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Curly after my mother lamented my bone-straight hair. She believed her role as a teacher was to lead children through an anxious passage into a mental clearing, and her role as an aunt was to send me books and recordings and on her rare visits to soothe me by loving me and loving my parents. It is the most relaxing thing in the world for the child of reliable, solitary parents to see them befriended. And the most surprising, the most eye opening, to discover that they have lives and interests and loves of their own.
    I remember the utter change in atmosphere whenever Connie came to visit. She was full of stories and laughs, she was risque, unzipped, fun. My parents were liberated for a moment, reconnected to their lives before they had children. They relaxed and came out of themselves, allowing me a glimpse of a past as promising as my own future seemed to be whenever I was in my aunt’s company.

    What for Connie was slipping outside on a summer’s day was endless winter for Michael - he had to don a mountain of clothing and struggle through the drifts.
    “Put down your pencil for a minute, shake out your hands. Relax your jaw. Get up and touch your toes.”
    Movement always helps. A world of thoughts occurredto her whenever she rode a train, and a lesser world whenever she went for a walk. She began to compile a working vocabulary for a junior naturalist.
Earth, lair, burrow, den, stream, brook, mountain, cloud, thunder, lightning
. Influenced by Parley, she looked up derivations and learned that almost none of these words, so close to life, came from French. The exception was
mountain
, from the Old French
montaigne
. The simple, earthy words were Old English. And so she found herself taking sides as she read the dictionary, arguing with Parley about the merits of English versus French as she used to argue with her father about the merits of Robert Service. “A campfire poet isn’t a real poet? You might as well say a campfire isn’t a real fire.” And she had stomped upstairs and slammed her door, even though she knew perfectly well what her father meant, and agreed.
    Michael liked to be in her wake as she strode around the schoolyard. He liked her tallness and her moods.

    A teacher’s sudden shift in temper - that’s what children watched out for. The snarl and snap. The crazy whirlwind of Attila bearing down in her mustard suit and thick legs and pencilled scalp. Hairs in her snorting nostrils.
    Miss Fluelling, moist and over-warm in her suit, suffered erratic surges in temperature, each one preceded by an oncoming train of dread that rocked through her and left her drenched. If a child happened to be standing on the tracks, the train overwhelmed them both, mutton and lamb.
    A few years earlier she had gone too far. It happens to every teacher. She had brought her pointer down on Michael Graves’s arm, raising a blood weal the length of half a ruler. The next day she received a visit from Harold Graves of Graves Hardware, a man known to have a fiery temper of his own, and soon after that she slipped on the school steps and came down so hard on her wrist, it broke. In her place arrived the wispy, ineffectual wife of a local farmer, and the children learned what heaven was. It was immense relief, then boredom.
    They studied their teachers for changes in temper, vagaries of mood, variations in wardrobe, indications of having shaved or bathed or washed their hair. Every release was temporary. Recess, dinner break, recess, the end of the day - all were followed by more school. The maiming of Miss Fluelling was temporary, too. She returned in September, a splotch of unmistakable colour in the doorway of the school.
    Children cannot believe that adults have forgotten what it’s like to be a child. What a sad chasm that is. The dumbfounded child on one side, the forgetful adult on the other - the perfect pink taste buds of youth, and the scalded, swollen, scummy-white tongues of age. Every so often there’s a truce,