Maple Syrup Days

Although each summer they put on their best unexpected company smiles and Sunday manners, my maternal and fraternal families were not the best of friends.  But for their children, they shared no real common interests, lifestyles or backgrounds.  Mother’s side was citified, not wealthy but certainly comfortable, and as an only child she’d been raised on privilege and become accustomed to getting what she wanted.   She grew up in a proper Boston suburb and No was as foreign a word as Share to her.  She never heard the first and rarely did the second.

Daddy came from the near poverty of ten children and a widowed mother living a ragged life on a tumbledown farm in Nova Scotia.   They were not just countries but worlds apart - yet somehow this young, spoiled American woman and the handsome, hard- working young Canadian came together and married - each with their own expectations in tow and their differences overlooked.   They were both in their early thirties by then and the war was over.

“Easy enough to be past your prime and adrift,”  Nana Alice told me, “Easy enough to think that opposites attract and love really does conquer all.”

Nana Ruby said nothing at all.

While Nana Ruby and her eldest, a confirmed bachelor and stay-at-home son, still lived on the farm in the tiny village of Graywood, just beyond Annapolis Royal, outside the  Annapolis Valley, we were summer transients, arriving just past Memorial Day and leaving just before Labor Day.  We were not, precisely anyway, what the locals called From Away as my great grandmother had been born in the small and isolated fishing village and the cheerful red and white house overlooking the ocean had passed to Nana Alice. 

 “Just enough Canadian blood to get by, “ my grandmother used to tell me, “Not as good as some folks who live in The Valley but near enough.”

It was her long standing habit to invite friends and family to come and stay for a week or two over the course of the summer - the house was old but well equipped for company with its five bedrooms and a sunporch that could always sleep an extra kid or three and often a few dogs  - and Nana Alice kept a blackboard calendar in the massive kitchen to track arrivals and departures.  More often than not, my brothers and I were shipped off to The Valley if she overbooked but she always tried to make these visits coincide with my daddy’s two weeks of vacation.  He would arrive and stay on the island for a few days then we would drive to the farm.   Nana Alice was a stickler for keeping to her agenda and the system rarely went wrong except for when my Uncle Edge and his snooty wife arrived - as was their habit - early or late and always without prior notice.

We were coming back from the general store one bright, beautiful morning when we saw the long, low slung white Cadillac parked at the foot of the gravel drive.

“Oh, no,” Nana said darkly, “Say it isn’t so.”   All our heads turned to see what the trouble was and she gave a long and weary sigh.

“Lord have mercy,” she muttered under her breath, “With a full house already, where in damnation am I supposed to put them!”  She turned the old Lincoln into the drive and by the time we reached the house had put on her happy face.

“Edgecomb!” she practically trilled, “And Helen!  And a week early, imagine that!”

There were hugs all ‘round, the boys were summoned to carry suitcases, my mother dutifully put the tea kettle on.  Nana discreetly left the back door open to hide the blackboard - someone had added a crudely drawn frowny face to the little square that marked my uncle and aunt’s arrival and she visibly winced at the bright pink-chalked caricature - then my brothers and I were whisked away to our rooms to pack for a last minute visit to The Valley.

“No, no, of course it’s no trouble, not a bit of it,” she was assuring the newcomers, “We’ll just ship…well,  naturally I mean to say….send the children to Ruby’s a few days early.  Don’t give it a second thought, Helen, dear, there’s always room for a few more!”

And, as my daddy liked to say, quicker’n spit, we were on our way, neatly and hastily packed into the back seat of the old Continental with my mother at the wheel.    Nana Alice was left to make the new arrangements and my uncle and aunt remained blissfully unaware of the chaos they’d caused.

  

Nana Ruby welcomed us with open arms and oatmeal cookies.  The old farmhouse, as gray and wizened as its last two inhabitants, smelled of home cooking and lavender and shimmered in the afternoon sun. Nana and my mother exchanged a careful, cautious hug - two old enemies accepting a truce for the sake of the children – but each harboring a low opinion of the other as people from different worlds will.  My Uncle Byron, country to the core in his muddy workboots and faded overalls, in need of a shave and reeking of cows but open hearted and as kind a man as I’d ever known, stopped his wood chopping to give us and my mother a genuine embrace. 

 “Reckon you’ll stay the night, will you, Jan?”  he asked her.

“If you’ll have me,” my mother said with a tentative glance at Nana Ruby, “Though I think I could still make the last ferry.”

“No need,” my grandmother said shortly, “Supper’s on the stove.  You can sleep in Ivy’s room.”

“Then it’s settled,” Uncle Byron grinned, “Now who wants to see the new horse?”

There was always enough room in Nana Alice’s kitchen for a flock of women but here on the farm,  there was far less room and Nana Ruby didn’t take kindly to an extra pair of hands.   She was a tiny woman, nowhere near as ample as Nana Alice and not inclined to nonsense.   Even at a young age, I had some misgivings about leaving the two women alone.

“She raised ten children all alone,” my daddy had once told me gently, “It hardened her some.”

 It was a glorious week.   There were cows to be milked, chickens and pigs to be fed, gardens to be tended and a new litter of barn kittens to care for.  Evenings were spent by the pot bellied stove where Nana Ruby would quietly read her Bible and Uncle Byron would play his battered old accordion.

It wasn’t the idle, lazy maple syrup days of the island but it was still family, still home -and as the poet wrote, the only place they have to take you in.