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...marriage. his second wife--a woman I had to get to know if I still wanted to know him--took advantage of the opportunity to clear their house of all the clutter that had irritated her for more than two decades. So, until she died, boxes of his possessions and family papers would be unexpectedly, if regularly, passed on to us by her or her children, and we would repack their contents partly sorted into clean, archival boxes, which now sit five high and three across in my hall, or in any corner I can spare in my one-bedroom apartment in Victoria, the city I moved to four years ago and where he retired in 1983, after living in Alberta since the early 1950s.
Box after box is layered with photographs and the surprisingly worthless stamp collection that our paternal grandfather or great-grandfather had started in the nineteenth century. Others hold the papers of a great uncle who had been a White Star captain in the golden age of ocean liners as well as bundle after bundle of letters saved by our other ancestors, and the records he would compile in a clear, precise script while tracing the generations preceding us as far back as he could, when, in absence of any further leads, he turned his attention to the even more obscure East European antecedents of his second wife's...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Queen's Quarterly
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Rabbit foot Bill.(Short story), December 22, 2007
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