Staycation day #351 :

Behind on everything, but working on my usual array of this, that, etcetera. The past few weeks, sketching out a handful of short stories, thinking about poems, and working on reviews. Working on a mound of above/ground press items, now that Ontario’s further layer of lockdowns, set on December 26, have finally lifted. And still, working up to the first anniversary of the original lockdown, which was, I will remind, was two days before my fiftieth birthday: my entire fifties-to-date on lockdown. And more than twelve hundred letters composed and mailed out since the original lockdown began. Can you believe it? Still, the past couple of weeks moving far slower than usual, as though walking through mud, or molasses. What happened to my attempts at two reviews a week? Everything moves so stupid-slow. Lethargy. I have been in the house too long, even for me.

I’ve been working through the late American fiction writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ One Small Saga (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) lately, a novella reissued from its original 1984 publication. I hadn’t read her work before, but somehow managed to discover a copy of her Almost Everything (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982) on our bookshelves downstairs. It even still has the January 1999 price-sticker from the late, lamented Toronto staple, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library. I remember finding and purchasing that book, some two decades back. Why did I never open it? Too many other distractions, most likely. Too many other items picked up on that same Toronto trip, or whatever it was I was doing. What was I doing? That was back in the days when I would tour and scour bookstores across the country, mailing home boxes to myself that jwcurry would collect and go through, before I returned. Her work is prompting some slow movement through prose. A couple more short stories completed and sent out, sketched and sketched and re-sketched during my mornings lifeguarding our wee girls during their e-learnings.

On Wednesday, we finally hired movers to collect the family piano from the homestead and bring it over, the last bit of post-father homestead before my sister’s new tenant moved in. I took more than a dozen years of lessons, but have barely played since the 1980s, so this has been a plan a long time coming. The movers brought it up our front steps and into our front room with great difficulty, and didn’t find it nearly as hiliarious as I did, when, right after they set it in place, I loudly asked Christine if “we really needed it moved into the basement, after all.”

The last time this piano was moved was in 1976, when my father, his hired man and my six year old self hopped into the pick-up to drive the two-plus hours from the farm into Kemptville, to collect it from my great-grandparent’s house. Family lore has it that my mother’s maternal grandparents, Joseph John and Mary Caroline Cassidy Swain, purchase the piano new so my maternal grandmother (and most likely my grandmother’s sister) could take lessons as kids. It needs serious cleaning, and possibly repair. Tuning, certainly. One thing at a time. Rose was extremely excited at the prospect of lessons, something I’ve been whispering into her ear for more than a year now. Right now, the young ladies plink at it, and perhaps get comfortable with it in our space, and get comfortable with playing, learning. Seeing how it feels. Hearing how it sounds.

The other night, the young ladies took turns playing while the other one would dance. It was a whole thing. Each played, while re-telling a story. I think Aoife’s was “Cinderella.”

Otherwise, what else? Over the past week or so, I’ve been reading Rose that first Anne of Green Gables novel at bedtime, which I’m a bit surprised she’s taken to so heavily. I suppose she’s the right age for it. Usually we take turns putting each child down for bedtime, reading stories and such, but Rose and Aoife “made a deal” across a couple of nights so she could get further bits of it read to her, and Aoife prefers when Christine puts her to bed, so that worked out for everyone. I’m surprised at the language; rather ornate, really. Pretty interesting to read aloud, especially when one considers it was published in 1908. I mean, my only experience with prose of the era, pretty much, are those semi-religious novels that Glengarry-esque novelist Ralph Connor was putting out, and those were only a couple of years earlier. Glengarry School Days was 1902, after all. His was a very different kind of prose. There’s a lovely music to her work I wasn’t expecting, and a language that occasionally requires me to explain a word to Rose (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given she absorbs everything). I never did read these when I was young. I went through the Narnia books, Pippi Longstocking and Doctor Doolittle and even Cheaper by the Dozen, and and latched onto comics pretty early, so went over in that direction, instead. My eldest daughter, Kate, in her turn, went through the Green Gables novels when she was young, but said she preferred the Road to Avonlea books, saying they were better written. Not long after that, she burned through a stack of most, if not all, of the novels by all of those Austens.

And finally, after weeks of prodding, poking and excitement, Rose lost her first tooth the other night. She’s already composed a note requesting it back, a note we found in her room. Apparently she didn’t get a chance to show her lost tooth to Aoife. Might the Tooth Fairy require the money back?

snow day (further excerpts from a work-in-progress,

                              see an earlier excerpt of the same piece here ; and here ; and here

January 2, 1999, when a snowstorm dropped thirty-nine centimetres of snow on Toronto. As a series of storms kept rolling in. Within two weeks, a state of emergency, as Mayor Mel Lastman called in the army. Dig, baby, dig.

