When I Was Young and In My Prime Read Online Free Page A

waving me over to give me a box of twenty-four jars of sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil. Connie volunteers at the food bank.“We got a whole truckload,” she said,“but no one in the lineup will have a thing to do with them and the soup kitchen volunteers can’t be bothered figuring out how to fit the things into a meal.” Last week it was a truckload of kiwis. I looked up a kiwi jam recipe for her on the internet. Once last summer, as I was on my way out of the house for my morning walk, she summoned me over for a serving of the chicken cacciatore she’d made at four that morning because she couldn’t sleep.
    When James and I moved in four springs ago, she called out from her porch and introduced herself, then got me to follow her inside so she could give me a slab of carrot cake. I watched her transfer it from her Pyrex pan onto a green Styrofoam tray, the kind they use to package snow peas in the grocery store. I took it home and shared it with James. The cake was exquisite, moist as anything, thick cream- cheese icing. On my way out later that day, I spotted her still on her porch and called over, saying it was the best carrot cake I’d ever had.
    The next morning there was a knock at my door: Connie with the carrot cake recipe written out on a piece of cardboard from a pantyhose package. “It’s from the Sun,” she said.“There’s a helluva lot of oil in it.”
    Then she eyed me as if she knew all my secrets and said, “Don’t skimp.”

Spring means time for a garage sale.
    Though we’ve been organizing for weeks, the basement is still filled chest-high with artefacts. Mary and Peter Friesen have saved everything that has ever come their way. Wooden chairs—with cracked seats and spindles missing—float stranded in corners, legs in the air. There are striped and polka-dotted hat boxes with hats inside that look like birthday cakes. Cream separators and butter forms. A step- ladder. A skill-testing puzzle of coat hangers, which I utterly fail to solve.
    Three large boxes full of plastic milk bags, all slit open at one end, cleaned, folded once and bundled in stacks of twenty, wrapped with twine like presents.
    An old violin with a bowed fretboard and a black- lacquered cardboard case.
    Crates of Christmas ornaments, grade-school test papers, sheet music. Stacks of moth-bally quilts and old board games—Chinese Checkers, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Scrabble and Clue—the boxes crushed and most of the pieces missing.
    A small black album displaying sepia photographs of a flood.
    Rows of glass-topped mason jars, some with labels saying what they once contained, some still full. Apple butter, 1973: the year I was born. Pickled asparagus. Homemade eye ointment. Plum jam.
    The garage sale doesn’t even make a dent. Grandpa is gruffer than I’ve ever seen him, and Grandma is hoarding trinkets, throwing subtle tantrums, shaken to see the contents of her basement appearing on the front lawn, haphazard and shabby in the sunlight, spread out suddenly in public, strangers taking it away piece by piece. She’s by turns generous and fierce: “Would you like these dear?” offering me a stack of old Reader’s Digests , then refusing to give up a red plastic poinsettia, clutching it.
    When Grandpa finds out that Mom has sold the bird bath right off the lawn, gruff becomes bewildered. “I didn’t even know it was for sale,” he says. He says it in the tone of someone who’s slept in because of a time change and missed something important. He keeps on saying it, to anyone who will listen.

things that might survive a lifetime

    1 the answer to the question, what do you do?

    This almost always survives a man’s lifetime.

    my great-grandfather was a farmer  
    mine was a steelworker
mine a butcher
mine a preacher
    my great-uncle was a harness maker  
    mine a labour leader
    mine a soldier
    mine