an ancient springtime that took her back to the earliest scenes of affection. She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she’d lost.
Her mother, frantic about money, sold the library a year later to Gladys Pyke, owner of Ye Olde Book Shoppe onGilmour Street. They moved to the small town of Almonte, where everything was cheaper, including their rented bungalow on the highway. Among the books her mother packed up and sold were a Japanese marine book tied together with shoelaces that showed coastlines and islands and clouds and rain, and a book about Japanese artists who would go out into the weather and observe it, absorbing it in every level of their being, before coming back inside to paint.
La fille qui était laide
Eleanor never found. It must have come from the library, her mother said. It must have been returned. But no librarian then or since had ever heard of the tale.
Finally, Eleanor went north herself, and now in the summer of 1975, a variation of the story was about to unfold in front of her eyes.
ON THE SHORTEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR , a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden steps to Pilot’s Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were. In her part of the Netherlands, the rolling and agricultural southeast, winds from the west brought a marvellous, sea-swept clarity, while from the east came all the dust of landlocked Europe. Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear.
On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father’s voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he’d made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock—houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barbershop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations. All the little and large efforts of settlement intrigued her. Down the shore from the old cemetery on Back Bay there used to be market gardens. Some of thelog buildings remained; it wasn’t impossible, with greenhouses, to produce melons and tomatoes in Yellowknife. We Dutch would have stopped at nothing, she thought, we would have turned this place into a northern garden. And that’s what pained her most about her Canadian father-in-law, how easily he’d given up on her. She remembered one of her father’s questions to “London Calling.” “What did you mean by the phrase ‘a month of Wednesdays’?” And the answer came over the air: “The expression is ‘a month of Sundays,’ but in the particular context ‘a month of Wednesdays’ made sense.” Her father-in-law wasn’t going to come after her, not in a month of Sundays, and not in a month of Wednesdays, either.
The man in the beret was Ralph Cody, she realized. She’d seen him around the station when he came in to do his book reviews. He folded his tripod and moved along Ingraham Drive, as it was fancifully called, since the narrow little roads on and around the Rock were more cow path than grand driveway. She’d read that the Ingraham of Ingraham Drive had been an early settler and hotel-builder who lost both feet and most of his fingers in a terrible boat accident on Great Bear Lake: fire then frostbite then amputation. All of these pioneer families were colourful, storied, and a diversion, Dido firmly believed, from the real story of the First Peoples, displaced and impoverished and now having their audience with Judge Berger, who wouldn’t be radical enough in his recommendations. That went without saying.
Dido turned 360 degrees to take in the west, north, east, south of Back Bay,
Her mother, frantic about money, sold the library a year later to Gladys Pyke, owner of Ye Olde Book Shoppe onGilmour Street. They moved to the small town of Almonte, where everything was cheaper, including their rented bungalow on the highway. Among the books her mother packed up and sold were a Japanese marine book tied together with shoelaces that showed coastlines and islands and clouds and rain, and a book about Japanese artists who would go out into the weather and observe it, absorbing it in every level of their being, before coming back inside to paint.
La fille qui était laide
Eleanor never found. It must have come from the library, her mother said. It must have been returned. But no librarian then or since had ever heard of the tale.
Finally, Eleanor went north herself, and now in the summer of 1975, a variation of the story was about to unfold in front of her eyes.
ON THE SHORTEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR , a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden steps to Pilot’s Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were. In her part of the Netherlands, the rolling and agricultural southeast, winds from the west brought a marvellous, sea-swept clarity, while from the east came all the dust of landlocked Europe. Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear.
On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father’s voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he’d made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock—houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barbershop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations. All the little and large efforts of settlement intrigued her. Down the shore from the old cemetery on Back Bay there used to be market gardens. Some of thelog buildings remained; it wasn’t impossible, with greenhouses, to produce melons and tomatoes in Yellowknife. We Dutch would have stopped at nothing, she thought, we would have turned this place into a northern garden. And that’s what pained her most about her Canadian father-in-law, how easily he’d given up on her. She remembered one of her father’s questions to “London Calling.” “What did you mean by the phrase ‘a month of Wednesdays’?” And the answer came over the air: “The expression is ‘a month of Sundays,’ but in the particular context ‘a month of Wednesdays’ made sense.” Her father-in-law wasn’t going to come after her, not in a month of Sundays, and not in a month of Wednesdays, either.
The man in the beret was Ralph Cody, she realized. She’d seen him around the station when he came in to do his book reviews. He folded his tripod and moved along Ingraham Drive, as it was fancifully called, since the narrow little roads on and around the Rock were more cow path than grand driveway. She’d read that the Ingraham of Ingraham Drive had been an early settler and hotel-builder who lost both feet and most of his fingers in a terrible boat accident on Great Bear Lake: fire then frostbite then amputation. All of these pioneer families were colourful, storied, and a diversion, Dido firmly believed, from the real story of the First Peoples, displaced and impoverished and now having their audience with Judge Berger, who wouldn’t be radical enough in his recommendations. That went without saying.
Dido turned 360 degrees to take in the west, north, east, south of Back Bay,
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