January, 1998, when an ice storm caused major damage across Eastern Ontario and southern Quebec, revealing the poor quality of the Quebec Hydro.

March 4, 1971, when forty-seven centimetres of snow fell on Montreal, made worse by winds up to 110 km/hour. The drifts kept rolling, rolling in.

What else do you wish to know.

Such fierce winds rush through Pyeongchang County, South Korea. Enough to knock Olympic hopefuls from their path. The snowboards turn to sails, pushed twenty feet into the air.

The mid-season opener of CW’s DC Legends of Tomorrow that actually includes their resident historian, Dr. Nathaniel “Nate” Heywood, grabbing his quick-at-hand copy of Ralph Connor’s 1901 novel, The Man from Glengarry, in an attempt to discover hints to the location of his time-displaced teammates. Why would you seek them in fiction? We begin to doubt your talents as a historian, Commander Steel.

Christine responds to an email. We discuss the possibilities of childcare. This too, happens.

*

Dead at ninety-five. Dead at sixty-three. Dead at forty. Dead at seventy-five. Dead at thirty-two. Dead at sixty. Dead at eighty-seven. Dead at seventy. Scroll through the obituaries, seeking out names, and particulars. Scroll through the connections. What am I seeking. The names of the dead and their angular pinpoints: birth, marriage, children. Remnants.

When a miracle is not a miracle. How close to your grammar.

Despite the weather delay, Canada Post delivers a handwritten note from Brooklyn poet and filmmaker Stephanie Gray. At times, one forgets such things existed: a note sketched by hand, and offered through snail mail.

The note’s verso: Brooklyn “Mapnote,” pinpointing Flatbush, Midwood, Bushwick, Borough Park.

Pattie McCarthy, margerykempething (2017): “this sentence is from several failed attempts [.]”

*

Stones in her pockets. Off-screen, I place eggs in the Instant Pot, set a dozen for hard-boil. Seven minutes on manual. Off-screen, the children sit quietly, flip through their books.

Michael Harris’ poem “Death and Miss Emily,” from Grace (1978). On The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc. blog in November, 2017, intern Stephanie Small writes of “The act of going back, of probing a topic like a sore tooth […].” Of which she was very much in favour.

Snow. What I know of it, falls.

The storm not a metaphor but situated in fact. Shovels the weight of the walk.

The penitent, kneels. Anna Gurton-Wachter: “The mouth is a whisper of an earlier event.”

Within days, temperatures rise. The rain. From minus twenty-three to plus-eight in the space of a week. The snow evaporates with such force it steams, producing light fog from the asphalt. It lifts.

snow day (excerpts from a work-in-progress,

            Here is a system. Time pours from its mouth.

                        Lisa Robertson, The Weather

First thing this morning, Christine and I each receive an email regarding the cancellation of buses across the school board. The warmer temperatures bring the potential for freezing rain. We live too close to the school to take the bus; for the cancellations to affect us. I still bundle both children for the sake of our Rose, and another day of junior kindergarten. Neither cancelled, nor snow: what kind of snow day is that?

Anna Gurton-Wachter responds to my email. Monty Reid responds to my email. Nikki Sheppy responds to my email. Stephen Brockwell responds to my email. Neil Flowers responds to my email. Pearl Pirie responds to my email. David O’Meara responds to my email. Annick MacAskill responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Sarah Burgoyne responds to my email. Shazia Hafiz Ramji responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. natalie hanna responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email.

Ian Williams responds to a photograph of my home office: “Don’t you feel perpetually overwhelmed?”

“I saw the photo of your writing desk and wanted to close the door.”

*

When I repeat a story, it is because I am close to learning something new about it.

The willingness to explore an already familiar terrain. Freezing rain.

Rose barely notices. Our toddler, Aoife, remains unimpressed. Fixed, in a grimace.

My father’s boyhood story of his overactive dog, losing a leg to machinery. My father’s boyhood story of his overactive three-legged dog.

The snow and the driveway and the entire fabric of nature. Out of memory, out of sight. I will not leave the house.

When I repeat a story. What might I have missed.

Reading Kate Greenstreet, I’m held by the integrity of her collage and coherence. “All our bones, and the mountains.” Rereading Rosmarie Waldrop, the linear abstracts of her Blindsight. I am attempting, yet again, to describe.

Snowmen, sizzle. A break in the tide. Are we meant to apologize.

For the weather, I mean. The snow. A Canadian stereotype. I’m sorry.

*

A year ago, I wove a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair into a poem. In the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, a lock of her chestnut brown set under glass.

