Read From This Moment On Online

Authors: Shania Twain

From This Moment On (9 page)

BOOK: From This Moment On
2.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Probably because he now had a government job with an impressive-sounding title, my dad managed to swing a mortgage so that we could buy our very first house, on a cul-de-sac in the neighboring working-class community of Hanmer. It was in an area people referred to as “the Sticks,” I suppose because the houses were built up against the bush line of the Sudbury outskirts. This wasn’t really forest, but more like low-growing bush—sort of brush, hence the term
sticks
? For the first time in my young life, we enjoyed a semblance of stability, staying there into my high school years. I finished grade school at Redwood Acres, went on to Pinecrest Junior High, and then transferred to Capreol High School, all in the Hanmer area.

I liked our house on Proulx Court, with its light green siding and faux brick panels at the base. Though it was just a simple bungalow, it was bigger than any of the other places we’d lived. (Carrie and I still had to share the same single bottom bunk bed, however.) How great was it to have more space? Sometimes, when my parents were
out and I was bored, I would move the bedroom furniture all over the house, just for something to do. A friend would be over, and the two of us would pull beds apart and drag them into the living room, then switch sets of belongings from one bedroom to the other. Looking back now, I find it strange that my mom and my dad were so cool about it, as it’s kind of odd for a ten-year-old to orchestrate a home renovation, so to speak, with little reaction from the parents. I think it was my way of superficially changing things in an environment I had so little control to actually change.

We had our own backyard for the first time, and I spent many hours there playing with grass. Not just picking it; I loved to take tall-stemmed grass with long, wide blades draping down in a swoop that I’d split with my fingernail to create the effect of hairlike strands. Each grass had its own name and character, like a Barbie doll. Then I’d put on little plays, giving each of them different accents and personalities, like the mean one, the mother, and so on. I loved acting out roles through them and found making up stories to be a great escape that whisked me to another place. I was very private about this make-believe play, as I felt embarrassed to share it with anyone else my own age. Although my little sister, Carrie, understood, and she joined in sometimes, I remember telling her quite seriously to never tell anyone that I played with grass.

The stories were always complete fantasy and never about reality or drawn from my own life. This was an escape. I enjoyed pretending that my grass people were from far away, like England or somewhere exotic like Egypt, for example. I’ve often thought that maybe I should have become an actress, since I enjoyed being in someone else’s skin so much, but I think it’s more that I enjoyed being
out
of my own skin. I can’t say that I would have been any good at
real
acting, but it sure would have suited my need to be someone else for a while, molding the characters and stories as I desired.

This also held true for my songwriting, which started the same year I began playing with grass. I was ten when I wrote my first songs, and the backyard was a great place to hide and write. When I escaped
into my creative world of “putting” stories to music, like when I played with my grass dolls, I lost myself in a world of fiction.

Usually after some solitary time in the backyard, I’d hear my mother calling out for me. I wouldn’t answer. What a terrible thing to do to your own mother, but I didn’t want to be disturbed. I wanted to preserve this state of escape for as long as I could and pretend I wasn’t there. I needed someplace with a secret door that I could enter and close behind me so no one could follow. My backyard spot was actually inside a patch of brush that sat in the center of the one-acre lot behind the house. I trimmed a path through the branches and made a cavity on the inside as my hiding place. I could make small twig fires in there without being seen. This branchy cave was a place where I could forget about the piles of laundry I would spend the coming Saturday hand washing and hanging on the line, or if it was raining, the hours from midafternoon to eleven at night in the Laundromat. Instead it was necessary for my mental health to be able to experience, even if just in my imagination, an existence without worries of what we would eat this week without money for groceries.

My mother loved to hear my new song ideas, and I’d play them for her occasionally, after much coaxing. I kept my songwriting to myself during my childhood as much as I could, since I didn’t see the point in sharing it. It was my personal thing, like a diary I kept with no intention of ever sharing it with anyone. It pleased my mother when I included her in my music, though I often needed time alone with music. To really ensure privacy with my thoughts and creativity beyond the backyard hideout, I’d put my guitar in its case, some matches in my pocket, and walk up the road about twenty minutes, then go off into the bush to have my fire. No one would find me there. I was safe to sing and talk to grass to my heart’s content.

