Wildwood. Elinor Florence

      I lifted my eyes from the page and gazed around the room, feeling as if I had been transported through a wormhole back in time. So my great-aunt had chosen this house herself, and everything in it. I could almost hear the Irish lilt in her voice and feel her joyful presence all around me like a warm glow.

      I closed the book reverently and replaced it on the shelf. Just as one resisted the temptation to eat an entire box of chocolates at once, I would put this diary away and savour every word.

      And that was Day One.

      Three hundred and sixty-four days to go.

      7

      August

      As I reached over my head to place the last china bowl on the top shelf, I winced. Every muscle in my body was throbbing, but the house was now as clean as soap, water, vinegar, lemon juice, and elbow grease could make it.

      I had cleaned only the rooms we would use: the main floor, staircase, upstairs hallway, and master bedroom. I had decided never to use the upstairs bathroom for bathing, since that would involve carrying buckets of water up and down the stairs.

      In the past three weeks I had wiped all the wooden furniture repeatedly with damp rags and washed the wooden floors three times. I staggered back and forth with pail after pail of muddy water, the bottom thick with silt. I dragged the heavy Oriental carpet outside and hung it over the clothesline, beating it with a broom until my shoulders ached. Bridget had tried to help me, too, whacking the carpet with a wooden spoon.

      Most of the time she amused herself. That was one advantage of being an only child with a solitary soul. She sat on the back steps and played with Fizzy while I kept an eye on her. Once I looked up to see the steps empty and ran outside to find her around the corner. “I’m right here, Mama. I’m watching Fizzy trying to catch a grasshopper.”

      An hour later, as I walked across the yard to use the toilet, I heard her calling me in a frantic voice.

      “I’m here, Bridget!” I assured her.

      She followed me and waited outside the toilet door. We were still nervous about being out of each other’s sight.

      And no wonder. Every time I glanced outside, my heart quailed. There wasn’t a sign of civilization, not so much as a telephone pole in sight. I tried to focus on my housework to avoid the panic that rose whenever I recalled our complete isolation.

      Now I poured myself a cup of steeped tea from the Old English teapot on the stove and collapsed into the rocking chair. My arms and legs were as weak as sock puppets because I hadn’t done any real exercise since Bridget was born. Still, the pain was worth the gain. I surveyed the kitchen with satisfaction.

      I had scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees, delighted to see an attractive checkerboard of light and dark green squares emerge, wreathed with a border of red, yellow, and blue flowers. Old Joe had referred to it as battleship linoleum and I could see why. It was as hard and shiny as steel.

      Next I scoured every square inch of the fir cabinets, which had been darkened by years of smoke. I found an old tin of Brasso polish in the pantry and made the knobs and hinges shine like the buttons on a general’s uniform.

      When Bridget grew tired of sitting on the steps, she came inside and helped me arrange the bone-handled cutlery in the kitchen drawers, now lined with crisp new shelf paper from Canadian Tire.

      Curiously, we found a chased silver baby spoon with a curved handle, engraved with an M. It must have belonged to my great-aunt when she was a child.

      As I sipped my tea, I gazed with satisfaction at the sparkling kitchen windows. After removing the top layer of grime with soapy water, I had scraped off the hardened insect spots with a kitchen knife and finished by polishing the windows with vinegar and newspapers. The rippling effect of the old glass gave the landscape outside an otherworldly appearance.

      The lace curtains had been stiff with dirt until I boiled them on the stove with a capful of bleach and hung them from the clothesline that ran between two poplars. They dried quickly in the afternoon breeze. As I took down the armfuls of snowy fabric, I remembered the term “lace curtain Irish,” a derogatory term used by the English to denote the working class. I wondered why they would criticize anything so beautiful.

      With the windows cleaned and the curtains washed, the kitchen was lighter and even a couple of degrees warmer. The bright afternoon sunlight turned the creamy walls the colour of unsalted butter. The lace curtains cast a faint pattern of fairy flower shadows. The windows were propped open with stones, allowing the fresh air to fill the room. From the yard came a chorus of melodic twittering and cheeping.

      A piercing scream from the dining room shattered my sense of peace. I leaped to my feet, a muffled exclamation of pain escaping as my sore muscles contracted, and rushed through the door. Bridget was crouched on the floor below the windowsill, her face contorted with terror.

      Gazing curiously through the window were three adult deer and a small spotted fawn. Their big ears, twitching back and forth, were larger than their dainty, pointed faces.

      “Oh, look at the deer!” I had never seen animals in the wild, never imagined that they would be so tame. “Those are deer, like the ones in the movie Bambi! You remember Bambi, don’t you?”

      She raised her eyes above the windowsill. Together we stared at the deer, and they stared back at us, their eyes deep and liquid and mysterious.

      “I thought Bambi was just a cartoon,” Bridget said tearfully. “You never told me deers were real people.”

      After the deer wandered away, I returned to the kitchen and finished my tea. There was still one last chore. I had cleaned the cream enamel and silver chrome on the stove, and now I was going to black the surface using a bottle from the back kitchen with a red-and-white label reading “Black Silk Stove Polish.” I set to work, rubbing the surface of the stove with a damp rag, admiring the way the black metal gleamed like ebony.

      Not counting the shabby duplex belonging to the Sampsons, I had lived in only one real house before, sold after my parents died. I vaguely remembered a pleasant adobe bungalow surrounded by palm trees, with colourful Navajo rugs and a grand piano. This house couldn’t be more different — yet there was some deep sense of comfort that felt the same.

      As I polished, I heard the unfamiliar sound of an engine. It grew louder every minute, a deep roaring accompanied by the sound of swishing, like a giant broom sweeping a giant floor. I ran to the back door and looked out.

      On the edge of the grain field across the creek, a red monster rolled past. I had never seen a combine harvester, but obviously this was one of them — a large, square machine with a rotating paddlewheel on the front, sailing down the field like a Mississippi riverboat. The wheel pulled the plants toward it, feeding them into a line of sharp cutting blades underneath. The rear of the machine spewed out a shower of stalks that fell to the ground like a trail left by a huge golden slug.

      “Bridget, come and see!”

      She came to the doorway and slipped her hand into mine, fearfully.

      “That machine is called a combine. It cuts down the grain and separates the seeds from the straw. The seeds go into a big hopper, and the straw falls out behind.” I hoped that was correct. “Let’s walk over to the