Before we went for dirt for the lawn,and for the garden,we went to get a trailer to haul it home in.My father must have either saw an advertisement for the trailer,or knew someone who told him where he could buy one.so early one morning,we dropped my mother off to work and drove out into the country to look at the trailer.
It was one of those days when my father was on a stretch of days off so we were not packed off to the sitters for the day. It was a fine,warm day,the kind you can get in Moncton,that can be typical of early May,where the air is warm and smells of wet earth.Trees were just beginning to bud out and everything was clothed in the lightest green.It really was the sort of day that made you want to ride around with all of the windows down,after a cold winter of never cracking them at all to the outside.
Wherever we went,it was not far from home.I had the sense of being near ocean water,the air had that kind of tang to it,and the ground was rather flat or gently sloped,and there were a lot of cat tails and taller grasses all about.Somewhere near Shediac perhaps,or maybe the Memramcook Valley.
We pulled up to this old house,a cottage really.There were some sheds and maybe a barn.A small one.An acreage.Not quite a farm.Some of the ground was plowed up,waiting to be set in rows for the planting of a garden.I could smell horses in the air too.my father got out and told us to wait in the car.He went into one of the buildings.He really couldn't have been gone long,but we decided to get out of the car.Just too nice of a day not to.
After we'd been out of the car for a while,the door to the cottage opened up,and this short,heavy woman came out to see us.She had a voice that reminded me of a bird singing,and,I could not understand a thing she was saying.At last she asked us"Do you speak French?" We replied that we did not,though only out of politeness.I'm not even certain that either my sister or I knew that there was such a thing as French.I thought there was only one language in the world,though I must have heard French around our neighborhood.When I had though,it was spoken by people who also chose to speak English ,when they were not conversing among themselves.this woman did not,and it never occurred to me that she likely could not.She lived in a community that included very few English speakers,and most likely she had little use of any language other than her mother tongue.
In gestures,not conversation,she indicated that we should wait,that she was going somewhere,but would be right back.Then she disappeared into her cottage and returned quickly a moment later.she had a plate of cookies,which she offered to us.I was not sure I should accept cookies from this woman I didn't know and couldn't understand,but,like the fresh spring air,they were beyond my ability to resist.And so,when my father returned a few moments later,that's how he found us.Eating cookies an in a conversation that wasn't really a conversation with our new friend.
A minute or two later this slim,tough looking man,not too tall came up the gentle slope of the yard pulling a small utility trailer,as though he was a horse.The hitch was lifted up on his shoulders,and he was just sort of trotting along with the trailer as though it weighed nothing at all.He put the trailer down right over the hitch on the car,then fiddled with some wires until the rear lights came on.Then my father counted him out some money,they shook hands and we drove off with our trailer.
On the way home we stopped at a gravel pit out near Magnetic Hill,out along the ridge.A man who worked there filled the trailer up with loam,which we hauled home and my father dumped out into the front yard.And,we did all that before it was time to bring my mother home for lunch.Later we went for more dirt.
Our new trailer was not very big at all.It didn't even hold a whole scoop of dirt from the loader at the pit.It had been painted red but was beginning to fade,and it's metal parts had been sprayed with aluminum colored paint.It's two tires were quite badly worn,but it worked well enough.Later,when it had been parked in the back yard,I discovered that it could be used as a seesaw.If I was sitting in it,I could move to the part of the trailer farthest from the hitch,and it would tip all the way to the ground.It wasn't a gentle seesaw though,like the ones in the park.The trailer would nearly pitch me out on the ground when I walked to the back of it.And,when I crawled up the other way,the hitch would slam into the ground and jar my bones.
We had that trailer for many years,hauled a lot of things around in it.And I recall not only the day we went to get it,but the day many years later when we came to have it no more,when I took it to it's final resting place-sort of.
It was one of those days when my father was on a stretch of days off so we were not packed off to the sitters for the day. It was a fine,warm day,the kind you can get in Moncton,that can be typical of early May,where the air is warm and smells of wet earth.Trees were just beginning to bud out and everything was clothed in the lightest green.It really was the sort of day that made you want to ride around with all of the windows down,after a cold winter of never cracking them at all to the outside.
Wherever we went,it was not far from home.I had the sense of being near ocean water,the air had that kind of tang to it,and the ground was rather flat or gently sloped,and there were a lot of cat tails and taller grasses all about.Somewhere near Shediac perhaps,or maybe the Memramcook Valley.
We pulled up to this old house,a cottage really.There were some sheds and maybe a barn.A small one.An acreage.Not quite a farm.Some of the ground was plowed up,waiting to be set in rows for the planting of a garden.I could smell horses in the air too.my father got out and told us to wait in the car.He went into one of the buildings.He really couldn't have been gone long,but we decided to get out of the car.Just too nice of a day not to.
After we'd been out of the car for a while,the door to the cottage opened up,and this short,heavy woman came out to see us.She had a voice that reminded me of a bird singing,and,I could not understand a thing she was saying.At last she asked us"Do you speak French?" We replied that we did not,though only out of politeness.I'm not even certain that either my sister or I knew that there was such a thing as French.I thought there was only one language in the world,though I must have heard French around our neighborhood.When I had though,it was spoken by people who also chose to speak English ,when they were not conversing among themselves.this woman did not,and it never occurred to me that she likely could not.She lived in a community that included very few English speakers,and most likely she had little use of any language other than her mother tongue.
In gestures,not conversation,she indicated that we should wait,that she was going somewhere,but would be right back.Then she disappeared into her cottage and returned quickly a moment later.she had a plate of cookies,which she offered to us.I was not sure I should accept cookies from this woman I didn't know and couldn't understand,but,like the fresh spring air,they were beyond my ability to resist.And so,when my father returned a few moments later,that's how he found us.Eating cookies an in a conversation that wasn't really a conversation with our new friend.
A minute or two later this slim,tough looking man,not too tall came up the gentle slope of the yard pulling a small utility trailer,as though he was a horse.The hitch was lifted up on his shoulders,and he was just sort of trotting along with the trailer as though it weighed nothing at all.He put the trailer down right over the hitch on the car,then fiddled with some wires until the rear lights came on.Then my father counted him out some money,they shook hands and we drove off with our trailer.
On the way home we stopped at a gravel pit out near Magnetic Hill,out along the ridge.A man who worked there filled the trailer up with loam,which we hauled home and my father dumped out into the front yard.And,we did all that before it was time to bring my mother home for lunch.Later we went for more dirt.
Our new trailer was not very big at all.It didn't even hold a whole scoop of dirt from the loader at the pit.It had been painted red but was beginning to fade,and it's metal parts had been sprayed with aluminum colored paint.It's two tires were quite badly worn,but it worked well enough.Later,when it had been parked in the back yard,I discovered that it could be used as a seesaw.If I was sitting in it,I could move to the part of the trailer farthest from the hitch,and it would tip all the way to the ground.It wasn't a gentle seesaw though,like the ones in the park.The trailer would nearly pitch me out on the ground when I walked to the back of it.And,when I crawled up the other way,the hitch would slam into the ground and jar my bones.
We had that trailer for many years,hauled a lot of things around in it.And I recall not only the day we went to get it,but the day many years later when we came to have it no more,when I took it to it's final resting place-sort of.
No comments:
Post a Comment