Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [56]
Both John and Thomas were grimly aware that wrenching a desirable “estate” from the dense backwoods was a monumental task. Thomas’s spirits sagged as he stared out at his rotting stumps and realized how quickly his capital was disappearing. But he tried not to worry Catharine, who wrote home, “My husband is become more reconciled to the country, and I daily feel my attachment to it strengthening.” John was too much of an optimist to be anything other than sanguine about the future, and Susanna described this period as “the halcyon days of the bush.”
The demands on both men and women in the bush were endless: there were always crops to harvest, maple sap to boil for syrup and sugar, apples to dry, fruit to bottle, fences to build or mend, potatoes to plant, candles to make. But even in the busiest season, Catharine found time to pull a crudely made wooden chair up to the scrubbed pine kitchen table and write in her journal or begin a letter home. Her account of their “Robinson Crusoe sort of life” filled pages and pages of precious vellum paper with her neat, sloping script. She was a compulsive scribbler who wrote the way she talked—in a warm, happy gush. Nothing deterred her from her prolixity. “Brevity in epistolary correspondence is not one of my excellences,” she sheepishly admitted.
She wrote about the shortage of basic supplies such as tea and milk, and the dire state of the roads. She described how her clothes crackled with static electricity during a January cold snap, and how she had developed a taste for maple sugar in her tea. She enthused about Sam’s skill at spearing fish in the lake, and the elegance of Indian quillwork. In her eyes, snow always twinkled like diamonds; a flock of snow buntings sparkled like “stars of silver,” even the bonfires of brushwood were “a magnificent sight.” She wrote about “bright sunbeams and blue cloudless sky”; pretty ducks “skimming along the … pine-fringed shores”; honeysuckle, St.-John’s-wort and the magnificent water-lily, which “in all its virgin beauty expands its snowy bosom to the sun and genial air.” She asked her family to send her some seeds from the primroses and violets that grew around Reydon Hall, so that she might introduce them into the backwoods.
Catharine could make the best of anything. Even the ugly, immovable stumps, which marched over the Traills’ newly cleared property like an army of angry dwarves, acquired their own flattering metaphor. In her letter to England, Catharine described how in winter each stump sported its “turban of snow.”
At one level, Catharine’s enthusiasm was genuine. She had never been as fond of metropolitan life as her sisters Eliza, Agnes and Susanna and had always preferred to watch the seasons gently blend into each other in Suffolk. In Upper Canada, she now had the far more dramatic cycle of seasons, and a vast new array of plants, to record.
Similarly, she “never was a votary at the shrine of luxury or fashion,” unlike Agnes and Susanna. She had hated the necessity, when visiting London, of getting dressed up in a full chemise, linen drawers, petticoat-bodice, whalebone corset and six or seven petticoats under a wide-skirted gown. The whole outfit (including bonnet, laced boots,