Mt. Holyoke, where Emily Dickinson was classmates with the Robertson sisters, far from their Glengarry County. Margaret Murray, who would go on to become a successful novelist, and Mary, called home by her father, for the sake of marriage. Mary, who became mother to novelist Ralph Connor, literary pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Gordon, who himself would become father and grandfather to novelists.

That I could write. That I could also write. As I am writing.

Sacred Emily. From Gertrude Stein’s 1913 notebook: “Foolish is foolish is.”

The first impulse with fresh snow: to make a mark upon it.

In an email, Samuel Ace writes: “Emily haunts the whole valley on that side of the river – from Amherst to South Hadley. There’s a specific New England interiority – brought on by the snow and the quiet of the woods – that I feel so strongly when I’m there. One has to scratch one’s way into being.”

St. Elmo (Gordon) Church, Glengarry

There is a framed poster in my father’s house announcing the opening of the Presbyterian Church at St. Elmo on July 20^th, 1864. The red brick and steeple stand on the hill just north of what is now the village of Maxville and as their congregation diminished as the population shifted, the church merged with St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Maxville in 1947. The church currently hosts two services a year—Communion and the Anniversary Service—down from the four a year I grew up with. This is my home church and one that still holds Sunday school rolls in the back with my father’s name next to a series of attendance stars; the same building of hardwood, musty floors my sister spends hours cleaning for services. Our September 29^th wedding is the third held at the church since 1972 and the first since 1990. The website at Archeion.ca holds a brief history of the church:

The congregation of Gordon Presbyterian Church in St. Elmo, Ontario traces its origins to c.1826 when the Presbyterian settlers in the area then known as the Indian Lands community began construction of a frame church in the 17th Concession. The first minister to conduct services in the church was the Rev. Archibald Connel, the minister in Martintown. In 1838, the Rev. Daniel Clark of Inverness, Scotland, arrived and served as missionary to the area for a year, before accepting a call as minister. In 1844, Rev. Clark and many of the families in the Indian Lands community broke away from the Presbyterian Church of Canada in Connection with the Church of Scotland and joined the Free Presbyterian Church. Disputes over ownership of the church and manse between the two groups continued until 1860 when it was given to the group in connection with the Church of Scotland. As a result the “Free Church” Presbyterians along with the minister, Rev. Daniel Gordon (who replaced Rev. Clark in 1853), began construction of a new church on the19th Concession. This was opened in 1864. The name of this community at the 19th Concession became known as St. Elmo in the early 1880s, and the church became known as the “Gordon Church”. At the time of Church Union in 1925, the congregation of the Gordon Church, St. Elmo, voted to remain with The Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The St. Elmo Church, as well as the 395-acre farm I grew up on, exist on what is known as the “Indian Lands,” a swath that boundaries north from the Ottawa River all the way south to the St. Lawrence, stretching two miles across the border of Glengarry and Stormont Counties. These were large open spaces that would later become parts of the Province of Ontario, but were previously Mohawk lands before they were pushed south by European settlement to end up in the St. Lawrence River at St. Regis. Originally leased by the British for a 99-year term, it was formally “acquired” by the British in 1840 and parceled out as land grants. Some land went to settlers who had been living and working their plots for years and others were settled for the first time. Arriving from Scotland somewhere between 1821 and 1840 with his parents and five siblings, John McLennan received lot 3, concession 7 Roxborough as a land grant in 1845, the same land where my father has lived since he was six months old. For reasons I have yet to determine, John and his family moved next door by 1860, into a farm that was passed down the line to my great-grandfather, and was later run by my grandfather and one of his elder brothers. Upon his marriage, my grandfather John Duncan McLennan lived briefly in the log house across the road from the homestead, before returning to lot 3, concession 7 with infant Douglas in tow. My father has lived there since, in the farmhouse where my sister Kathy and I were raised.

Originally marked out in 1770, Glengarry Country originally stretched all the way north to the Ottawa River, unlike the current northern border just south of Highway 417, making it the oldest county in Ontario and (I’ve heard say) the last in the province to receive telephone service. One of the features of Glengarry is that immigration actually began before the Loyalist surge came north across the American border. When the county was originally founded on what is now considered to be settled by the largest concentration of Scottish immigration in the country, their boundaries also included also the eastern half of Stormont County and parts of Quebec. Marianne McLean, in her magnificent The People of Glengarry: Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), writes:

Between 1773 and 1853, close to 3,500 people emigrated to Glengarry County from a few districts in the Scottish Highlands. The emigrants came principally from the districts of Lochiel, Glengarry, Knoydart, and Glenelg, in the mountainous western rim of mainland Inverness-shire. Many of the clansmen of this region had been fervent supporters of the Jacobite cause in 1745; the Camerons of Lochiel and Macdonells of Glengarry followed Prince Charles Edward to bitter defeat at Culloden. All the inhabitants of western Inverness suffered the full effect of the military suppression of the revolt and then endured the government’s efforts to “civilize” the region in the generation that followed.

