Our mémère was born the youngest of fourteen in St. Leonard, New Brunswick, Canada. They didn’t have indoor plumbing, so her job as the youngest was to empty the outhouse bucket. Her mom didn’t like her, and her dad died on her 16th birthday. One time I asked her what she had wanted to be when she was a kid, and she said she never thought to be anything. “The world was nothing to me. Isn’t that terrible?”
She really turned nothing into something. A mom at 22, a grandma at 47, married for 55 years. Four daughters and thirteen grandchildren and nobody who will ever love any of us more. She knew all of our birthdays and shipped all of us boxes of her pumpkin bread. She made the best chicken stew and inimitable ployes. She was left-handed and spoke two languages and played the guitar and was crazy beautiful. She should’ve lived forever