Our house had a basement with a dirt floor. We kept chickens down there for a while, as my dad figured it would save money to raise our own and have free eggs. We had a few hens and a banty rooster. At the same time, we planted potatoes in the backyard along with a few
other root vegetables. We also started scavenging nearby fields for potatoes left over from the fall harvest. You could pick them for free, so why not? If you dug and kicked the dirt enough, you could go home with a decent yield. My dad was being innovative with these hobby-farming, potato-scavenging ideas, and I thought they were clever ways of helping to keep us fed through periods when money was scarce.

That said, I
hated
picking potatoes. Not so much because of the physical work of bending and digging on your knees, but because every once in a while I’d thrust my hands into the loosened, tilled soil and pull up a muck-like slime of putrid, rotted potato. The stench is almost impossible to wash off your hands once it gets in the pores and up into the fingernails. Even worse was pulling up a potato and discovering that it doubled as a condo for potato worms. Ever see one? They are large, fat, white, and
so
disgusting. I used to gag at the mere sight of them, and coming face-to-face with one of these gooey creatures dangling from my potential dinner was enough to make me swear off spuds for life. But potatoes were a staple in our house, especially during picking season. I was turned off of potatoes for a while, but beggars can’t be choosers, so down the hatch they went—even if sometimes I had to choke them down.

As for the chickens, I was my dad’s head-chopping assistant. I didn’t like the idea of this and was a little nervous about the whole thing, but he talked me through each step, and off we went with being off with their heads. My father warned me that once the head fell away and he let the chicken go, it would run around for a minute or so before finally falling over dead. That idea freaked me out. But I had to suppress my girlish squeamishness and be the tomboy I wanted to prove to my father I could be. I felt he was relying on me to help him, as Carrie and the boys were too young, and I’m not sure that Jill would have been up for doing it. Although I was on the verge of adolescence, I felt obligated to fulfill my role as his son-slash-daughter for a while longer.

My job was to hold the chicken’s head in my hand, pressing its beak firmly against the brick that served as the chopping block.
While my dad held its body still with one hand cupped over it, he brought down the axe on the bird’s neck with his other hand. The instant the blade made contact, I let go and ran as fast and as far away as I could, as I was sure that the decapitated chicken would chase me. You know the expression “run around like a chicken with its head cut off”? That’s exactly what it did: running frantically, senselessly, and directionless. There was little blood, though, and it was all over very quickly. Phew! Boy, was I glad when the raising-chickens phase came to an end.

My dad had a playful sense of humor. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, we heard my mother give out a high-pitched shriek. I was alarmed, thinking maybe they were fighting again, but when I went to their bedroom door, she was laughing. My mom had gone to bed and turned out the lights. My dad waited until she was settled in, then he quietly joined her in the dark, with his feet up on his pillow beside her and a lit cigarette between his toes. All she could see next to her was the orange tip of the cigarette in the black and leaned over to kiss him on the face. That’s when she let out the screech. I thought that was a clever one.

Reflecting back as I write my life story, nothing feels better and cozier than my bare feet on my clean kitchen floor, and with dinner already on at five in the afternoon. The air is filled with the aroma of onions, garlic, thyme, rosemary, and slowly stewing potatoes (I love potatoes now), the sun is shining, my son is playing happily with a school friend, I snuck in a ten-minute nap this afternoon, my first spring roses on my deck are up, the birds are singing, and I feel all warm and fuzzy. Content. This is what’s really happening to me today: order, comfort, not just on TV or in my imagination, but in my real life in my own home. I savor these days and remind myself not to take them for granted, as I realize it’s not every day that you have the chance to enjoy the simple things.

