Anny Scoones - Home and Away: More Tales of a Heritage Farm

Dad had a brother named Ernie, whom he had not seen for years. All we knew was that Ernie lived alone in St. Catharines, Ontario, and was a pantyhose salesman. Mum resumed contact with Ernie the summer I was turning 13, when she received a letter from his son, and she and I flew out to visit him.

We took a bus from the Toronto airport to St. Catharines and waited at the station until Ernie pulled up in a dented grey delivery van. Ernie was much bigger and taller than Dad, bald, with a kind face and a gold tooth. He wore glasses and a rust-coloured cardigan over a white shirt and grey pants. He was a real gentleman, taking our bags and opening the van door for Mum. We loved him right away.

We drove through congested traffic, then pulled into a driveway off a busy road. Ernies house was a box painted bright green, with a small patch of lawn in front. Inside, everything was beige and spotless. In one half of the living room was a bar that Ernie had built himself, with black vinyl bar stools. Ernie took our bags down the hall to a bedroom with two single beds in a maple bedroom suite. The bedroom window looked out at an equally neat grey stucco house next door.

Ernie made Mum a cup of tea, then got himself a bottle of beer and a tall glass mug. He put out a bowl of Cheezies and chips and a can of mixed nuts, all of which he retrieved from a shelf behind the bar. We sat in his living room and chatted. There was a white lacy curtain over the front window, and I could see the traffic going by outside.

Later, we sat out on the cement patio. Ernie barbecued some hamburgers and put out an array of red and yellow condiments in plastic squirt containers. Mum and I had made a salad with an iceberg lettuce and a bottle of Kraft blue-cheese dressing. After the sun went down, Mum and I turned in, but Ernie stayed up and watched sports on his big TV set.

The next day, Ernie offered to take me on his rounds while Mum went to Hamilton to visit Dad and Ernies parentsthey had moved from Toronto. We drove all over St. Catharines delivering beige pantyhose in purple cellophane packages to stores. We stopped at a Polish caf in a hot, gritty suburb for lunch, and Ernie ordered us an enormous plate of perogies. Some were filled with plums, and some with cheese. I had an orange float to top it all off. My uncle and I had discovered we had something in commonvoracious appetites. The sun beat down as we stopped in at more strip malls and stores in suburbs with our deliveries. We took a break in mid-afternoon at the Dairy Queen, where we ordered banana splits.

When Mum and I were lying in our single beds that night, I asked her if Uncle Ernie could come and stay with us in Fredericton. She said she would arrange it.

Late one rainy night that autumn, Mum and Dad and I drove out to the Fredericton airport to meet him. Dad had a funny smirk on his face as he ambled over to the arrival area. I was so excitedI could see the planes lights heading right toward us on the wet black tarmac.

Gradually, people with shoulder bags began to drift into the terminal. Then we saw Ernie, lumbering toward the glass doors carrying a brown paper shopping bag and a duffle bag. He and Dad embraced. Ernie was twice the size of Dad, and moved half as fast.

Because Ernie was so tall, he sat in the front seat of our green Buick with Dad for the drive home. At one point he spotted the Ponderosa Steakhouse. Oh, he said with delight as he turned to me, well make a trip there! When we got to the house Ernie pulled out all sorts of things from his brown shopping bag: a long string of Polish garlic sausages, a huge loaf of black bread and a case of Polish beer.

Dad took us out on a lake in his aluminum boat the next day. He had loaded the car with fishing rods, and Mum had packed a picnic. While Dad and Ernie fished off in the warm brown water, Mum sketched wildflowers and I played on the pebble beach with my trolls.

We headed home late in the afternoon with Dad and Ernies lake bass in a white plastic bucket. They filleted the fish out on the back porch while Mum made apple jelly with some wild apples she and I had picked in an abandoned orchard. Dad and Ernie had a drink in Dads garden, and then we all sat down at our wooden picnic table and ate Polish sausage and sardines on thin squares of black bread sprinkled with fresh dill. Later, when we got hungry again, Ernie took me out alone to the Ponderosa for a pizza.

Ernie stayed with us for a week, and at about the middle point of his visit he met a big, happy, red-headed woman named Ethel. Ethel was a real estate agent who loved fishingshe knew every good fishing hole in rural New Brunswick. She came by for Ernie in a red station wagon with wood panelling on the side, and two huge pairs of green rubber hip waders in the back. Ernie went off with her for the afternoon carrying the brand-new fishing tackle box hed bought at Canadian Tire. Ethel honked as they pulled out of our driveway.

Ethel came for supper one night after Ernie had gone back to Ontario. I was upstairs when I heard her say in a gay tone, Oh, Bruno, I loved your brother Ernie. Isnt it a shame that hes paralyzed from the waist down.

After that first visit, Ernie came to see us every couple of months. Then, one time, he brought with him a woman named Elma. They had met at Arthur Murrays Ballroom Dance Studio. Elma was a buxom, buck-toothed, retired schoolteacher who wore mauve polyester pantsuits, and knitted turquoise toilet-paper and Kleenex-box covers in her spare time. She played bridge with the girls and knew all the places to eat brunch for $2.95 in the St. Catharines area. Ernie told Mum that Elma was a real lady and quite a catch.

Mum and Dad and I were invited to the wedding, which was held at the St. Catharines Polish Hall. Mum made me wear a dress wed bought at Zellers in Fredericton. The hall was packed with our Polish relatives, who danced a ferocious polka around the newlyweds.

We rarely saw Ernie after he married Elma. At some point they moved to Rice Lake, Ontario. Mum visited them there once, and she told us that Elma had placed teddy bears made of pink fluff on all the beds. My eating days with Uncle Ernie had ended. But whenever I ordered a pizza at the Ponderosa Steakhouse, I always thought of him.

APPLES AND BOWL
oil Harold Mortimer-Lamb

arranging a still life

When Mums eyes were better, she would always do little watercolours of wildflowers at my kitchen table when she came to visit. One night by the fire, she was reminiscing about her early days at art school in Vancouver.

The first year, she explained, we learned how to draw and how to paint a still life. Oh, it was so formal. The teacher, a lovely old Scot, arranged the drapery and the objects, some apples or a vase, and then he placed spotlights on the arrangement to strategically create shadow. We all had easels, and Bert Binning (later a well-known painter and architect) would come in dressed as a baby in a pink bonnet and pretend to set up the still life and then knock it all down!

We had to learn perspective, too, and we were told to hold one arm out at full length with our thumb up, to measure proportion. None of us really understood why we were doing thatit was just something an artist did before beginning a painting.

Of course, a real still life should be haphazard, Mum concluded.