Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [169]
The formal presentation came early in 1899. The tribute acknowledged Catharine’s major literary works, and concluded: “We cannot forget the courage with which you endured the privations and trials of the backwoods in the early settlement of Ontario, and we rejoice to know that your useful life has been prolonged in health and vigour until you are now the oldest living author in Her Majesty’s dominion. Nearing the close of the century we desire to pay tribute to your personal worth, and we ask your acceptance of this testimonial as a slight token of the esteem and regard in which you are universally held.”
A few months later, Kate Traill took her ninety-seven-year-old mother to Minnewawa, her cottage on Stony Lake. Catharine sat on the shady verandah, scattering crumbs for her beloved birds and watching canoes skim across the azure water. She loved “the wild and picturesque rocks, trees, hill and valley, wild-flowers, ferns, shrubs and moss and the pure, sweet scent of pines over all, breathing health and strength. If I were a doctor,” she had once written, “I would send my patients to live in a shanty under the pines.” In the summer of 1899, she would occasionally ignore Kate’s protests and, cherrywood staff in hand, totter off to the woods behind the cottage to look for berries and flowers. Very occasionally, she would pick up a pen to write to distant relatives.
Kate Traill’s island of Minnewawa, on Stony Lake, where Catharine loved to smell the pines and scatter crumbs for warblers and orioles.
As the August nights lengthened, and the evening breezes grew cooler, Kate helped her mother board the steamer for the return journey to Lakefield. Soon after Catharine was settled back in her beloved Westove, she began a letter to a cousin in England about a London publisher’s decision not to publish one of her children’s stories. “I had many misgivings as to the merits of the composition,” wrote Catharine, with typical self-deprecation. “I never see anything good in my writings till they are in print and even then I wonder how that event came to pass.”
Catharine’s head began to nod before she had finished the letter. Kate gently took the pen out of her hand and, as her mother jerked into wakefulness again, Kate suggested to Catharine that she could finish the letter later. The old lady gave her faithful daughter a grateful, sweet smile, and settled back into her chair as the evening shadows began to lengthen.
Catharine’s final hours were far more peaceful than those of her sister, Susanna. With the blessed calm she had radiated throughout her life, she died quietly in her sleep two days later, on August 29, 1899.
Postscript
T he best memorial to the lives of Catharine Parr Trail and Susanna Moodie is the angel above the Moodie grave in Belleville cemetery. A stalwart figure in her carved robe and mossy wings, she towers over her neighbours and holds her arm aloft in defiance of the winds from the Bay of Quinte. In her hand she clutches a star—symbol, perhaps, of the immigrant’s hope that a better future lies ahead, and that he or she can control it. It is unlikely that the two Strickland sisters who came to Canada ever felt in control of their destiny. Yet as each neared the end of her own long life, with beloved children close by, she would have acknowledged that the journey had been worthwhile. Each had arrived in the New World a writer, and had continued writing despite hardship. Each had seen most of her children happily settled. Both had watched the rough-and-ready colony of 1832 embark on its transformation into a remarkably vigorous, prosperous nation. And through