A House of Her Own
It wasn’t a tarpaper shack to Emily, it was Home. As far as she was concerned, it was Heaven. With her feet up on the front porch railing, relaxing at the close of a long day, she could still smell the tar. She’d insisted on a front porch, no matter how small the house. It didn’t matter; the smell would go, but her new home would stay.
Emily married North West Mounted Police Constable Earnest Harding almost a year ago, and spent the first six months of the union nagging her new husband to build her a house of her own.
He always said they couldn’t afford to buy their own property until he was older and been promoted. She always said she was a farm girl, he knew that very well when he married her. She needed her own house to grow her own plants inside during the long winters, and her own dirt to plant outside flowers in the spring.
She insisted with a little stamp of her foot that her fingers and toes would simply fall off from the lack of being able to sink into HER OWN DIRT!
Besides which, if she’d had to live in that little tiny bedroom off her sour and grim mother-in-law’s kitchen one moment longer, she surely didn’t know how she’d have held her tongue!
It was late summer of 1905, the day of Emily’s seventeenth birthday.
Earnest finally promised to build this little house one day last winter. Emily had suddenly burst outside in her shawl one bright morning, looked around the large yard snow-covered yard, and then ran across the street to the line of young trees on the hillside, looking for a windfall branch.
After looking around the base of the third tree, she found a strong enough stick and ran back to the wintry yard. She began carving lines into the crisp February snow on the north side of the yard, between the carriage house that faced the back alley and the narrow dirt road going up Scotsman’s Hill at the front.
Impatiently, Emily kicked snow into a groove she’d just made. There was no way she wanted so much of her house right next to Ma Harding’s. Back, back a few feet. She’d make it to fit so they’d not touch or have very much of the houses right next to each other, and still leave room for the privy out back.
Emily concentrated fully on her task, arranging small rooms, dividing them with snow lines. There! She’d done it! She could prove to Earnest that a house – HER OWN HOUSE – would fit right here, right in this yard. Right in the half of the property they’d given Emily and Earnest as a wedding present.
Well, they probably didn’t mean it literally, but Emily dragged Earnest out to show him her snow house, and she won her point. And now she had her feet up on her own front porch railing, looking over the tops of the small hedges and little bushes between her and the hill across the road.
After a moment her eyes were drawn again to the earthen pot she’d just suspended from the front porch roof support. In it was a still-young slip of climbing ivy. She’d carefully taken a cutting from her mother’s large, healthy specimen, itself rooted from her grandmother’s and planted under her bedroom window on the day Emily was born. Lovingly tended until she was grown enough to remove a snippet of her own to take care of.
She’d borne the little plantling with her all across the country with her new husband, taken on her last visit to her parent’s farm in Ontario. Watered with her own tears more than once by now, but none the worse for the salt it seemed.
In the first six months of her marriage the tiny plant grew roots in the little blue bottle her mother gave her with it, and then in the earthen pot it was thriving in now. Six months ago, after Earnest promised her house for this year’s birthday, she’d snipped off the top bit. The plant had grown too spindly, but thickened nicely once a bit was snipped off the end. And the new cutting, placed in her mother’s little bottle on her bedroom windowsill, thrived and grew despite the frosty disapproval of Emily’s mother-in-law.
Mrs. Harding – the older Mrs. Harding, Emily reminded herself; that title was for her now too! And she even had the address to prove it! Ma Harding, as she insisted on being called, could just go jump in the river for all Emily cared, now that she had HER OWN HOUSE!
No more holding the dish drying rag with seeming patience and sweetness while the old bat took her sweet time about meticulously washing each item three times over. Knowing full well the newly married Emily wanted only to rush to the side of her eager young husband, and be done with the everlasting chores!
Emily took her gaze down from the ivy, doubled in size since she’d lovingly dug a little hole for the second snippet, using a fingertip to manipulate the earth inside the pot, and tenderly placed the brand new root tendrils under a little mound of soil. If plants could smile back, she knew that these two little miracles, these links to her own childhood home and mother, would be smiling at her right now.
She was fully aware of why she incurred the wrath of her mother-in-law more and more often, more deeply. To begin with, the dragon lady had been the only woman in the lives of her son and her husband, and in the lives of most of her husband’s fellow Mounted Policemen. In short, the centre of attention.
Until the night, a bit less than a year ago, when Earnest came home from a training session in the East, holding Emily, his bride, by the hand.
Emily and Earnest first met at Union Station in Toronto, amid the crowds and the confusing vastness of the largest building either of them had ever seen. Earnest, just in from the west, literally bumped into pretty little Emily, fresh from the farm.
Emily, aside from her love of the earth, showed no interest in anything or anyone in her home area. Her mother finally threw up her hands in frustration at Emily’s perpetual restlessness, and sent her to the aunt in Toronto to find a job, a husband, or both. Emily thought she was merely visiting her aunt, but the grown women knew what the girl needed. And in her first few minutes in the bustle of Toronto’s busy train station, here it was looking her right in the face.
