Have I squirrel blood in me? Some of their characteristics are in me very strong. One is my keen appetite for nuts, but my strongest squirrel way (and I’ve had it as far back as I can remember) is hoarding. Not money or things that you can touch with your hands, but hoarding experience.
When I was a child, I was very fond of old ladies. There were several I used to read to and a lot I went to visit., old ladies who sat in chairs all day. I wondered what they thought about, sitting with their wrinkled hands folded in their laps, “I hope they have lots of nice thoughts stored up in their heads,” I used to say to myself.
For loneliness the married did not seem much better off than the unmarried. Maybe they did have children and grandchildren, but the children seemed to busy to minding the grandchildren and the grandchildren seem bored with Grand’s long stories and long kissings. Having more people to love oly gave one more people to trouble over.
Well, I looked at all these old people and I said: “Emily, see all you can with your young eyes, hear all you can with your young ears, because if you don’t have your memory full, old age is going to be very dull!” I went everywhere I had a chance to go, and I saw and heard and hoarded, Though I really had no idea how much these hoarding were going to help my old age, nor how much they now enriched my life during the years I was hoarding for my oldness.
When I heard grownups discussing a place that interested me, I would tell myself: “Emily, you must go to that place, you will get lots of rememberings to hoard there,” and nearly always I went sooner or later. Sometimes it took scrimping and pinching in other way, but I went somehow.
The first trip I remember definitely planning in this way came about through hearing a nurse who came to she my mother. She and my mother were chatting, I listening. She had been up among the mountains of Yale, BC. She was not an educated person but she must have been a vivid narrator. She said, “Yale is very hot in summer. You see, Yale sits in a little basic.”
The phrase caught my fancy: surrounded by high mountains all round, sitting in a basic like a baby in its bath. I sat listening quietly, not joining into the talk or asking questions., I just saw Yale sitting in a bath of heat. “Someday I must see this little town, sitting in a basin.”
I did ,but not till I was an adult and took myself there to sketch. It was midwinter, white and frozen, otherwise everything was just as that nurse had said. I was in a cold hotel. Strangely, I never felt Yale cold, always hot. The rememberings of that old nurse had been vivid, more vivid than the findings of my own adult eyes.
A French artist and this English wife came to Vitoria. She painted better than he did and he was jealous. They were the first real artist I had every known. I believed everything they said. They told me how marvellous was London and to see Paris! Why the were the only places in the world to paint in. You did not even need to have to study much in Paris to learn painting, all you did was to go there and look and absorb things and talk to artists and there you were — a painter!
“Emily,” I told myself, “You certainly must go to London and to see Paris, no matter the cost, and eventually I went. It was not as easy as they said, it meant work — hard work — to get there and to become. If I had not gone I would never really have been happy over my work for hankering.
It was the way all my life. If I wanted things hard enough, and I strong and I managed, somehow they cam my way. Sometimes it was just an Indian village I heard of., off the beaten track and hard to get at. Sometimes it was a person or a doing, but somehow or other they came my way, but always I had to do my share and go out to meet then.
These things were like Father’s jar of Hundreds and Thousands candies, so small that alone you couldn’t even call each a candy. Father said, “Hold our your hands!” and he poured Hundreds and Thousands into our palms. We bobbed our head down, and our tongues out, and there we were — a pretty taste, sweet and crunchy, made by those tiny bits of things that were nothings in themselves.
