Lavinia

My great-grandmother whose

name I cannot remember

had Alzheimer’s

A mammoth woman

Bones bent like my father’s

She left letters for witches

at the foot of his bed

(Although I never could

find out what they said)

Cured his sore throat with

the white of chicken dung

mixed with blackstrap molasses

It took eight men to carry her

down Joseph’s Hill that spring

she crossed the veil

The damp earth mashed

and wagon axle deep

First leg of a long journey

Back the single-tracked Barrens Road

(although in truth her journey

 was much longer)

The country kitchen door finally shut

on the sweet hayfields of her life

The gore of Margaret Smith's mad murder

the mother, covered in blood, standing

at midnight by the foot of her bed

Her handsome husband

Joseph the blacksmith

counting the coins of his day’s labour

spilling from his leather pouch

as he falls dead on her kitchen table

(The Pleasant River wild with strife

She took him home to Begger Settlement

Buried him at the graveyard’s edge)

Her

   turn

      now

         to

            journey

              

               Far

                  out

                     and

                        beyond

NOTE:  Baker Settlement, named for another German ancestor and Hessian deserter, Georg Baker, sounded ‘Begger Settlement’ in South Shore dialect.  Lavinia was born to Charles Boliver and Elizabeth Weagel on 30 Aug 1847 along Pleasant River Road (probably current day Baker Settlement).  She died at 1:30 a.m. on 7 May 1929 in Colpton, Lunenburg County. She was 81 years old.  Cause of death was senile degeneration.  It was a particularly wet spring.