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

gambled a fortune away

    2 refusals

    Sometimes refusals
survive a woman’s life: oh it was a scandal when Aunty May  
    refused that widower’s offer of marriage.
(I have some of her paintings,
hang them as reasons why.)

    And I am told my namesake, Great-Grandma Helena,  
    refused to marry her murdered husband’s brother  
    until his invalid mother died—
said she wouldn’t be a slave to another man’s burdens.  
    For eighteen years she refused.
    Then, after the funeral, accepted.

    And Aunt Olga refused
to roast a chicken if she didn’t have anise seed.

    3 odd details

    Aunt Anne hated blue jays
because they were greedy at her feeder.

    And that, as I said, is all I know  
    about Aunt Anne.

    (Oh yes!
and that she lived in a place called Turkey Point.)

    4 secrets

    Not the content, perhaps, but the
silence, the wariness surrounding them (a pocket  
    of stale air in rock where a living thing
is preserved for a time after death
then dissolves, leaving fossil).

    The way the whole family lifted
a leg to step over Arnica the dog lying  
    in the kitchen doorway long
after Arnica was dead and gone.

    5 habits and tricks

    Grandma would buy no ketchup but Heinz, no grape juice but Welch’s, said toothpaste gets out certain stains and only bought Crest, said baking soda takes away fridge odour and only bought Cow Brand.

    The elements
of daily life, more basic now than air earth fire water.
    Nothing but Ivory soap, nothing but 2%.

    In the grocery store, my hand is drawn as if by tractor beam  
    to her brands.

    6 a violent death

    Almost fair, isn’t it? How if you die, as they say, in an untimely fashion, at least the memory is likely to survive?

    We all know (though can scarcely imagine) how Grandpa’s father died in 1919. He was the overseer of an estate in the Ukraine amidst war and revolution—the landowners long gone, the peasants hungry. He held a meeting, decided to start the threshing early and pay the peasants out in grain. Slept that night in a neighbouring village for safety.

    Next morning, pregnant wife at his side, on his way to the first day of threshing, two young men stopped him, demanding the ox and cart. He gave it up, helping his wife down and then was
    shot
through the neck as an
    afterthought
    on the road
    blood
    leaving him  
    neutral and
    red.

    7 a grand story or two

    The morning after I met James, we went walking in a snowstorm and he told me one of the only stories he knows about his great-grandfather:

    One winter morning he decided to paint cherubs on the living room ceiling, one on either side of the light fixture. When he stepped down to look at his work the little angels weren’t balanced, so he painted another beside the smaller one,
    which called for another on the other side,
    which called for another on the other
    and on and on he see-sawed
    through the day until his wife came home that afternoon to a ceiling teeming with cherubs.

    And though I try in general to be wary of romance, that day I was thinking who knows? That day I was thinking, Someday (ridiculous!) maybe someday I’ll tell my children (absurd!) maybe someday I’ll tell my children that (madness!)
I fell for their father because the morning after we met, we went walking in a snowstorm and he told me his lopsided story           yes
    that day I was in love with how one thing leads to another.

When Father was shot at the estate where he’d been the overseer—and a good one at that—Mother, and mind you she was eight months with child at the time, she found a man willing to escort us back to our village. Dangerous times in the Ukraine. No way in hell a woman could make that journey alone with six children and another on the way. The arrangement she fixed was he’d take us home in the landowner’s horse and covered wagon in exchange for keeping the beast and rig when he’d got us there. The men who’d shot