Sanctuary Line Read Online Free PDF

a combination of practicality and panache into a modestly eccentric Canadian world when she left northern Ohio and crossed the lake in order to marry my uncle. She brought other things as well to a family that had been content to muddle along in the fieldstone farmhouse their ancestors had built two generations before. She brought ambition. And she brought taste.
    There was almost nothing she couldn’t do with the interior or exterior of a house, or with the gardens surrounding that house. According to my mother, my aunt painstakingly restored the “important” architectural features installed by their colonial forebears – she had respect, after all, and a sense of history – and ruthlessly disposed of those features she considered to be unimportant. She removed all the flowered wallpaper and painted the rooms pale yellow with white trim. She ripped up the linoleum and had the wide pine floors beneath sanded and varnished. She dug out all of my grandmother’s spirea and forsythia bushes and planted roses, lilies, delphinium, and other gorgeous flowers and shrubs whose names only she knew. She took the quilts off the beds, hung the best ones on the walls, and threw those that were too worn into the trash. She had the old lane graded and filled in with white gravel. She had the lawns rolled.
    Hers was not a conventional beauty. She was tall, almost rangy, and her face was slightly angular, but part of my mother’s admiration for her was attached to what she did with what she had been given: even at her most casual she exhibited a variety of style no one in rural Ontario had been able to muster. My mother admired my aunt’s mind, as well. All those years on the farm she had kept the books, and began, right after she took up residence, to “knock some sense,” as my mother would have it, into my uncle’s head. The one thing that she couldn’t do was make tomatoes and strawberry plants bear fruit twice in one season. It took my uncle’s lust for risk, and his scientific mind — a mind you could say I have inherited — to do that. But would this have even happened without his wife? My mother thinks not. Sadie was the daughter of the more successful American branch of the family, she once told me, implying that, as such, she brought all the expectations of their flourishing fruit empire with her across the lake.
    About two years ago my mother announced that it was time for her to move to The Golden Field. When I asked her why — she was only seventy-three and in good health, so I was genuinely shocked — she looked surprised, then simply said, “There are people there.” I was a bit hurt by this; we both knew that I would begin to work at the sanctuary a month or so later and had no intention of living anywhere else. I was close to tears when we were packingup the few things she took with her, though I said nothing. My mother, however, did say something as she was making her last exit out the door leading to the porch. “Now you’ll have your own life,” she remarked. I sense that my mother wanted me to lean more toward crowds, or to become part of a community. Perhaps she was worried about me leaving the university faculty where, for ten years, I had participated in the easily accessible, though in my case not particularly intimate, social world that existed there. Looking out the back bedroom window that rainy day, though, when I had returned from settling my mother into her three small rooms, I found the flat, opaque wash covering the seemingly empty distant townships mildly comforting, as if it were a painting of my own character. I am a solitary, I thought. I cannot attend fringe festivals, protest marches, council meetings, or engage in any kind of team sport without feeling herded, trapped, and forced to perform. This was where I belonged.
    My mother’s corner apartment is on the ground level and has sliding doors that one can open in the warmer months for a breeze and gain access to a private patio. I