Take down Volume II, the last years when she was happy. The tiny woman in the pince-nez, the veiled black hat, black gloves, and a smartly tailored suit stares out at the reader. Her thoughts, too, were veiled: from her husband, her congregation, her readers, who expected only sunshine from their favourite writer. Only in her journals could she let off steam, as if she were a volcano about to erupt, words flowing from her pen like molten tears.
She wished for an hour out of the past, a time when she was happy but didn’t know it. She wished to go back to Park Corner, when she was still young and hopeful: before her father died, her husband fell into madness, Frede died, and the world changed.
She wrote about that hour out of the past, turning back to a time when the world seemed safe, before motor cars, world wars, madness, death. She gave her readers marriage in the final chapter, the happy-ever-after ending.
She wrote about marriage failures, war, despair, madness, death. The anger we carry in our bones because life cheats us, steals what we hold most dear, gives us back our dreams with tarnished corners. The secrets we never reveal.
“L.M.M.” appears in Kat Cameron’s Strange Labyrinth
(Fernie, BC: Oolichan Books, 2014).