Free They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson Page A

all their tiny clips had to be slipped from the mast again. This was my job and I hated it.
    One day, as I sat shivering on the dock, my cold hands wrestling with the wet sails and icy clips, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. “Dad?” I said. “Why can’t the sails roll up and down into the boom automatically, like our movie screen does?” I’d often watched Dad pull up the screen when he set up the projector in the playroom. It was spring-loaded and would effortlessly wind out of its tube, and when he’d let go, it would roll quickly back in with a satisfying thu-thu-thunk.
    He swiped at me as if I were a gnat. “Because life isn’t meant to be easy .”

    “Easy” wasn’t in Dad’s vocabulary. He liked a challenge. Perhaps this is why Mum and Dad were able to keep their marriage vows, against all odds, until death. Dad once told me that divorce didn’t solve anything because you were just trading one set of problems for another. You had to look beyond them, he said.
    When my own children were young and I was thinking of divorcing, Dad took me for a walk. He told me the story of when, as a child, he’d gone into the woods and torn down his brothers’ tree house in revenge because they wouldn’t let him play there.
    “I always regretted it,” he told me, “because I tore down the one thing I loved.”
    He left it up to me to decipher this parable, but when I decided to separate anyway, he came into the city to helpme move out. I thought he disapproved, but in the kitchen, lifting boxes, I heard him mutter under his breath, “I wish I had your guts.”
    Mum and Dad’s tumultuous battles reached one crescendo after another until eventually they simmered down. When they entered old age, their prolonged truce seemed to resemble companionship. When Dad got Alzheimer’s, it even resembled love. He began to pay compliments to Mum that she’d waited sixty years to hear—but we knew by then that he’d lost his mind.
    By then, Oakville had matured into a sprawling, sophisticated commuter town with a population of over two hundred thousand people—one of the wealthiest in Canada.
    Mum hated this change.
    “People have more money than sense!” she’d say. “They tear down all these beautiful old houses, build monstrosities with five bathrooms, and then hightail it to Florida for the winter! Who wants to clean five bathrooms ?”
    Mainly she complained that, in the old part of town, all the children were gone. “It’s like a ghost town! Instead of sagebrush blowing down the streets, newspapers are all over the lawns—but nobody’s home. All the doors are locked. You walk down the street and you don’t see a single soul !” Young families, she pointed out, could no longer afford to live here; instead, they came as tourists.
    On hot summer weekends, families who live in cookiecutter housing that was once farmland north of the highway drive down to the lakefront to picnic in front of our house. They peer wistfully over our hedge at a bygone era—at a house that looks frozen in time, the last unrenovated holdout. The verandah, wicker chairs, driftwood doorstops, whiteporcelain doorknobs, screen doors with hook-and-eye latches, and tall blown-glass windows have all remained much as they were when the house was built in 1902. You can find faux replicas at expensive home decor shops uptown, where everything new has been purposely distressed, but here at home every scratch has a bona fide provenance. When Dad finally kicked his dilapidated wooden wheelbarrow to the curb one garbage day, it appeared two weeks later at an antique shop on the main street with a $200 price tag strung on a pink satin ribbon dangling from its rusted iron wheel.
    Tourists now refer to our house as the “Old Slave Driver’s House” because of what they think is a historic plaque outside the front door … but it’s a fake, hung there fifty years ago when we were teenagers determined to spite Dad. Our neighbours have a