A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski

telling the story and I’m not even born yet? Hal is saying those things about the ancestors because he wants to please me. I know better than to listen to someone who wants to please. Shut up Hal, and I almost lost the story. He was quiet for a long time.
    Well, in this house, he continues, there were ten rooms, large rooms with bluestone floors and painted plaster walls. Nine of these rooms were occupied, not with people but with boats. Little fishboats you might say when they were tossing on the sea, but large boats if you saw them cooped up in a house. You’d wonder how they ever got into the rooms. But there are ways with these shore houses, I can tell you that, ways of getting them in there and ways of getting them out when they are needed, just as there is a way to float a boat from a beach when there’s no dock handy, and ways of pulling it up on the sand so that the high tide won’t take it out to blue water where it’d fill up with salt waves and be lost to its master forever.
    Why don’t you ask me about the tenth room? Well that’s where the family lived pressed down like herrings in a barrel. Ten of them. The same number as the boats. Now Grandpa’s boat was the best of them, painted green and white and the name of this boat was Ivy. I could tell you the story of Ivy, or I could name all the boats and the colours and their owners first and go back to the beginning later, so choose which and hurry up about it. I haven’t got a hundred years, even if you have.

    Nan

    When you lean out of the upstairs window on a summer night the velvet dark touches your face softly, softly. It is the very colour of the smallest tadpoles that you remember from spring. Later the tadpoles got browner and browner until they were tiny mottled froglets. They had forgotten how to wriggle so they hopped; they hopped away into the grass and you forgot them for the love of moths and huge junebugs flying through the night. Flying through the open window and falling on the bedroom floor where Julius the white kitten hunts them and you have to bravely pick them up and throw them back into the soft warm night which waits out there in the garden. It is Grandfather’s garden, the music one. He’s the one planted all the plants long ago and now they are flowers, lilies and peonies and daisies.
    And you shall climb over the sill and leap into the night and land softly in the dark grass and then down to the canal bank where grandfather has sworn you will hear the nightingale singing, burbling he says in the trees that hang down over the water. You never can see them, he says, but their song must mean they are there. If you can hear something but you can’t see it, it’s still a noun grandfather says, but really shouldn’t there be another sort of noun quite separate for things that are there but you can’t see? But what if you just can’t see them for the moment, like the Atlantic Ocean or the Tower of London? Can a noun be one sort one day and the other kind another day? Someone has to decide that. Perhaps God?
    NAN – When is a noun not a noun?
    GOD – I can’t answer that.
    GRANDFATHER – Neither can I.
    NAN – Give up?
    GOD – I never give up.
    GRANDFATHER – I do. When is a noun not a noun?
    NAN – How do I know. Anyway, I asked you first.
    And so on. There doesn’t have to be an answer for every little thing. Question and Answer: Question and Answer: All Grandfather’s test papers are like that. Laurence says it’s time for Nan to do essays, little ones in big writing perhaps. Grandfather says, let her learn to put sentences together first, not the cart before the horse. Nan wonders was the cart invented before the horse? Was it waiting there for the horse to be invented? God invented the horse, Laurence explains, it took a long time, like a million years or so.
    God is a slow inventor. But the cart is a manmade object.
    Nan stops thinking and kicks her legs about. Her dance makes a bumping noise on the wooden floor.