THE COUSINS

On Sundays, she just smiled a lot and gave hugs to grandkids who had dinner in the kitchen with the goldfish, the dog and the cat. The many babies would be smothered away on the living-room sofas. Recently it was a lot of fun for me to discover several of my 80+ cousins on Facebook. One of them, Jean-Pierre, had taken me trout fishing at the time while his sister Corinne pointed out where raspberries and wild strawberries could be found. J-P is retired as a plumber, happy to hoist lobster traps on a winch-equipped trawler.

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THE FARMHOUSE

I entered the farmhouse late afternoon tired and hungry, something grandma Clementine took care of for dessert with a fresh batch of “sucre à la crème”, something I would tentatively translate to "creamy sugar treats". My bedroom was on top of the kitchen, a see-through floor register allowing hot air and hot gossip to rise to my attention. I fell asleep hearing a lot of laughter downstairs, not realizing that I was probably the butt of some jokes, a skinny city nerd imported to use big farm machines and care for farm animals, helping out a supremely self-sufficient woman, their own mother. I woke up early with a ray of light and soft whistling coming from downstairs, seemingly blowing through the register the aroma of toasts and bacon. I soon found out that country bread was toasted right on top of the stove, and, more importantly, that my grandma was the best whistler ever. She spoke little, smiled a lot and whistled when she worked, which was pretty much all ...
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THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVES

Wait, those had not been created yet, but you get the picture. I was totally in awe of the hissing black locomotive, a smoke-belching New York Central steam locomotive for a two-hour ride to Montreal Central Station. There I was swiftly transferred to the new diesel Trans-Continental CNR train to distant New Brunswick. And so after long hours of drinking the scenery, my face glued to the train window, that night I slept well, a nice black man with a white cap had deployed the upper berth and put me to bed, adjusting the ladder for pipi purposes. Maybe the world was safer in those years
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THE PRANKS

One weekday, one of the aunts wearing a strong perfume drove over and asked me the date of my birthday. I told her "Next Sunday". On that Sunday I received a mountain of gifts that included a bright red bicycle to use while I was there. My birthday was to be the next January with my family hundreds of miles to the west of where I was. Not a chance for greedy me to get a gift bonanza like what came on that Sunday. A week later I was stalled at the bottom of a hill I could not climb with that bicycle. Worse I was too tired to pedal 16 miles back to grandma's house. Uncle Victor picked me up at sunset on his way to the police station to report a missing kid. And then they found out about the birthday scam. I had a bad week and the laughter grew louder. My grandma never whistled with big people around her.
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