toilet and flushed. It burped like a hippo  in the mud

I washed  bowls and the Bunny pan. Cleaned up my dolls, managed to get the curtains back up where they were supposed to be; had done it many times before. I just stood on the back of the antique chaise lounge and threaded them thru the curtain rod. Easy Peasy.

Then I sat down in front of the tv to watch the Young and the Restless. My mother came home right about then.

She noticed right away that the toilet was  goopy. She called a plumber. He said he’d be over within the hour. (Those were the days). My mother  pulled back the sheer curtains, ready  for Mrs. Bliss. My mother found goo on the curtains.  She yanked them down. I had to take them down to the laundry. The plumber came and fixed the toilet for $50. 

When Mrs. Bliss arrived, I let her in. It was tea time. It was Easter. It was as it always was . She would stay for a good long while and visit. She  handed me  a cake shaped like a Bunny.

 Then she winked at me, and asked  if maybe next time I could slay some dragons for her……

Photographs 2022

 

TALL GRASSES and WARM WINDS

                “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind…”

              -Nathaniel Hawthorne

They walked this earth. Tilled the soil. Worked , slaved, toiled,  till their fingers cracked in the dust. They saw war. And hope for  the changes that  made them one with another. 

They called Bethune home. Where sky reached beyond tomorrow. Where Saskatchewan ,(“kisiskaciwani-sipiy” in the Cree language), meant swift flowing river. The famous Long lake  bordered their farm district. 

My grandparents took the children for paddle boat races. The air fragrant with  tall grasses  and  warm winds.  

In 1934 cowboys  came sauntering thru. Cow drives. Fresh fertilizer for the garden in the dried up slough.…..

1920’s saw the first air show  come to the prairies. My mother said most people were in disbelief. Most  had never seen a plane. 

She watched it fly . It made her giddy. Up and down went the flying machine….

So many weddings. Those Flapper styles. Silk cost about $1 a yard. Very expensive for those days. A family visited  with  their first car , were nice enough to let my mother and her siblings play in it. Which would have been fine, but they put the baby chicks in the back seat….

The endless farm work. Horses loved my grandfather so much and  took turns nuzzling his face. In later years he sold off the horses. He missed them. But the years moved on.

1919 Old Granny , east Main Street in Biggar, Scotland, expected a letter at Christmas and easter.

So, dutifully, my mother , being the oldest, wrote to a granny she had never met.

Dec 1933 it was a farm holiday. In the snow

The Cutter was rigged up. Laden with blankets and  mittens, three times thick. Afterwards, hot tea with scones and homemade jam. Sticky fingers washed afterwards in the snow, and a snowball fight.

On the farm, Grandfather  loved  guiding his work horses on the plow. My mother came out to the fields, carrying dinner in a pail. Treats and water for the horses. They ate as they walked. She would gather tall grasses to buzz and squeak, pretending to be a cricket calling into the late afternoon.

In  summers of the 1920’s,  there was diving from the Trestle bridge. Sploosh. Into the cold water of the lake. Fishing for pike, dreaming away the days. Then doing it all over again.

It was a quiet time. Horses and buggies, even though there were some cars. Carts broke  down, while horses snagged  their harnesses. Long walks to school  thru fields of grain, chasing gophers, finding arrowheads.

On  special days,  there was ice cream. Churned in the shed and paraded around to  be given out to happy children and adults, all dressed in their finest whites. 

My mother played in a basketball team. She really didn’t like the new bloomers they wore as a uniform.  She felt they looked too poofy. 1933 was a great year for their team. Kedelston was the best.  My mother  used to sing the team song “Milk n Mush and Sunflower seeds….” with her teammates. Some stayed on the farms. Others, like my mother, moved away looking for change.

June 20^th, 1933 was a red letter day. Rides in a Bennett Buggy. During the Depression it was a car which had its guts yanked out to be pulled by a horse. (In the States it was known as  a Hoover Cart.) My mother said Richard Bennett ( Prime Minister of Canada from 1930-1935) made them all poor. Poor as happychurch mice. My grandparents  soldiered on.

