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The Swan

Swan morning Lines March 28 2022

Rustling newsprint filled the galley kitchen as I unpacked the Bekins box. Fine glassware wrapped carefully for shipping on our cross country move I could finally open, for the china cabinet was back. It had been stored in a damp place for a year and when we finally had a new house to home it, it was mouldy. The van lines paid for the restoration, and we had waited nine months for the fine furniture restorer to access the materials he needed during COVID, when a worker shortage blocked shipping.

I folded each sheet to save space in the recycling bag. I set the glassware on the counter to wash it: champagne flutes, brandy snifter, long stemmed pudding glasses, martini glasses with tinted stems. These were relics of my mother’s love of entertaining, hosting lavish dinner parties in the small town where she lived her married life during the sixties and seventies, where people made their own entertainment by inviting friends over to dine in style in the homes. I wonder if there was some kind of competition among the women who were full time home makers of professional husbands in a town of five thousand people where the social circle was small and everyone knew each other. In a gold fish bowl, the doctor’s wife was especially visible, and my mother enjoyed feeling important. Looking back, I imagine those dinner parties were an act of adventure and creative self expression for her, too—fondue parties, Vichysoisse soup, Beef Wellington, Baked Alaska, Poire Helene. She liked to try out new and fancy recipes, she lay the table with bone china, linen table cloths, red and white wine glasses for French wines, silver table ware, and dressed with pearls and turquoise jewellery collected on trips.

Near the bottom of the box, I cleared the crinkled paper aside and saw the glass head and beak of the swan.

“Gramma Bet’s swan! I had forgotten we sent that.”

Gramma kept it on her dining table on Cliffcrest Drive, a dark oak table with six matching chairs and a buffet beneath the window. She kept it on a round lace doily beneath a small mirror surrounded with silk water lilies that reflected in the silvered glass like still morning water at the cottage.

She had another mirror in her house that I loved too. Round, hanging on the wall of the spare room above the garage where my Mom and dad always slept when we came to visit for the weekend. It was etched with palm trees at the edges, beautiful arcs of their trunks leaning just into the edge of the mirror. I loved to look at myself in that mirror, seeing a long beach, blue water, cool shadows under coconut palms, hot sand, and hissing waves receding from wet sand.

We ate breakfast around that table. When I set the table for breakfast, I cradled the swan in both hands and moved it carefully to the buffet, arranging the doily and mirror and water lilies beneath it so the swan could continue serenely swimming. Before breakfast my grandfather had been soaking his swollen hands in warm paraffin wax to ease the pain of his arthritis. His hands were wooden claws by the time he was seventy, fingers and wrists frozen, rigid. I was a little afraid of him. He had always been a smoker, and I didn’t like the way he smelled. I took a place at the table on the opposite side and watched him struggle with his bacon and eggs. His wooden fingers could no longer manipulate his knife and fork to cut his food, nor could he bend his wrists to bring his food into his mouth. His palsied hands shook. His wife quietly cut his bacon into pieces. He dropped his hands in his lap, dropped his eyes to his plate, silent tears dropped down his cheeks. He stood abruptly. He strode from the room.

I didn’t understand but I felt the undercurrent of shame, frustration, rage, and fear. No one spoke. The swan gazed implacably into its mirror.