Chapter III Continued.

Our time in Redmondville was nearly over by the end of 1963.My father wanted to move on to the city,and I suppose he had his reasons.He had two growing children and it was time to think about school.My mother taught school,and knew what the schools were like in the area,and they likely didn't want that for us,especially when we were young.Later,many years later he said he never wanted us going to school with Indians,but it was a little hard to know how serious he was about this.He was never really a bigoted person,at least when left to his own devices.Still.it very well might have been true.

In Redmondville I have no memory of there ever being snow on the ground.My snow memories are rather odd.Mostly I think of those days as being rather cool and blustery,and it very well could have been that that is how they were.But,as I grew I became aware of Atlantic Canada being a place given to snowstorms,sometimes huge blasts of snow and ice.So I'm tending to think that there must be something faulty about my memory.I don't recall myself dressed in a heavy winter coat that winter.

Still,there must have been snow.I have a picture of snow in my mind,but it's not of snow laying on the ground.

Once,my father and I started out for someplace in his old blue truck.There was a young woman with us.I believe it was the same woman who was looking after my sister and I the day we saw the pigs rooting in the garden.We didn't really go all that far,maybe ten miles or so,but things looked very different.We were on this old dirt road where we stopped and this woman got out of our truck and began walking.Down off the road there was a big body of water,or at least it seemed very large.The woman started off across the ice surface of it and she was happy and laughing.We watched her until she disappeared,then turned the truck about and went back home.Later,I came to believe that we had gone somewhere near Escuminac,out on the coast,and that the woman was someone who lived there and was distantly related to my mother by way of marriage to her niece in Canterbury.

My only other encounter with snow that year was rather odd.Not the way you usually encounter snow at all.It was later in the winter,going into spring at least,maybe even going into summer.The lady who lived in the trailer to the south of us was standing  out on her porch.I don't recall that her little girls were around,but then,I hardly remember them at all.My sister was there too,and someone else,a woman,possibly my mother.It was very warm out.There was some conversation between the two women,then our neighbor poked her head back inside the trailer and returned with a box.It was a big box of snowballs,and I guess she'd been keeping them in a freezer just inside the door.She started tossing them,slow pitching them,not trying to hit anyone with them.She just stood there tossing snowballs,an obvious act of joy for her,until they were all gone.But it was a dreamlike memory for me,I can't be assured that it really happened in the way I imagine.It could have been created from a few other things I suppose.

Then I cease to remember Redmondville at all.We moved,it faded and all became memory of Moncton.