In 1936, my mother married and moved away , like she always planned. She wanted to be free. Though for many years she and my dad  returned for weeks at a time. Then she walked those fields again, with the tall grasses and warm winds. I think she missed it. Years later I went with her, and I felt the pull of that place.

May 29^th, 1940. Many of the farm “boys”, now young men,  left for war. A war they knew little about. My grandparents grieved . My Uncle Stuart wanted to be with his chums.  It was so difficult. My mother thought he should stay and work the farm with his brother, Bill.  Stuart was raring to go like all of those young men. Mugging for the cameras as they went. So many did not come home again.…..

 Till one day, he appeared . Snow had vanished, like it does, when spring peers from the shadows.  He was older and a little broken, maybe  wiser. Tall grasses and warm winds, welcomed him home.

BIRTHDAY SHOES...

"Life is the dancer, and you are the dance..." -Eckhart Tolle

April meant new shoes. For me. When I was little. Spring shoes to stomp in . Mud to muck about in. My mother often took me to the one shoe store in town. The one that had been open for at least a century.   

My mother always bought  me a pair of shiny part shoes. Supposed to be for spring  recitals. 

 They  weren’t stomp worthy.I would pout and  pretend they didn’t fit by squirming and hanging from the bench. No such luck.Year after long year, it was always the same recital shoes.

Then one spring, when I was much older, before the store closed for  good, we went by the shop one last time. A pair of  gold slipper shoes caught my mother’s eyes.   They glittered. 

My ever practical  mother picked them up. “We used to go dancing. I had shoes like these…long ago.” She tried them on. For fun. We left without buying anything.

    I returned to the store,  just before her birthday,  and bought the last pair of gold dancing slippers. I wrapped the shoe box in newsprint with a gold bow. Her birthday was the next day. The fifth of April. When I was little I used to make her toilet paper roll dolls and tissue flowers.  

April 5^th dawned. We were planning on heading out  to get manure and dirt. I gave her the present.  My mother carefully took off the gold bow,  unwrapped the newsprint, folding it neatly and laying to one side. 

Then she stared inside. She often was hard to read, but  dutifully slipped them on. Then she walked purposefully up and down our main hall. Back and forth.

The shoes squeaked. Dreadfully. Squeak. Squeak. 

My mother laughed. Then she snorted. Most unladylike. Then I laughed.

She was wearing her  train engineer overalls. One of  her favourite things to wear. So she decided to wear the gold slippers. 

We drove to the gardening store. She took off the right  slipper to drive, of course, and the glitter  shone like gold.  She wore them in the garden store when she bought  manure and dirt. 

Squeak.Squeak. She wore them in the grocery store after that. With her overalls . Squeak.Squeak. We ran into a couple of her friends. Squeak. Squeak.“My birthday present,” said my mother, showing off her shoes.

When we got home, she switched to rubber boots to dig up the ground to plant sweet peas. Another one of her  favourite things to do on her birthday. She was a hard worker, and  she toiled away till the last sweet pea seed was planted. Then it was  evening. She had made  a Caraway Seed cake. I stuck a candle in the loaf.My mother sat  in her train engineer overalls and glittery shoes. “We would go dancing on my birthday. At the Crystal gardens.”

 My mother put on a  record (yes, a record)and had me dance with her that night. She often would put on an old record from time to time, and dance. This time she asked me to join in. Any other time I would say I felt silly. But that fifth of April, I did not.

                     

She hummed a tuneless melody. She never could carry a tune. But she loved music. The gold slippers sparkled, and squeaked, as we danced around the living room , her in her engineer overalls.I imagined her in a sweeping ballgown, waltzing across the floor. And the gold slippers squeaked on. It was probably the last time I saw her dance. I left for school in  the next year.

But on that evening she  told me stories about dancing with my father, and of glittery, squeaky shoes  and birthdays long ago. Beautiful things. So many years before…….

Photographs 2022