I’ve already run around straightening every curtain, vase, carpet, and chair, opened all the right windows, lit a fragrant candle,
poured myself a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and sat down in my chair, which is perfectly positioned at just the right angle to take in the most of the view over Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps, to write. Nature is my favorite painting. I like nesting and enjoying a perfect home setting. With everything in place, I can relax and enjoy the picture-perfect moment. Freeze-frame it for as long as it will last. Then my son runs in with a bloody knee and smudges his muddy fingers on the sliding glass doors; the dogs trot along behind him, wet, and proceed to shake themselves dry all over the floor. Yup, these are the components that complete the scene of a truly perfect day. The peace may be broken in my quiet setting, but by something that makes me smile, like the warm, humorous scenes of one of my favorite Norman Rockwell paintings,
No Swimming,
depicting everyday, real-life perfection where something goes wrong but still makes you smile.

When I was a kid, I longed to have moments alone to myself, just so I could dream about how ideal life could be. I always imagined other homes having dinner on the stove, and I fantasized about the great food they would be getting ready to eat. Their lawns the perfect green and manicured, car just washed and polished, and parked very straight in the driveway, a couple of kids playing basketball at the net mounted up above the garage door, their golden retriever sprawled out in the sun, and me watching, dreaming, wishing things could be as ideal for us as they were on the other side of the street. I wanted us to be like them. I called them “roast beef families” because their dinners often smelled of roast beef. To me, if you could eat roast beef so often, then you must have been rich. By contrast, the Twains were pretty much a “ground beef family,” off the reduced-price rack, and that’s when we were lucky. For the most part, it was soups, stews, or other dishes where the meat could be spread out over several meals. Often, though, we didn’t have enough for even that.

All my senses would sharpen as I’d sit and observe this roast beef family basking in its perfectly pleasant life. We had one such family across the street from us on Proulx Court, which was a horseshoe-shaped “court” with a string of bungalows on either side. Roast beef
families frequently barbecued on summer weekends, and the smell of their steak sizzling would almost kill me. I was dying with envy knowing they could eat so deliciously all the time. It didn’t seem fair, and I felt sorry for myself and perpetually hungry when I smelled something I couldn’t have.

In our house, when the cupboards were otherwise empty, we ate what we called goulash, which in reality consisted of boiled milk poured over broken pieces of dry white bread and topped with brown sugar. Very hard to feel satisfied no matter how much goulash you fill up your belly with when you have a neighbor who is sitting down to his juicy, barbecued steak for Saturday lunch and his roast beef dinner that evening. Now it’s strikingly ironic to me how, as a vegetarian, I no longer yearn to eat any sort of animal, yet my childhood envy was to eat the rich man’s food: meat.

For us, goulash became a staple; there were times when we would eat it for every meal for days. Funny enough, I really liked it and still do, but it was hard to swallow when my taste buds were begging for something more savory and succulent. I recently rediscovered goulash in the Middle East, to my surprise. I went to Dubai for a recreational weekend trip in 2009, and one of the desserts offered in a very nice restaurant I was eating at was goulash! Although it’s also made with bread, sugar, and milk, the sugar is different and not like our Canadian brown sugar, which I think makes it taste best. This Middle Eastern version was good, though, and it brought me back to the days when this was my meal two to three times a day. Ironically, I was eating this poor man’s dish at a luxury five-star hotel in the desert, worlds away.
Whoa
, I thought,
it really is a small world after all
.

I spent a lot of my youth jealous of what other people ate. When our cupboards were empty, my school lunch was likely to contain a “poor man’s sandwich,” as my dad used to call it, given that it included only two ingredients—mustard or mayonnaise spread on two slices of white bread. A poor man’s lunch box for a poor man’s lunch was an empty plastic bread bag. That was a bit embarrassing, as most kids had a proper container for carrying their lunch, or at least a
brown paper lunch bag. On days when we had no bread left, I lied about why I had no lunch and told the teachers and my classmates that I forgot it at home or that I wasn’t hungry—anything to deflect attention or prying questions.

BOOK: From This Moment On
2.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Brett McCarthy by Maria Padian
Minotaur by Phillip W. Simpson
The Springsweet by Saundra Mitchell
Killer in the Shade by Piers Marlowe
Henry and Jim by J.M. Snyder
A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu
Set Me Free by Gray, Eva
Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders
Firewalk by Anne Logston
Basketball (or Something Like It) by Nora Raleigh Baskin