Dancing In a Jar Read Online Free PDF Page B

that when her sister died they sent her to Halifax to be embalmed. I nearly gagged on my tea but acted suitably impressed at this fact. I never know what the afternoon will bring.
    You will be pleased to know I’ve become a dedicated churchgoer, although maybe not in the way you envision. Every evening I have been accompanying our landlady, Mrs. Giovannini, to church to light a candle and say a prayer for a few men from the community. Along the way, we call upon a few others and eventually the children of one of the men, a Mr. Louis Etchegary.
    There is so little opportunity here that some of the men have taken work smuggling liquor by boat from the French islands close to here into New York. In fact, the tots of Glenlivet you both have in the evening could well be thanks to these men! They have been doing this during much of the Prohibition and have been careful to not find themselves inside U.S. territory. However, on this last trip they weren’t quite so lucky. Apparently, their ship, called the Which One , strayed inside the limit while making a handover. The Coast Guard arrested the whole lot of them and they are now sitting in jail in the Bronx. It appears that the fight to end the Prohibition is not going out without some fireworks!
    The Etchegary children lost their mother a few years ago, so you can imagine there are lots of prayers joined with theirs when we go to church in the evening.
    I have been adding to my language glossary too. This week Mrs. G asked me to “Sing out to Walter. I’m after running out of flour.” That meant I was to tell Walter to go to the store for his mother. Their language is peppered with the prettiest kinds of words.
    I will write again very soon. Don always reminds me we have to catch the mail boat before it leaves or else you’ll be worried. But please don’t worry about us. Although the place is rough, the people have been very sweet .
    Love to you both,
Urla
    St. Lawrence, Newfoundland
    November 18, 1933
    Dear Mother and Daddy,
    Wind has delayed the mail boat, so I thought I would send you another quick note today. It might keep the mail boat down, but not the women of this town. Mrs. G declared this morning “It’s a grand day for a line of clothes.” The whole town has clothes drying, and flying, horizontally on long lines and the town looks like it is celebrating something.
    I laughed at Daddy’s comment that I must be growing gills from eating so much fish up here. While this is primarily a fishing village, the fishing has been so poor and the prices so low that not many are fishing right now. But everyone has a flock of sheep, pigs, and cows, so we have plenty of lamb, pork, and beef. Some days we have duck or ptarmigan. And everything is eaten with potatoes. Don says many of the men who work with him go through a sack of potatoes a week.
    Our real treat is cream of wheat in the morning, but only if it has been smuggled in from Saint Pierre. If you have to buy it in the shops here it is sixty-five cents a package. Oranges are three for twenty-five cents, so you can imagine how few of them are eaten.
    On the other hand, you can get a pair of wool socks for sixty cents. Everyone here wears all homemade and homespun woollens. They shear their own sheep, spin their own wool, and knit up a storm. I’m surely the only woman in this country who doesn’t know how to knit but I’m intent on rectifying that soon.
    Don is working so hard at the mine and I am so proud of him. Since he arrived they have built a two truck garage, a workshop, a house for the crusher and one for a compressor. I’m not sure what all of this is, but he seemed pleased!
    They are very short of medicines here and I’m wondering if you could send some things for them to keep out at the mine site? I told Don I would ask you. They need two large bottles of iodine, two large bottles of Argyrol, and six medicine droppers. It will be wonderful if you could send those out and Don will reimburse you later.
    I