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I must have been born with a vivid imagination and a creative nature, ensuring that reading would have an overarching importance in my life. I read Gone With The Wind for the first time when I was eleven years old, and then reread it many times thereafter. Unfortunately for my mother, I was a complicated breech birth: years later, I would joke with her that the long and challenging labour was due to me reading the tome, GWTW, in the womb. “I should have had the forethought to close that heavy tome as I made my way out into the real world,” I remarked to Mom when home on a visit from the city, “but I was intensely engrossed in the burning of Atlanta!”

Growing up in a large family, my sisters and I had a love-hate relationship, typical of many children. I was a terrible tease with them; I was the proverbial thorn in their sides. However, for the record, they teased and taunted me too; in fact, they ganged up on me on many an occasion, a middle child, and the only boy in a house full of sisters (several years later, another sister and finally a brother were born, but were like a second family for my parents). For example, they often insisted that I was adopted: making the best of a bad situation, I imagined there had been a mistake at the hospital between Prince Andrew and me, and my rightful and regal place was at Buckingham Palace in Jolly Olde England. Also, a favourite trick of my sisters was to try to pull the towel off me, wrapped around my waist, when I was either on my way into the washroom to have a bath or on my way out. I was mortified that my sisters would get sight of ‘the family jewels’, in all their glory and magnificence.

It is generally known to be true that boys are testy and odorous little creatures, but girls are plain mean and spiteful when they have a bone to pick (and they don’t forget anything, better than any elephant you may have met). When at our worst, we fought like cats and dogs, enjoying every minute of our sibling-based battles; at our best, have someone say anything untoward about any one of us, and a line was drawn in the sand, the wagons were put in a circle, and all artillery.

Was pointing outward at the enemies. In short, may God have Mercy on those children who had decided to pick on any one of the Potter brood. As siblings, we were as thick as thieves, and sometimes did some good-natured thieving – seeing if we could steal a chocolate bar from the candy counter at the town’s most popular restaurant-coffee shop when the owner was busy at the cash register, to prove a point. Even though that woman kept an eagle eye on us, the hand is quicker than the eye!

As my three older sisters entered their teens, they grew less interested in teasing and taunting me. They had bigger fish to fry: all three of my older sisters were attractive, and suddenly, teenage boys started to hang around our farm. I had to content myself with teasing my younger sister Barb, who was easy to bait but no fool. She was Dad’s favourite, no doubt because she looked so much like him and his side of the family; moreover, she was just plain adorable. Her nickname was Pinky. Barb’s cute, pert, and pink ski-slope nose was ideally suited to her (and it was an original because no one else in the family had a similar one). I liked teasing Barb that her father was actually Bob Hope, who must have come to Canada in the early ’60s and met our mother at one of his stand-up comedy performances. For children, when teasing is involved, either as the inflictor or the inflicted, logic goes out the window.

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In high school, my love of reading made English my favourite class. Never wanting to be noticed, particularly by my teachers, I tried to be invisible in the classroom. I was, of course, a different person with my friends in the hallway or the cafeteria at school, but I generally preferred to keep a low profile. I had long hair and thick, Coke-bottle bottom glasses, and acne…and those were quite possibly my best features! Years later, looking back at my high school photo, I joked to my sisters that I looked a great deal like our dog, Sheba. She was the family dog, but my particular pet, and we adored each other. At one point, I had taken a photo of Sheba, a headshot, and proudly displayed it in our home. After commenting to my sisters on the resemblance in appearance between Sheba (by then, dearly and clearly departed), I set my old high school photo on the table in front of them, then the picture of the family dog. The similarity was definitely evident to all of us, and we had a good laugh when we realised that Sheba’s photo was the better one.

One day in English class, we were studying the Tennyson lyrical ballad, ‘The Lady of Shalott’. The teacher had asked a few pre-reading questions at the start of class. I had not read the poem in advance and hoped not to be asked, thus kept my eyes cast downward at my desk and the book in front of me. Then he started to read the poem, in a histrionic manner, his voice resonant and deep. When the teacher came to the line, “She knows not what the curse may be,” a memory came back to me in a flash. I started to chuckle, trying to suppress it by covering my mouth with my hands, while the teacher continued to read. I was afraid that the teacher would notice me, and that was the last thing that I wanted. Then he recited dramatically, “The curse is come upon me,” and I broke out in an uncontrollable guffaw. With tears (of laughter) streaming from my eyes, I was cursorily banished from the English classroom and, with a proverbial tail between my legs, made my pitiful way to the office for my first and only disciplinary chat with the high school principal.

