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The Shed, by Michael Roberts

21/1/2022

 
Dan nudges me, then motions with his head towards the dais.
“I knew they’d use that one,” he says.
Next to the urn, there’s the picture of my mother.
The Picture.
The one that was on the dust sleeves of her books, all one hundred million copies of them.

I’ve seen seen the photo dozens of times, obviously, but for some reason today it seems fresh again.
My dad took it the summer before she published her first book.
Nineteen seventy two.
In it, her hippie vibe has started to wane and she’s looking more like Hip Suburban Mom than Flower Child, her twenties fading into her thirties.but that’s the Mother I remember as a kid.
This is the Mother I remember loving.
This is the Mother who kissed us both on the head in the schoolyard as the bell rang, shooed us off to class, then walked back across the playing fields, through the thin line of trees marking the boundary of our backyard facing the mountains and went inside her cedar shed which my dad built for her as a wedding gift, ostensibly to garden out of.
According to her memoir, she’d write for an hour or so, then go back and do housework.
She referred to cleaning the house daily as her ‘two hours of Victorian servitude,’ a phrase that had apparently resonated with a lot of disgruntled housewives in the Seventies.
She’d finish up her ‘servitude’, have lunch, then come back and write until it was time to pick us up from school.
Like most things that end badly, it started innocently enough.
The year before, my father had seen the ad for the writing class tacked up at the community pool.
She went and everything thing changed.
A couple years before he died, he and I were out somewhere having drinks and he brought that ad up.
“If I’d known,” he’d said, “I’ve have walked right by.”
After that, I’d wonder what we would have all been like if he had.
What it would have been like to have a regular mother.
The thing was, after all this time and all this acclaim of hers, I struggle to remember her being anything other than a writer.
It just grew into this thing that eclipsed everything else before it.
Eclipsed everyone, including my father, who left and eventually found a new life and a new wife back east.
Everyone had assumed she had gotten the house when they split up, until she set the record straight in her book and said that she had bought the house outright from him with the advance from her third book.
She even hired a housekeeper so she could write full-time.
None of this endeared us to our neighbours, who were mostly either housewives themselves or employees of the local logging company who resented the way they were portrayed, albeit fictionally, in my mother’s fourth books, a sort of “Peyton Place” set in the sleepy Pacific Northwest.
​
Jim Bartlett link
21/1/2022 04:43:10 pm

This is excellent, Michael. And such a fun ending.
Really enjoyed this
Jim

Michael Roberts
21/1/2022 05:48:14 pm

Thanks.....It sort of morphed from this other story I was writing about the death of someone else in my family....

For the record, my folks were more like the neighbours, a housewife and a guy who worked for the local logging company.

There was a lady whose kids went to my public school, who wrote Harlequin romances.

Jim link
21/1/2022 08:26:31 pm

Quite interesting. Sometimes (if not most of the time) truth is stranger than fiction.
Thanks for the extra note on the story
Jim

Marjan Sierhuis
21/1/2022 06:22:12 pm

An enjoyable read, Michael.

Angela Carlton
21/1/2022 08:14:40 pm

An interesting look behind the life of a writer. I think most of us can relate?? It can be a lonely road but storytelling, the ability to make the words shine on paper is a gift.

Sue Clayton
22/1/2022 05:00:12 am

A writer's gotta do what a writer's gotta do. At least her efforts were rewarded.

David Milner
22/1/2022 11:17:11 am

Writers and artist are often judged harshly. This is an evocative and lovely piece of fiction.

Cindy Patrick
23/1/2022 04:49:42 pm

I loved this woman and wished her family were less selfish about what they wanted her to be. Got the 70's imagery for sure, Michael. I liked this!


Comments are closed.

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