Lynes, Jeanette

English

Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

68 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMMEmonths. She word dark glasses every day for a year until one day a friend yanked them off her and said it was time to get on with living. She be-gan inviting neighbours in for tea as she had done before our father left. She surprised us by starting to take night school courses.One was day after the clothes had been hung, a neighbour came in for tea and looked out our kitchen door at the clothesline. Hanging close to the door was a set of pink silk Van Raalte lingerie our moth-er had bought for herself with her first paycheck earned as a kinder-garten teacher. Matching panties, bra, and slip had been hand washed and hung to dry discretely over the porch. “Jane, whose lingerie is that?” the neighbour asked. “Mine of course,” replied our mother. “Well, what possessed you to buy those?” laughed the neighbour. “You’ve no man in your life.” I heard my mother’s starched re-ply, “A woman doesn’t need a man to buy herself nice underwear.” Neither my mother nor the neigh-bour realized the Van Raalte lingerie hanging in the breeze were flags of independence.Gale Tyler is a retired public school teacher born and raised in Vancouver. She is a University of British Colum-bia graduate who majored in Primary and Special Education.A lifelong feminist activist, she worked to end the rigid sex role stereotyping in bc curriculum, textbooks, and Govern-ment and School District policies that restricted girls and women in Educa-tion in bc .JEANETTE LYNESWhat I Knew Of PigeonsWhat I knew of pigeons came from a book on Parisin the school library. Pigeons were everywhere, there –moulting teal-plum feathers on stones, puddlingdoorways to underground trains, bobbing for crumbsflung by beret-headed crones – pigeons, I concluded,were French – which must make ours some fallen,anglicized sub-species. Pigeons bore messages –I’d forgotten that until bursting in from schoolearly one Monday, the Sunday china spreadbefore my mother. She was picking a tiny carcassclean. Pigeon, she said, swirling homemade winein her crystal wedding goblet. She’d caught it herself –her mother, in lean times, did the same. The bones’look of a small empress’ fan clamped shut my owngrowling gut. I was too stunned to probe her method:butterfly net? My skipping rope as lasso? I suddenlyfound myself famished, far from France. The lower cul-tureswill gather what they can – she’d saved me a diminutivedrumstick. She poured me a glass. My first real drink.What my father would eat she’d no inkling. I raised my goblet to her, to own my birthinto a long line of predators. Jeanette Lynes, a York alumnus, is the author of three collections of poetry. Her regular position is Associate Professor of English (and Women’s Studies) at St. Francis Xavier University. However, she is currently on leave as a Writer in Residence at the Saskatoon Public Library. Jeanette’s third collection of poems, Left Fields (Wolsak and Wynn, 2003) was short listed for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award). Jeanette is Poet Laureate for the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party.

What I Knew of Pigeons

https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/download/5841/5030

What I Knew of Pigeons

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Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)