Partridgeberry Scones

Long time no write! 

I haven't updated my blog in far too long. I have a few ideas tossing around in my head, and it may lead to more blog entries. That will depend upon me finding the time. I used to think that when I retired I would have lots of free time. How wrong I was lol.

One of the things I have been up to is publishing a novel, which is titled Dance of the Daisies. It is available in paperback directly from me or from Amazon. Amazon also has a Kindle edition. Tonight I'm going to give you a teaser ... the prologue. I'd love to hear feedback after you read it. You can leave a comment here, or, you can email me at denisempenny@gmail.com or search me out on Facebook. I should set up a Facebook page for my writing, but that takes time. Can I buy an extra day for each week somewhere?? Until I find that extra day for now my Facebook presence is under Denise Dyke Piercey.

So...the prologue:

Prologue

My earliest memory is of me and my mom walking through a field of grass sprinkled with sunny yellow buttercups and virginal daisies fluttering in the wind. I was about four. To my little girl’s eyes, the billowing hay was tall enough to weave the fantasy of forever walking hand-in-hand with the tall yellow-haired beauty who had given birth to me. In my heart this is a real memory, but in my head, I know it is a daydream I have had so often that I have fooled my neurons into believing I really did see the daisies and feel the heat of my mother’s palm as the dry blades of grass scratched my exposed shins. I know this because if the memory was real, I was walking with a dead woman.

My mother, Isabel Elizabeth Sweeney, died in childbirth on December 12, 1941, just a week after I turned three, leaving my father and me alone in the parlour of our saltbox house, crying over the pine box that held the most important person in my young life, and the baby brother who had taken her away from me. Unfortunately, that’s my real first memory; not much for a little girl to cling onto.

1941 was war time in Newfoundland as it was elsewhere in the British Commonwealth. My father was working away in the woods for the AND Company before my mother died, and I think he tried to go back there, leaving my care to his spinster aunt, Ethel. But apparently when he got to Grand Falls in the spring of 1942, instead of joining the crew that was headed to Millertown to cut pulpwood, he got back on the train and returned the way he had just travelled, this time bypassing the junction for Admiral’s Harbour, where we lived, and continuing on to St. John’s where he enlisted in the Newfoundland Regiment and got shipped off to Europe. I still have a box that holds the medals I was sent lauding his bravery. It’s a failing of mine that I could never get my head around to believing that there could be anything brave about leaving a three-year-old to become an orphan.

I know Aunt Ethel did her best; it’s just that her best was dismal when it came to raising a child. She was in her late fifties when she got saddled with me. As she frequently reminded me, she had to quit her much loved job as a teacher to thirty-seven of the best students imaginable in the wonderful one-room schoolhouse perched on the cliff overlooking Admiral’s Harbour. Worse still she had to move from her comfortable little cabin to our too-big house. It was quite a while before I learned about the inaccuracies of perception, especially when told from the distance of time or space. Aunt Ethel and I lived on the money my mother had inherited from her father, who had once owned schooners and the local dry goods store. Aunt Ethel died, most likely of a heart attack, when I was fourteen. Years later I heard it said in the harbour that she had the most shoes of any woman on the east coast when they put her to rest. Needless to say, very little of my grandfather’s money was left.

After that I was taken in by the people next door, Mary and Pat Collins. They had three children of their own, Mabel, Jake, and Annie, but they treated me like one of the crew even before Aunt Ethel died. Pat arranged to sell my house, and he put that money and the little that was left of my inheritance into a bank account in St. John’s. I got a little black ledger that helped me keep track of my balance, and I kept it in the box with my father’s medals. Pat and Mary would never take any money from me for my keep, insisting that I earned it by helping out around the house and in the garden. Really the two years I spent with them before I went off to summer school and then to Deep Bay to teach was the only time I ever had parents or was part of a family. That made what I did even harder for them to understand and near on impossible to forgive.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to start at the beginning to tell you the whole story.

 

Buy the book here: The Dance of the Daisies