Maxville came later, invented through the rail line between Ottawa and Coteau Landing in 1881. The new village caused a small radius of hamlets to diminish, some into non-existence, including Tayside, Dominionville, Athol and St. Elmo, which is now only marked by the church building and small cemetery. My father’s maternal grandfather was once postmaster at Athol which was two miles north of St. Elmo and their farmhouse still stands, although Athol itself now no more than a roadsign at the intersection. After the church break-ins at St. Elmo during the early 1980s, the few valuables that were left in the building were removed and placed with the rest in my father’s house. The silver, a clock, this framed poster.

My father holds keys to a padlock most likely older than he is and points to a brick at the front of the church marked by the son of one of the parishioners marked and placed during the original construction. The musty smell that greets you at the door, the smell of a breath held in the building for years, perhaps decades. Every summer, opening the church to air out for upcoming services, the stale winter air pushed out into surrounding fields. Former paint-chipped ceiling suggesting colour long washed white; I remember the remnants of colour, swirling blues and light reds. I could talk of playing the church organ in my early teens, feet pumping pedals to keep the air moving, or singing once or twice in the choir, while wearing my grandfather’s robe. Since I left home at nineteen, a lawnmower engine was adapted to fit into the back of the organ and my father now rents a small generator for the sake of sound and overhead light.

Growing up, I read the novels of Ralph Connor, pen name for the Rev. Charles Gordon, son of Rev. Daniel Gordon, who spent his first decade living with his family in the St. Elmo manse. As Ralph Connor, he was one of Canada’s bestselling authors with sales of over a million copies. Some of his best-known books were composed on the area, written from his early life in the county, from The Man From Glengarry (1901), The Girl From Glengarry (1933) and, a particular favourite, Glengarry School Days (1902), which fictionalised the author’s early years, set around the church and the church hall, as well as the swimming hole at Hugh Fisher’s farm, another mile or two north. In many ways, discovering these books in the farmhouse as a pre-teen offered the possibility of writing. Even if I wasn’t aware of any contemporary writers when I lived on the farm, the fact that a writer had come from the area, writing books on the area and highly successful at that, presented the option in ways that nothing else was. Another novel of Connor’s, Torches Through the Bush (1934), fictionalized some of the story of the religious revivals and conflicts that led to the construction of the St. Elmo Church, based upon stories he had heard from his father. In Royce MacGillivray and Ewan Ross’ A History of Glengarry (Belleville ON: Mika Publishing Company, 1979), they write:

The Rev. Mr. Gordon’s congregation in the old church which we have just described was divided by the controversy, which was troubling Canadian Presbyterians at this time, between the Free Church of Scotland and the state Church of Scotland. Mr. Gordon had been a firm supporter of the Free Church since his student days. When he and his Free Church followers lost control of the old church building, they built a new brick church which has been known since the year of its opening as the Gordon Free Church, near the manse at St. Elmo. For the minister, it must have been convenient to have the manse and the church at last close to each other, but for the children it meant the end of such exhilarating rides to church as that described in the 9^th chapter of The Man from Glengarry. The work of building the church was in progress in 1863, and the opening ceremonies were held on 20 July 1864.

So much of the talk of the church is a talk of its origins, and yet so little has been said on what has happened since. A building still used and utilized, a building that still holds like an anchor on the small rise at St. Elmo, deep in the county. In the chapbook-length History of Gordon Church St. Elmo (1988), the late Rev. Wallace MacKinnon provides one of the more contemporary portraits of the church:

At present, Gordon Church Congregation consists of fifteen households and thirty-five communicant members. The financial situation is good and the congregation oversubscribes its allocation for the General Assembly, maintains in good condition the two Church buildings and the cemetery, and gives at least one bursary, and some years two, to theological students from Glengarry Presbytry, amounting to 150-300 dollars a year from the Hugh Cameron Memorial Bursary Fund. In addition, one of the members is giving an annual memorial gift of $500.00 to the Presbyterian College, Montreal, for academic awards or prizes. The church was completely redecorated in 1982. In 1987 five special services were held in Gordon Church: in June, a Communion Service; in August, a Memorial Service and an Anniversary Service observing the 150^th anniversary of the Congregational Church built in 1837 and now the Church Hall; and the 123^rd Anniversary Service for Gordon Church in September. The Maxville and District Masonic Lodge held a special service of worship in Gordon Church as part of the 100^th Anniversary of the Masonic Lodge on the last Sunday of September.