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Barb and I were sitting in the kitchen at the big oval wooden table, staring at the television screen of the portable set perched on the recessed shelf opposite. It was in the late 1960s, and we were still watching a black-and-white portable television. I was 9 or 10, and Barb was four years younger. We heard a piercing scream from the floor above, then the voices of our three older sisters, raised in that shrill, panicked manner typical of a sudden, dramatic emergency. Then we heard heavy footsteps pounding down the linoleum-covered wooden stairs with a series of resounding, ominous thuds. When the

Cacophony was heard from the upper floor; our mother had turned from the kitchen counter where she was making one of her delicious meat-and-vegetable pies for supper. In the same wide-eyed manner as my sister and I, Mom was staring in consternation first at the ceiling above and then at the door at the bottom of the stairs, when suddenly my second-oldest sister, Laurie, burst through it with a bang, the door slamming back against the kitchen wall. She had the wild-eyed and hysterical look of someone who the hounds of hell are pursuing. Laurie was running at a madcap pace for the bathroom that was on the far side of the kitchen.

My oldest sister, Cheri, must have been fast on Laurie’s heels because moments later, she too appeared at the bottom of the steps and made a beeline for the bathroom, with an expression hard to discern. It was somewhere in that vast, inexplicable expanse between misery and mirth. For a self-satisfying moment, it crossed my mind that my sisters must have been involved in that age-old, pleasure-inducing battle typical of siblings worldwide and throughout the centuries. That thought was banished, however, when my sister Jo Ann, who was next oldest to me, literally flew through the open stairway door with feet that barely touched the linoleum of the kitchen floor. As Jo Ann sped across the kitchen, she managed to turn her head and shriek at our mother the following sentence that remains imprinted even now in my mind and makes me smile at the memory:

“Laurie’s got her period!”

Immediately, my mother, who was always at her best during times of crises, turned her back on the meal she was preparing and hurried into the bathroom. Barb and I barely had to glance at each other before we went into action: we were of one mind, as it were, and ran fast behind our mother. Just as we reached the bathroom door, it slammed shut in our faces, and we heard the lock click into place. After Mom had slammed the door closed in our faces, I turned to look at Barb, who was standing beside me. I was amused to see that her cute and pert Bob Hope ski-slope nose now appeared to have a definite little skier’s ramp at the end of it! We hammered on the door, asking what all the commotion was about, but we were ignored. We could hear our sister Laurie half-sobbing and our other two sisters talking animatedly, whilst our mother’s voice was soothing and lower-pitched. Despite plastering our eager ears to the bathroom door, we could not distinguish what was actually being said, nor determine what curious calamity had befallen our sister, Laurie.

I turned to Barb and exclaimed, “Let’s look in the bathroom window!” I ran from the kitchen and through the back kitchen, then around to the rear of the house. Barb was fast on my heels. Our home was on the family farm that Dad had purchased from his father; at one time, the house had wooden siding, but several years earlier, my father had arranged for multi-coloured asphalt shingles to cover the two-storey home at the front, and the one-storey at the back, where the kitchen and bathroom were located. As children, we joked that the siding looked like something our old asthmatic mother cat, Tinker, had coughed up; in retrospect, though not the most attractive for a house, it was at least new and considered both fashionable and affordable at the time.

The rear of the house was on a slight hill, so the back wall, where the bathroom was located, was significantly higher than ground level. Behind the house was a covered shed with steps leading down into the cellar; it had wooden walls on two sides, a stone-and-cement foundation, and a Dutch door with an old-fashioned metal handle at the front. An aluminium eaves trough ran around the house along the lower edge of the roof on both upper and lower floors; however, at the rear, it ran in a straight line below the bathroom window. It was just the right level for two children with beady little eyes and snoopy big ears to perch on while they did their sleuthing!

