valeriesbookofme

 December in South Africa 1977, Part One I had never understood candlelight in quite this way before. Oh there had been candles on the table Christmases past back home in Canada. For atmosphere, for festivity. While the electric crystal chandelier above cast the “real” light on a table laden with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce.… But this, this was different. Here in the corrugated iron shack that my friends had referred to as “the cottage”—not any cottage that I had ever seen in my growing up in Quebec—with no other light either inside the cottage nor outside in the black night of the Transkei, I understood how candlelight could draw a world down into the narrowness of those around the light, as if nothing else in the world existed.  I looked at the six faces around the table, illuminated in the candlelight, my own pulsing with sunburn. "Oh you’ll be grand," they’d told me down at the beach that day. "We’ll tell you when to get out of the sun." And toni

 I first met Eddie the cat in the summer of 2009. Eddie lived with my friend Sheila in an English village called Burnham-on-Sea. Burnham is described as a “seaside town” although strictly speaking it isn’t on the sea, it is along part of the Bristol Channel in Somerset. It's a tidal space, the water comes in and out daily and when it goes out, there's a wide expanse of beach. There is even an old Victorian style pier pavilion that sells ice creams and has an arcade. You do have to be careful of the beach at low tide, however, as it becomes very muddy and cars have been known to sink in the mud, necessitating a rescue. Sheila had grown up close to Burnham and after she retired from her work in Reading and her husband died, she decided to return to the area. She bought a Victorian row house in a narrow street off one of the three main roads in Burnham and settled into a fairly quiet life of fixing up the house, working on genealogy and walking her two King Charles spaniels, Daisy

  A s I write this on October 1, 2024, I imagine you reading this October 1, 2034. I hope that you are well and happy. I hope that some things haven’t changed for you, and I hope some things have. I hope that, as you read this, you’ll remember some of the things I am describing, that your memory is still as strong and vital as mine is. I hope that in the ten years that separate us you have remained as healthy as I am today. I am currently a little overweight, I hope that in the intervening ten years you’ve been able to keep that in check. Maybe you’ve conquered the “stress eating” that has dogged me so much of my life. I’m doing a lot of things right currently to help that happen, such as watching that I eat less, daily exercise, getting to the root of my recurring depressions, being kind to myself. I hope you have seen the benefits of this. I also hope, though, that you can still enjoy some of the treats that make me feel better. In moderation of course. If I had to pick my favorite t

September 1968. My mother hasn’t been well all summer. She’s been tired. Even while on holiday and visiting friends she’s excused herself midday to have a nap. I hear whispers from the adults that she’s drinking too much. My father has taken to measuring the bottles of sherry and port wine in our liquor cabinet.  Worry over my mother’s health in those September days was an escalation of the fear I’d felt since I was 13, three years previously. When she came home from the doctor’s and she and my father sat me down and explained she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. That she could die if she overexerted herself. I immediately volunteered to take over the vacuuming and the ironing. Anything. Anything so she wouldn’t die.  I knew though in my teenaged heart that mothers die. It was a theme that ran through my books: fairytales, even young adult series. Disney movies. I didn’t want MY mother to die at the same time as I grappled with fear that she would.  So for three years I held a

After my rather "political" post last week, I decided this week I would return to my usual style of memoir writing. Today's post is about my childhood, no deep psychological ruminations, just memories. Enjoy! When I moved there in the early 1950s, Rosemount was a very new suburb of Montreal East. Carved out of small plots of farmland in response to the influx of new immigrants from post Iron Curtain Europe and newly middle class factory workers, returning soldiers and the Baby Boom, post-war housing sprang up. These consisted mainly of smallish row houses and duplexes that hardly held the members of some large Catholic families. For example, my friend Brenda, with her eleven siblings, springs to mind. My friend Danielle, who because she was the only girl among five brothers, never had her own room and slept on the living room couch, keeping her clothes in the hall closet. But our bungalow had been built in a smaller section of the area. All of the bungalows in the neat av

1971. I was 19 years old and still caught between wanting to embrace the new women's liberation movement and also wanting desperately to be loved. So I chose to be dependent on a boy/man who smirked at my going to a women's lib meeting at my university. I never went again.  But that song kept ringing in my years through the years. And there were lyrics that I repeated to myself when I was told that I couldn't do certain things. When I was promised things--by men--and then disappointed. Lyrics such as "You can bend but never break me, for it only serves to make me, more determined to achieve my final goal." And, later, the more poignant, "Yes I've paid the price, but look how much I've gained." Meanwhile, on the public stage I saw women making steps forward and steps back. In Canada, we had Kim Campbell as our first female Prime Minister for five months in 1993. In Canada you can become the Prime Minister by taking the helm of the governing party