True North by Jill Ker Conway

Author:Jill Ker Conway [Conway, Jill Ker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79733-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

7.

LEARNING TO WAIT

WHEN WE MOVED into what everyone called generically “The Farmhouse” in August 1965, the simply elegant white board and batten house, surrounded by lilacs, a sweep of lawn, and an ancient apple orchard, was an island of settled life on a three-hundred-acre construction site. The construction schedule for Founder’s College and the library was several weeks behind the planned date of completion, and the bulldozers and backhoes were already at work behind construction walls on the second college and a large auditorium, which would eventually serve a school of fine and performing arts. The site was a flat piece of fertile farmland covering a full section running north and south between Finch and Steeles avenues. The Black Creek meandered through the back part of the campus, and created a steep- sided small ravine at the back of our farmhouse, which was set a mile and a half back from the main road approaching the campus.

I’d hired an efficient German immigrant housekeeper, who turned out to be very much a city type, and, though an excellent cook, spent much of her time climbing up on chairs and shrieking at the sight of the mice which were a part of life in a farmhouse with an 1812 unlined earth cellar. I needed a reliable backstop in the house, since I now drove twelve miles south to the University of Toronto each day, making time to stop for the long list of errands needed for a household in the country with no shops or services nearby.

The tension mounted in the white frame house as an early fall heat wave set in, the water supply ran out, and the plumbing began to display cranky country quirks. I left it all every morning to go to my sweltering office at the University of Toronto, but John had no such retreat. The ventilation system was not yet functioning in his office, and an erratic power supply deprived a man who could only write by typing with his left hand of the ability to produce drafts of memoranda and letters. The dictation which should have remedied the situation failed to be transcribed, because the secretary first hired by York’s fledgling personnel department turned out to be deeply neurotic and inclined to paranoid visions.

Somehow we struggled through the ceremonies for the opening of the campus, improvising supplies of water for the farmhouse, which was the only site for entertaining guests, but shortly afterward the cook and the secretary were fired, and drastic measures were required to deal with the erratic plumbing. John’s life was made miserable by the campaigns of faculty and administrators opposed to the entire college idea he had been recruited to define and shape, and the perpetual frustration of an unfinished office and a nonfunctioning residence began to fray his nerves and exacerbate his usual late autumn depression.

Into this stage-set for tragicomedy marched a personal guardian angel in the ample shape of my third effort to hire a suitable housekeeper. In the interview at the employment agency, I explained to Elizabeth Sisnaiske that we lived in an old farmhouse.

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