biologically related.
She hears a thump overhead, followed by the clickety-clack of canine nails on hardwood and the thundery thud of Daisy barrelling down the carpeted stairs. The dog, having heaved herself from her queen-sized Tempur-Pedic slumber at the sound of domestic disturbance, is now reporting for duty.
What’s up? Pizza guy? Want me to kill him?
“It’s okay, Daisy,” Mary Rose says in answer to the dog’s RCA Victor head tilt. “Do you want to go outside?”
“Me!” cries Maggie, fully recovered, clipping her mother on the temple with the snack trap in the course of wriggling free to tackle Daisy around her thick neck.
Mary Rose unlocks the heavy oak front door and Maggie reaches up to wrestle with the handle of the exterior glass one. Daisy obligingly head-butts it open and torpedoes out and down the veranda steps, making a beeline for the gingko tree, where she drops to her side in the mulch at its base like a shot pig. The sun has come out, the earth is steaming … This is going to confuse the magnolia tree, dumbblonde of the horticultural world—already its buds look ready to pop, petals that ought to be pink, they’ll be black with frost before the month is out, it’s asking for it.
But sun is better than the unrelieved overcast of a winter that ought to have been hard and bright and blue and white.
I’ll take it
. She breathes deeply the scent of soil, and surveys the dowdy shades of grey and brown and dirty green in her front garden with its skeletal trellises and spectral dogwoods. Beyond her low wooden fence and across the street, the rotted leaves that crease the curb are flecked with tissues, candy wrappers and bits of recycling that got away; all the ugly promise of spring framed by the pillars of her porch. Behind her, Maggie starts ringing the doorbell. Daisy’s head jerks up, then sinks down again.
Mary Rose MacKinnon lives with her family in the Annex neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. Mature trees, cracked sidewalks, frat houses, yuppy renos and more modest, pleasantly dingy houses that cost a fortune. Theirs is somewhere between yuppy and dingy. She loves the house. It is down the street from a park where a nine-year-old girl was abducted in 1985, but Mary Rose no longer thinks about that every time she looks out the front door. She knows her neighbours and likes them—with the possible exception of Rochelle three doors up, who tried to block their renovation. There are young families—VWs and Subarus—plus a few old-school Italian holdovers: Chevy Caprice. Among the latter is an elderly widow who has a Virgin Mary in the middle of her patch of front lawn that is otherwise distinguished in summer by the closest greenest shave in the neighbourhood—Daria pours Mary Rose a limoncello every Christmas, and dresses up as an elf. Mary Rose’s children are as safe as she can make them. She uses non-chemical cleaning agents and washes all fruit, even those with inedible rinds. She volunteers for all the field trips so Matthew won’t have to take the school bus. Recently she was on her front porch when two children ran past followed by their mother, who was shrieking, “Sebastian, Kayla, don’t run in flip-flops!”She isn’t that bad. Nearby are good schools, a community centre and an arena, not to mention great shops a short walk away on Bloor Street. It is a shabby chic neighbourhood where the cosmos runs wild outside wooden fences in summer, sidewalk chalk and dandelions proliferate, and higgledy-piggledy hedges and trumpet vines proclaim the prevailing left-leaning sympathies of the residents. Most of all, it is the only home her children have ever known—a fact that forces her to admit that growing up on the move must have cost her something, given she has chosen to raise her own children differently.
“Maggie, no more bell ringing, please.”
Bingbongbingbongbingbong
.
Though she has failed to cultivate a fondness for dandelions, Mary Rose has toiled to achieve a
She hears a thump overhead, followed by the clickety-clack of canine nails on hardwood and the thundery thud of Daisy barrelling down the carpeted stairs. The dog, having heaved herself from her queen-sized Tempur-Pedic slumber at the sound of domestic disturbance, is now reporting for duty.
What’s up? Pizza guy? Want me to kill him?
“It’s okay, Daisy,” Mary Rose says in answer to the dog’s RCA Victor head tilt. “Do you want to go outside?”
“Me!” cries Maggie, fully recovered, clipping her mother on the temple with the snack trap in the course of wriggling free to tackle Daisy around her thick neck.
Mary Rose unlocks the heavy oak front door and Maggie reaches up to wrestle with the handle of the exterior glass one. Daisy obligingly head-butts it open and torpedoes out and down the veranda steps, making a beeline for the gingko tree, where she drops to her side in the mulch at its base like a shot pig. The sun has come out, the earth is steaming … This is going to confuse the magnolia tree, dumbblonde of the horticultural world—already its buds look ready to pop, petals that ought to be pink, they’ll be black with frost before the month is out, it’s asking for it.
But sun is better than the unrelieved overcast of a winter that ought to have been hard and bright and blue and white.
I’ll take it
. She breathes deeply the scent of soil, and surveys the dowdy shades of grey and brown and dirty green in her front garden with its skeletal trellises and spectral dogwoods. Beyond her low wooden fence and across the street, the rotted leaves that crease the curb are flecked with tissues, candy wrappers and bits of recycling that got away; all the ugly promise of spring framed by the pillars of her porch. Behind her, Maggie starts ringing the doorbell. Daisy’s head jerks up, then sinks down again.
Mary Rose MacKinnon lives with her family in the Annex neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. Mature trees, cracked sidewalks, frat houses, yuppy renos and more modest, pleasantly dingy houses that cost a fortune. Theirs is somewhere between yuppy and dingy. She loves the house. It is down the street from a park where a nine-year-old girl was abducted in 1985, but Mary Rose no longer thinks about that every time she looks out the front door. She knows her neighbours and likes them—with the possible exception of Rochelle three doors up, who tried to block their renovation. There are young families—VWs and Subarus—plus a few old-school Italian holdovers: Chevy Caprice. Among the latter is an elderly widow who has a Virgin Mary in the middle of her patch of front lawn that is otherwise distinguished in summer by the closest greenest shave in the neighbourhood—Daria pours Mary Rose a limoncello every Christmas, and dresses up as an elf. Mary Rose’s children are as safe as she can make them. She uses non-chemical cleaning agents and washes all fruit, even those with inedible rinds. She volunteers for all the field trips so Matthew won’t have to take the school bus. Recently she was on her front porch when two children ran past followed by their mother, who was shrieking, “Sebastian, Kayla, don’t run in flip-flops!”She isn’t that bad. Nearby are good schools, a community centre and an arena, not to mention great shops a short walk away on Bloor Street. It is a shabby chic neighbourhood where the cosmos runs wild outside wooden fences in summer, sidewalk chalk and dandelions proliferate, and higgledy-piggledy hedges and trumpet vines proclaim the prevailing left-leaning sympathies of the residents. Most of all, it is the only home her children have ever known—a fact that forces her to admit that growing up on the move must have cost her something, given she has chosen to raise her own children differently.
“Maggie, no more bell ringing, please.”
Bingbongbingbongbingbong
.
Though she has failed to cultivate a fondness for dandelions, Mary Rose has toiled to achieve a
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