Writing the Okanagan by George Bowering

Author:George Bowering [Bowering, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Memoir, Okanagan, British Columbia, Vernon, Osoyoos, Peachland, Poetry, Prose, Fiction, George Bowering, Collected works, Collection, Family
ISBN: 978-0-88922-999-0
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rhode Island Red

Trust me, this will take only a fraction of the time it would take to write and read a novel, but there will be order somewhere here, faint order, human traces anyway.

If you were not in the southern Okanagan Valley in the fifties you will not be able to picture the scene I am picturing. But you can say this on the other hand, that no matter how well we think we are remembering scenes of thirty years ago, say, whenever we are given the opportunity to check those memories, we are invariably wrong, sometimes a long way off.

So I will have to do a little description, I guess, at least to get this going. The consolation will be that we will no longer have to listen to the voice delivering the goods in sentences that start with the first person singular pronoun. I like pronouns, but that one is not my favourite. Description, then. But be aware, won’t you, that description will not bring you the authentic look or feel of the place, either.

We are three miles, because they still used miles then, south of the village of Lawrence. Lawrence could have been called a town, but the people who lived there persisted in calling it a village because it was cheaper when it came to taxes. No one could tell you how that worked, but everyone seemed to think that it made good sense.

Three miles south of Lawrence, let us say, in November. The orchards are just beginning to turn skeletal, the season’s fruit picking finished weeks ago. Just across Highway 97 there is a funny-looking apple tree. It owns perhaps only seven dry curled brown leaves, but there are apples hanging all over it. These are over­ripe apples, brown and wrinkled. If the orchardist working on his tractor up by the house were to drive down here and bump the tree’s trunk with the front of his machine, he would find himself in a rain of apples that were useless except to the health of the soil covered right now with slick leaves.

He would probably also notice the chicken hurling its head at the pebbly ground beside the blacktop, and carry it under his arm back up the dirt road to the home yard.

There is no fence between this orchard and the highway. Fences are only a nuisance around the kind of farm on which workers are always moving ladders or trailers covered with props or empty boxes. As every orchardist along the road has said at least once, you don’t need a fence to keep apple trees in, and any fruit thieves that come in uninvited at night are going to have to get used to rock salt in the ass. The kids around Lawrence figured that every orchardist had a shotgun loaded with rock salt or worse standing by the back porch door with the baseball bats.

Most families had chickens in their yards in those days. Even in town, where people would make

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.