Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [165]
It was more than five years since Susanna had died, and Catharine missed her. These days Catharine remembered her sister not as the cantankerous widow or the demented old woman on her deathbed, but as the lively, headstrong girl with “an inherent love of freedom of thought and action.” She wrote about her with a love and longing she had never expressed about Thomas Traill after his death. “We two lived in childlike confidence and harmony, as we grew up side by side as loving friends, our lives remaining in parallel grooves, and this continued even after we married and left the old home at Reydon to share the untried fortunes of the new world in our forest homes in what is now Ontario.” In particular, she remembered her youngest sister’s intensity. “Susie was an infant genius…. Her facility for rhyme was great and her imagination vivid and romantic, tinged with gloom and grandeur….As is often found in persons of genius, she was often elated and often depressed, easily excited by passing events, unable to control emotions caused by either pain or pleasure. …I was not of so imaginative a disposition.”
Whatever wistful thoughts of Susanna she harboured, Catharine undoubtedly comforted herself with the pleasure she continued to take in her own huge family. Five of her seven children were still alive in 1890, and she had twenty-one grandchildren. Kate Traill continued to look after her mother, and Annie Atwood and Mary Muchall, Catharine’s two married daughters, lived close by. But both her sons, like so many young men in the late nineteenth century, had been forced to travel west in order to find work. William and Walter were now both settled in western Canada and had started families thousands of miles away from Lakefield. Catharine ached to see them and her “little Nor’wester grandchildren.” Even when her right hand was swollen with rheumatism, or her eyes cloudy with cataracts, she managed to write them lengthy letters. “See dear how I have blotted the sheet well you must not mind the blot but take from the hand of the aged mother,” she wrote to William Traill, now a chief trader dealing in furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the remote northwest of the Dominion. William wrote affectionate letters home, filled with vivid descriptions of native uprisings, natural disasters and adventurous canoe trips. He sent his mother dried ferns and grasses from the Peace River region. But Walter’s letters arrived infrequently these days, and were often gloomy. Catharine confided to William her concerns about Walter’s mental health. “I fear for that morbid temperament so like his dear father’s.”
Catharine’s son William Traill (seated, right), who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company before becoming a farmer in Saskatchewan, with his wife Harriette and nine of their ten children.
In sheer volume alone, Catharine’s correspondence is extraordinary. Judging by what has survived, during the last few years of her life she sat down to write a lengthy epistle to a relative or a friend, or a formal letter to a publisher or fellow writer, at least once or twice a week. Moreover, letter-writing was light afternoon entertainment for the elderly author. Most mornings, while Kate Traill did the housework, Catharine worked away at her writing projects. Often her eyes ached after she had been writing or reading too long; then she would open the windows and step outside. “I long for air,” she explained to her daughter Annie, “and pottering about the garden.” Kate looked after beds of flowering perennials, while Catharine was still in charge of the vegetable patch. Since the two women could rarely afford meat in their diet, they depended on Catharine’s harvest of peas, beans, root vegetables, raspberries and strawberries. Despite her white hair, arthritic knees and aching back, the octogenarian would dig, plant, weed and pick just as she had done throughout her life in Canada.
Besides the family memoir, Catharine had two other writing projects on the go: an account of her first