By Patricia Anne McGoldrick  »  I grew up in Garafraxa, on the edge of the snowbelt, surrounded by two hundred and fifty acres of forest and fallow, and fields of purple flax, amber wheat and lanky, tree-tall corn.

In our small, rural, southern Ontario township, weather dictated the days of our lives.  I have clear childhood memories of conversations, which centred on weather observations, forecasts, and past run-ins with meteorological forces such as Hurricane Hazel. 

Even today, living in Kitchener, my senses are still attuned to the weather.  Much to my Montreal-born husband’s amazement, I have inherited my father’s ability to smell the approach of rain.  For my children, the smell of soil is now available in a Crayola crayon, but I can remember the real thing and the sight of hundreds of grey-white sea gulls chasing the worms upturned by the trademark yellow and green John Deere cultivator.

Through sun and rain, hail and snow, from cool September to sweltering June, my brothers and sisters and I rode the long yellow rectangular bus to school.

For an hour in the morning and an hour at the end of the day, we sat with our friends of many faiths and schools--singing songs, laughing and crying, arguing and reading, planning dates and parties and hockey matches and baseball games.

In my last year of riding that bus, I found a Canadian voice in my Grade Thirteen studies of English literature but I was too young to grasp more than the rock in Margaret Laurence’s “angel of stone”.

Some twenty years later I have met Margaret again in a five-page essay, entitled “Where the World Began”, where she writes about her beginnings in Western Canada. 

I have re-read her words many times and have come to some realizations about my formative years in the dark Dufferin nights of Garafraxa.

Thinking back, I’m sure that I saw the same Northern Lights as she did twenty years before but I didn’t know, before Margaret, that God was signing the parchment of sky and that the Garafraxa weather was moulding me with its snowstorms and rain.

Margaret Laurence has helped me to see that my eyes were formed, in many ways: by everyday childhood events, the daily influence of the weather, and the varied experiences of living on a farm.  Imagination and memory banks were being filled on small occasions:  when I trampled oats and barley to make houses with my sister; carved garage-high snowbanks to make an igloo; watched my father check the ripeness of wheat by biting into the white centres of grains which he had shuffled from an amber stalk in his hands. 

After high school, when I set out from my home, I was thirsting for paper leaves of knowledge at university.  I did not realize the store of learning in my rural beginnings.  It has taken two decades, and Margaret, to realize, in my writing, that I am going from whence I came.

Today, in my mind, I take Garafraxa and fine grains of wheat wherever I go and I still can’t imagine tomorrow without checking the weather.