Driving off the Map by Sharon MacFarlane

Author:Sharon MacFarlane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC022000
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 1997-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

We Didn’t Go to Len’s This Summer

The wife went to a summer school for three weeks, took an art class. I still don’t know why she went. Edna’s been painting for years and has done some real nice things. We’ve got two pictures hanging in the living room that she did of our girls. Judy and Karen. The girls both work in Calgary now but Edna copied from their old school photos. And her flower pictures are just beautiful, they’ve got one she did of a vase of lilacs hanging in the library in town. She took an art correspondence course last winter and I thought that would have been enough, but no, she sent off the money she’d saved up from the egg cheques and enrolled in this summer class. Turned our whole summer upside down, too.

The first two weeks in July, between spraying and summerfallowing, we always go to my brother Len’s cabin at Candle Lake. Haven’t missed a summer in over twenty years. Len and I like to fish and I always come home with a big bag of jackfish fillets for the deepfreeze. It’s a great beach for kids, too – our two and Len’s boys used to have a great time there when they were small. Edna and Len’s wife, Hazel, made a lot of good meals on that wood stove. Never a cross word between them all those years.

Well, anyway, when Edna came home and I went to meet her bus at Swift Current, I was way too early. Had to sit for an hour in that depot with a lot of dirty hippies. When the bus did get in, she was the last one off. She came down the steps, smiling and waving at me. She looked good, younger somehow. She was wearing a purple dress of some thin material, like cheesecloth. I was sure I’d never seen that before. She gave me a hug right there with everybody watching and said, “It was wonderful,” before I even had a chance to say a word. We got her luggage – two suitcases and a big package wrapped in brown paper and tied with heavy twine.

She talked all the way home, telling me about her teachers, her classmates, and what she’d learned. She didn’t seem worried when I told her the crops were really suffering, needed rain bad. Then I told her there was a letter from the girls but she said, “Oh, I phoned them when I was at school, we had a nice long talk.”

After we got home and had coffee, I pulled her onto my lap and kissed her. She had been gone a long time. She jumped up and I thought she was going to the bedroom, but she took the butcher knife from the rack on the wall and slit the twine on the big package. Edna took out paintings and propped them up against the kitchen cupboards. There must have been a dozen pictures. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

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