Verandah Talk

The Street was not a long one. From the verandah it ran down a gentle hill to the bridge over the Magog River. The water made a great sound as it flowed over the power-house dam and between the steep cliffs of the gorge, and it was a pleasant cooling thing to hear for those who sat outside on a summer evening. 

After supper on August evenings the family moved to the verandah. There we watched the traffic going downtown or said good-evening to the people we knew walking by. Meanwhile there were remarks to be made about the household and happenings in the district. Or it was good just to sit, with the family content to be together without expressing any sentiment about it. Perhaps there was more purpose in this than in the weighty matters the newspapers write about. But we never stopped to consider that. 

It was one of those old wooden houses accommodating two families, so often seen in Canadian towns. Lumber was plentiful and cheap in those days and they built accordingly. Rooms as high as two modern apartments. Every room square, it is true, but just the thing for those who like being a family and bringing up children. 

There wasn’t much to do on an ordinary evening in Great Forks. You might play bridge with your neighbor or go to the lodge, or go to the movie if you hadn’t seen it. Even if you had, there was almost as much fun speculating about how the next episode of “The Crimson Stain” or “The Perils of Thunder Mountain” would come out as in seeing it. Or if you hadn’t a car, you just sat on the verandah and were very content doing it. We didn’t work much mischief, just sitting, that I know of.

It was dusty before they paved the street, the verandah being four yards from the roadway. But by August the morning-glory vine had climbed the strings tied up for it and a very snug corner it made too. The bees used that vine for years, and if you plucked a blossom and sucked the end of its trumpet you could get a very sweet morsel of honey for your trouble. It was a snug corner, too, to watch a thunderstorm from—if it wasn’t exactly over the town and wind didn’t blow too hard. The black thunderheads would pile up over the shoulders of the Brome hills and everyone could express a little nervousness at the sheet-lightning and feel brave about it, though anyone knows that sheet-lightning never hurt anything yet but a picnic. 

I’ve been in less pleasant spots.

As a youngster, I favored the big red rocking chair most. With a straight pin, most satisfactory drawings could be scratched in the paint on the arms of it.

But my mother used mostly to sit in the rocking chair and she wasn’t much for pictures drawn on the furniture. She just sat quiet, not rocking much because she generally sewed at her embroidery, the area of pattern she had reached carefully stretched by two small wooden hoops placed on inside the other with the cloth between and her needle busy with colored threads. It was the French-Canadian families who rocked and chewed gum as fast as they rocked. We used to feel superior about it. But I don’t know why.

We two kids used to sit on the edge of the verandah. You could pluck blades of grass when you leaned over and then either blow a screech on them or split them in two halves with a thumbnail, which is very hard to do. But for competitive purposes, the best thing was to put the stem of a dandelion in your mouth and wiggle the splits into curls against the end of your tongue.

When grandma came from next door to be with us, we all got up and rearranged ourselves, though most times it wasn’t a bit necessary. But grandma was a great favorite.

Father generally came out of the house last, letting the screen-door slam behind him. Flies and mosquitoes were a nuisance in the hot weather, though that isn’t the point. It was no more trouble to close the screen-door than to let it slam. 

Father stopped and lighted his pipe of tobacco after he had banged the door—scratching the match down the frame. Between the paint-bubbles blown by the heat which I used burst with my thumb and father’s match-scratching, mother managed never to run out of something to say at that point.

Although he’d done it for years, father always sort of apologized for not sitting out with us. He’d do it with the air of a man struck by an idea and rather surprised at it, though I can’t remember the time when I didn’t know exactly what he was going to say. “Well, I guess I’ll go down to the studio for a little while.” He was a photographer, but it wasn’t so much his enjoying himself down at the studio with his photographs as his saying “a little while” when he knew that he wouldn’t be home till eleven o’clock at night, that ruffled my mother’s composure. It was the Canadian in her, I guess, that got annoyed at him not saying what he meant, though it didn’t really upset her anyways as long as he was happy.

It was the same common sense that asked him, “Well, why don’t you advertise?” whenever business was poor, which it was most of the time no matter how much attention he gave it. Father always said something that didn’t answer the question. It was the artist in him.

But there was annoyance in any of us when he went off down the sidewalk with the modest way of his pride about him, just so long as he was doing what he wanted to, which wasn’t as often as with others who are luckier.

As a kid I used to get a quarter from him to buy soft drinks before he left and that used to blunt the finer feelings somewhat, though as I rushed off up to the store on the corner I generally resolved to say his name in capitals when it was come to in the prayer my sister and I had to say before getting bed. The times I forgot I don’t think mattered. 

Grandma lived with my aunt’s family, and being a good part Vermont would down opinions on their goings-on that that family wouldn’t have much cared to hear of. But in the long run the exchange was sort of kept at par between the two families, and somehow we all seemed to find ourselves on the same side whenever anything really went wrong—like sickness or a funeral or an opinion from someone who wasn’t relevant to either of our families—and I’m still of the opinion that most families turn out that way and pigheadedness proves a pretty low hurdle in the run of a lifetime.

Well, there we sat talking of the weather or rheumatism or school reports, which was the subject I liked least. And best of all were the nights they held the band-social in Portland Square at the top of our street. We didn’t even have to move from the verandah—“The Blue Danube” or the overture to “William Tell” with the thunderstorm in middle of it coming down the summer air in all their harmonies. And the citizens of the town went up to the Square in an endless procession, and most everyone a stranger. And I’d go up to the park and buy ice-cream cones for everyone and have had a shrewd lick at each one of them before I got back to the verandah.

It wasn’t the same after grandma died, but we still sat out nights and talked of her mostly, exaggerating her virtues so you wouldn’t have recognized her three weeks later for the same person.

And now here’s my father still going down to the studio “for a little while”—and meaning what he says, for his legs aren’t getting any younger and rather prefer to avoid Frontenac Hill if they can get away with it. But mother won’t know he means it these days. She’s dead too and we don’t care to sit out on the verandah much.

And here it is being written about. I don’t suppose many people will care one way or another, or think it’s much to write about if they ever do get as far as reading it. But my mind sort of takes a contrary cast when it gets up against such attitudes and I dare say if these same people wrote down their happiest memories, they wouldn’t be so far different from what’s being written here.

But that doesn’t matter much either—as long as we have them.

For my part I think mine about as pleasant as a man can possess—as pleasant almost as reading or hearing something without Improvement in it.

But mention of something practical like Improvement gets all I’ve said into the realm of the poetic. Just by contrast. I meant to avoid it. I remind myself of the boulder that stood on the edge of Mr. Thorncomb’s lawn across from the house where we kids used it for climbing the Matterhorn or shooting at stagecoaches from. It had been left by the Ice Age. Nothing grandiose. Eight foot by six, at the outside. Just sort of a symbol of what neighborhood grew up with—like the Book of Genesis. Nothing at all, when you come to think of it now, commensurate with the litigation of old Mr. Thorncomb set going when they went ahead and widened the street over it. He claimed it was politics. Whether it was or wasn’t, I wouldn’t know. But it took a court order before they got the boulder out of him. However, everyone lost their front lawn, eventually, including the trees. Clear up the street.

It’s a great Improvement.