It was not the first time that Barb and I had climbed up onto the roof of the cellar shed: like a pair of tree-dwelling chimps, practised climbers, we clambered up the side, getting toeholds.

On the exterior, the wood had knots. On that particular day, I was the first to climb on top of the cellar shed and perched on its roof as I waited for my sister, Barb, to follow.

“We can walk along the eaves trough to the bathroom window,” I whispered to Barb, “ and then from there we can see and hear what is happening.” From what our sister, Jo Ann, had cried out in the kitchen, we knew that Laurie had got her ‘period’, but we were not entirely clear what that meant (although we had a pretty good idea it had something to do with her body and its functions). That said, it was clear to us that a major pow-wow and emergency session were taking place in our family bathroom, and we did not want to miss out on all that anxiety and excitement.

I sat on the edge of the roof of the cellar shed and began inching my way across the eaves trough toward the bathroom window, using the wooden trim above to cling precariously with my fingers. Barb followed closely behind. It was not far from the roof of the cellar shed to the bathroom window, but it seemed quite a distance when one moved sideways, one tiny, tentative step at a time.

We reached the window and looked in. The bathroom light was off, and the sun shining through the window behind us made it difficult for Barb and me to see into the darkened room. When our eyes met, we saw our mother from behind as she busied herself with Laurie (who was sitting on the family ‘throne’), whilst our other two sisters stood nearby, making the occasional indistinct comment. It was indeed frustrating for Barb and me to be unable to see or hear sufficiently; we could not quite make out what was being said, and unfortunately, by now the earlier shrieks and exclamations had become subdued conversation.

I had just turned to Barb and murmured, “I wonder what is going on, when I heard a loud cracking sound. In an instant, I felt myself falling the half-storey distance to the ground below. I hit the grassy slope with a thud that knocked the breath out of me. I quickly sat up and looked around, and saw that the eaves trough had broken in two and was lying nearby. But where was Barb? I then looked up at the wall above and saw that Barb had managed to hold on to the wooden window frame with her two small hands. Her little feet, encased in her familiar running shoes, were desperately trying to get a toehold on the wall. I was amazed that my younger sister was still hanging by her fingertips on the windowsill. I was just about to jump up to grab or catch her when all of a sudden, Barb dropped unceremoniously to the ground beside me. She, too, had the breath briefly knocked out of her.

After a few stunned moments, we looked at each other and had the same idea at the same time: we knew we would be in trouble for being such snoops and for breaking the eaves trough. Immediately, we got to our feet to flee from this mishap and started to make a beeline down the lawn to hide in the barn. Just as we began our great escape, we heard the bathroom window bang open, and our mother shout, “Just what are you kids up to now?” Rather than stop to give an explanation or to beg forgiveness, our flying feet beat a path down the long back lawn and to the welcoming solace and safety of the barn.

We later came to understand better the full meaning of what transpired for Laurie that day, which is a significant milestone for a teenage girl. The incident became a favoured and humorous recollection for my siblings and me, one we told and retold to cousins and friends. No doubt Laurie was not as enamoured of the family tale, but being a good sport, she put up with its retelling. Our father, who already worked like two men, had the task of repairing the eaves trough. We were told never to walk on it, because it would break again; it couldn’t hold our weight. There were no particular consequences for the two of us, although my sister, Barb, and I were somewhat taken to task by our mother for being such a pair of nosy parkers.

What is clear to me is that in those days and with my generation, we found fun and occupied our time in so many ways that we took for granted then, but that, unfortunately, are really not available now for children. The world on our farm and in the nearby community was a place of exploration, experimentation, education, and enlightenment. We would ride our ponies, horses, or bicycles on nearby back roads for hours on end. We could explore the wooded areas and pasture lands not only on our farm but also on the neighbouring land without any issues or concerns. During the summers, we swam for long and pleasurable hours with our friends on the next concession road in the large pond on their property. During the winter, we climbed snowbanks that almost reached the telephone lines. The memory of those days and that childhood world has been made more poignant during the past two years, due to the loss of my sisters, Jo Ann and Cheri, who left this world too young and too soon. My siblings and I have been fortunate indeed to possess shared childhood memories of such a wonderful world. It was a world of imagination that still illuminates and enlightens my life as I continue on my journey toward the future and other adventures yet to be discovered.