LIFE'S IRONIES

        Hers was a very slow-paced existence, and for the first eighteen years of her life she had never traveled more than thirty miles from the house in which she had been born. Growing up in a small isolated village, in a small isolated British colony, Elsie Mae, as well as most of the people around her, had a rather limited concept of the true geography of the larger outside world.

         Her grandfather used to tell stories of the time when, as a young man, he and most of his fellow shipmates, had been forcibly removed from the vessel in which they were fishing and taken aboard a British Man O’ War to help defend their part of the Island from a fleet of French invaders. Because of incidents such as this, the people of the Island looked upon the French as a bad lot, and France, the place these people must have come from, was thought to be a land of troublemakers and located at the furthest ends of the earth.   

            Now we all know that memorable events have a way of working themselves into the everyday existence of a people. So it came about that whenever someone in Elsie’s village was especially annoying, the person being upset would often be heard to make exclamations such as, “Oh, you’re such a nuisance, I wish you were in France!” This would signify to the offender that he had tested the uttermost limits of his rival’s patience, and was being wished the very worst of all possible punishments. Understandably, Elsie also adopted this saying, and since she had a rather quick temper, was often heard to use it in times of extreme exasperation.

When she reached her late teens, Elsie, following in the footsteps of her older sister Martha, left her little coastal village and took a train for the hundred-mile journey to the center of the island. There she soon met and married the love of her life, and before long settled down to raise a family of her own.   

          As her family grew larger, Elsie’s patience grew thinner, and the phrase, 

fell from her lips on a somewhat regular basis. Now the child who got wished away to France most often was Elsie’s second son, Jim, because of his uncanny way of testing her patience to the ultimate. This beautiful blue-eyed, blond haired child had such a winning smile and such mischievous ways that he would melt your heart one minute and break it the next.

Typical of the sorts of things he would get up to was the afternoon in late August when seven-year-old Jim and his cousin, Bruce, decided to have some fun by seeing who could jump off the back verandah and crush the most heads of cabbage. Jim’s father had planted the cabbages near the verandah in the spring and had lovingly cared for them all summer long. Granted, now that their leaves were beginning to “turn in”, the cabbages did look like several rows of green balls waiting to be jumped upon, but this was not how Elsie Mae saw things when she looked at the crushed and mangled mess that the boys had made of her husband’s prized cabbage patch. Instead, she cried out in anguish:

            In spite of all the heartache and the tears, however, the years rolled on, and almost before she had realized it, the oldest children had all grown up. Moreover, since employment opportunities were limited in central Newfoundland, and since with the coming of Confederation many new positions were opening up in the Canadian military, the oldest boy, Fred, even began making plans to leave the island altogether. This proved to be a very difficult time for Elsie Mae, for although in their younger days she had often momentarily wished a child away to France, truth be told, it pained her to have either one of them out of her sight for long. In fact, once they had reached their teenage years and had started having independent social lives outside the home, Elsie had been often heard to say, “the happiest time of life is when all your little ones are safely tucked into their beds at night and you know where they are.”

            Nevertheless, time could not be made to stand still, and leave they did. First, Fred the oldest, joined the Royal Canadian Air force and went off to mainland Canada. Then the next year Jim followed in his brothers footsteps and off they went to places Elsie had never heard of before -  places like Trenton, Ontario, and Rivers, Manitoba. It tore at her heartstrings to see them go, and she missed them terribly, anxiously awaiting every letter they sent, and carefully reading and re-reading each one many times over. However, although she didn’t know it at the time, Elsie’s greatest heartache was waiting just around the corner, and it came to her quite unexpectantly one beautiful summer day in mid-July.

            Elsie had been outside working in her flower garden while her younger children were playing in the front yard, when someone cried out that a soldier was coming up the lane. Elsie went to investigate and who should she see coming towards her but Jim, dressed in full military garb and saying, 

“They kicked me out Mother; they couldn’t put up with me any longer, so they kicked me out!”

“Oh, Jim, that can’t be true”, she exclaimed, “Tell me what really happened.” And it was then that Elsie learned the dreadful truth.

           “Jim, that just can’t be! France is on the other side of the world; why would anybody want to send you there? When will I ever see you again?”

“Oh, Mom, it’s not that bad. I have a couple of weeks leave before I go, and I’ll only be gone for two years……”

Jim’s voice began to fade out as Elsie’s head started spinning and feelings of guilt and remorse welled up inside her. Surely everyone knew that she hadn’t really wished her children away to France; surely this was some elaborate joke or some monumental misunderstanding; surely the gods could not be so utterly unkind……!