She was born in 1967 in Jacksonville, Florida and got to live until 1982. She was born into the latest generation of a family soaked through with inescapable, interwoven cycles of poverty, abuse and mental illness.
When she was 14, her mother died of an opioid overdose. Freida and her brother Frank had never been particularly looked after. If they’d ever had it, their family had lost the knack of caring for each other well before.
When we remember things, we don’t just find the right file and press play.
The Purposeful Mayonnaise is a combo deal literary and art journal and online platform. Today the team published Volume 1 Issue 4: Essence and one of my pieces of short fiction is in it!
When my Grandma Madeleine was four, her mother, Florence, took her and her two older sisters, five and seven, out to the Montréal shopping district to buy new shoes. It was 1934, almost five years into the Great Depression. Canada was hit hard, second only to the USA.
I’ve been addicted to it since I was fifteen and I was allowed to have it whenever I wanted, not just one on special occasions. In grade eleven, I got up to three per day: breakfast, after school, evening.
How do you feel about these off-the-wall names that some of my early Québecker ancestors gave their children? Girls SymphoroseTheotisteMarcellineJosephteApollineScholastiqueCedeliceHarmoniaZelire Boys SilfroyPolydoreEnguerrand
Before factory-made textiles, making fabrics took up such enormous amounts of female time that little girls had to start preparing for wifehood as soon as their fine motor control came in. Any spare minute women and girls had, their hands were busy …