Sunflowers
Mary Fowke
The British Empire was present in the pictures on the walls of the dining room in the Canadian summer house. To the left of the fireplace, and on either side of the china cabinet, twin drawings of before and after depicted three grey and white Scottish terriers behind a blue and white platter. In the first, the three little dogs are standing alert on their hind legs, a bone in front of them on the platter. At the bottom of the picture, the words For What We Are About to Receive. In the second, the three dogs are lying down, one sound asleep and the other two still hungry, their eyes wide open.
It was January 31st, 2023, the dead of winter, and Sheila Sanders was bundled up in an old winter coat and thick scarf, seated alone at the dining room table, its golden grain visible through the dark stain applied over a hundred years ago.The room had a winter smell: a blend of cold materials including plaster and creosote. It contrasted with the summer smell of the adjacent kitchen, present in memory: a warm mingling of smoke from the wood stove, coffee from the percolator, oatmeal porridge and toast springing out of the toaster like a jack in the box.
Sheila gazed at the pictures of the dogs with a sense of bemusement that she shared with the other inhabitants of the house, now absent. The bemusement stemmed from an appreciation of the mores and morals of the time when the house had been built -1908 - and the fact that the images were taken from the pages of the Illustrated London News and placed inside hemlock frames, wood identical to that the rest of the room’s built-in furniture. Nowadays, no one besides a university student would put such pictures on the walls of an elegant summer house.
Sheila Saunders picked up her Smartphone and googled the name of the artist, Cecil Aldin. She learned that he was born in Slough on April 28th, 1870, and that his son had died at Vimy Ridge during The First World War. She felt a vicarious sorrow. She clicked on Wikipedia’s embedded links until she was carried far from her original search, like a seagull that comes upon a fishing boat and gets carried along beside it, swooping down for entrails.
Time evaporated like ocean spray on the skin, leaving a salty aftertaste.
Sheila silenced her Smartphone and placed it out of reach on a small table in the adjacent living room, attempting to detach herself from the hold of her addiction. It was one of many and co-existed within her along with such pathologies as ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, neurodivergence and body dysmorphia. Had she been alive at the time the house had been built, hysteria and nostalgia might also have been present as
afflictions.
Sheila was additionally afflicted with various forms of guilt, such as that of being descended from settlers, some of them planters who had usurped Acadian farmland. The summer house, on a peninsula surrounded by ocean, had itself been built on farmland, previously a seasonal hunting and fishing ground for the Mi’kmag First Nation.
What Sheila considered shadow thoughts included many associated with the past three pandemic years, and the Trump years that proceeded and overlapped with them, along with ensuing wars, as well as the “massive shift online” that held everyone in its thrall, for better and for worse.The slogan BUILD BACK BETTER, voiced in unison by allied politicians from countries of the former British empire during the lockdowns, felled her with its pure propaganda.
An overall sense was that the past three years had run roughshod with the communal.
Sheila’s memory travelled back to communal times around the table when family, friends and people from all walks of life would gather in an atmosphere of hospitality - what would now be called inclusivity. Sheila’s mother was renowned for her good cooking, especially her casseroles and fruit and berry pies: apple served with a slice of cheddar, blackberry, blueberry, strawberry and rhubarb. Nowadays it would be noted that the casseroles contained meat and the pies gluten. Sheila herself was largely vegetarian and had taken to replacing cow’s milk with oat milk.
What would it be like when people got together again and would they still like each other as they used to, Sheila wondered from the perspective of January 31st, 2023. “Let’s get out the sunflower plates” Sheila heard her mother say with a lilt in her voice. Sheila looked towards the corner cabinet between the before and after pictures of the three dogs behind the platter with the one bone. She could see the set of yellow sunflower plates with its own sunny platter behind the glass.The deep yellow petals comprised most of the surface of the plates with the black centres and white background more minor. The set had been purchased after a dark shadow period when Sheila’s father, a WWII veteran, had nearly died of pneumonia. Sheila was only five when a nurse revived him by pounding on his heart. After that, the family doctor recommended recuperation in a warm country. The family travelled to Jamaica and that’s where Sheila’s parents had bought the sunflower set.
Sheila walked to the corner cabinet and opened its small metal latch. She lifted the stack of plates and carried them to the table. She placed each sunflower plate part way between the centre and edge of the table, closer to the edge, OCD almost leading her to get out a tape measure to measure and repeat the best possible distance between the plates themselves and the plates and the edge of the table. Then she imagined taking the tape measure and hanging its ribbony thread from the light fixture above the table, pretending that she was a hosting a party.
The sunflower plates formed a concentric circle, radiant even in the cold. Sheila looked at them and waited for humanity to return.
Bio-note
Born and raised in Canada, Mary Fowke has been living in Lisbon for over twenty-five years, where she works as a psychotherapist. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Lisbon's Department of English and American Studies where she is a researcher and co-editor of ROAM Creative Journal. Her PhD thesis focused on relationships with homes of origin in memoirs by three Canadian immigrant writers. She continues to be interested in relationships with place and to explore these and other relational questions and attachments in her writing .