Crabapples and a Rainy Saturday Afternoon

AS A KID, I WAS overly fascinated with keys—not the jangly kinds that unlock doors and secret diaries and stash boxes—the kind you find on antique cash registers, typewriters, and adding machines. For whatever tactile pleasure these mechanical devices provided I may never understand, but I know that I still love the clunky sounds they make.

Indeed, regular access to an IBM Selectric in high school gave my fixation purpose and I soon became a champion touch typist thus solidifying my future as an office worker.

But years earlier, at age 11, I’d become so enamoured with my mother’s portable Sears typewriter with its forest green keys and distinct scent of inked ribbon, that I hounded her to use it every chance I got. The typewriter was latched into a hard carrying case and tucked away in the closet under the stairs to my bedroom. Its inaccessibility mocked me for it was tantalizingly within reach, but forbidden to use.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in 1975, busy with bushels of crabapples—washing, stewing, straining pulp—after years of relentless pleading and begging and cajoling (tactics that simply added up to whining) my mother dragged the typewriter from the closet, unlocked the case, and placed the machine on the kitchen table then turned back sharply to her fruit preserves.

I could scarcely believe my luck! What an awesome turn of events! With luck like this, I would have my ears pierced before I turned 16!

I rolled a blank piece of paper into the carriage and got straight to work.

The end result, “How to Aggravate Your Mother on a Saturday Afternoon When It Rains” listed seven activities that would irritate any mother, but specifically one immersed in the various stages of making homemade jelly and fruit juice as mine was.

I lifted the first three techniques directly experiments in one of my sisters’ books “Fun with Science.” The remaining four techniques were fictitious, far-fetched, and increasingly silly.

This piece of work I saw as childish, became significant to me because it was my first poem, it found an audience in my mother and aunt, and I had gained access to equipment otherwise prohibited from using. But, what catches me today is the underlying theme of landscape that resurfaces in poems and essays I’ve written, such as these two lines:

The land left handprints on her body
in ways she had not counted on

The poem is reminiscent of a specific time and place, of a season, of home.

The harvest season, too, stayed with me: Even 25 years after moving away, it makes its way into my writing.

I have a photograph of me, age 11, standing beneath the trees in full bloom, white-pink blossoms wearing a crocheted vest over a blouse and checked seer-sucker pants with my favourite crepe-soled shoes.

Later, those trees provided respite as I grew into and out of adolescence; I often stared out my bedroom window at those crabapple trees and wished I were elsewhere—New York, Los Angeles, Toronto. I watched the trees through the seasons. I watched flowers bud, then bloom, and lastly blow away.

crabapple trees give birth to pale pink blossoms
innkeeper to robins sparrows

Our property also held apple trees that birthed green apples so tart we had to shake salt on them before each bite. To appease our childish taste buds, mother cooked them into chunky apple sauce on which we sprinkled brown sugar and cinnamon.

We had a vegetable garden, too that I also captured in poetry:

She has long forgotten the pleasure of snapping
peas from a vine, cracking open a pre-dinner sweet

A rhubarb patch at the edge of our property line where it butted against the neighbour’s and almost three decades later, I remember how we plucked the ripened stalks and carried arms full to be cut, sugared, and cooked into delightful desserts.

a footpath through cedars to

a gnarled pear tree barren
untended raspberry bushes
a lively strawberry patch

Landscape permeates my work. It’s always present. And while I can trace the impetus of my creative writing habit to one, rainy Saturday and the need to feel the tapping of typewriter keys beneath my fingertips, the debt I owe is not to circumstances of the rainy weather, or the autumn season, or my mother for granting me permission to use her typewriter. The debt I owe is to semi-rural countryside of my childhood that continues to feed my imagination.