Читать книгу Over the Spiked Picket Fence - Angela Aloisio Sander & Denvil Buchanan - Страница 12

kept his “joie de vie”. Unlike many who immigrated here wandering like sheep, not motivated enough to learn to speak English or to scratch a few words on a blank page, he learned the language of the new country. I think he was confident that he would one day be among those who would own property, the symbol of power and success. After all, it was every man for himself, as he often said.

As was common among the generation of my papa, he had kept his extended family close by, as if they had not been extended at all. In fact, many of my family lived all together in the large farmhouse near a clear stream. It was away from the hunger and the homelessness that Enrico had talked about. I remember being the object of affection and fussiness in my family, in what had appeared to be a perfect world, until the letter arrived.

My Uncle Vincenzo had a factory far away in a cold and icy country called Canada. A place where the maple and pine trees covered in ice went to sleep in the winter. I could not understand why Papa was so determined to uproot his family and move us away from our beloved home. We came from the hills and ocean, to this place where people shuffled around in the cold and did not look at who passed by. This was a place where people went to work only to retire much later to their small castles, lifting the drawbridge and barricading themselves against strangers and neighbours. This was a place of small communities, flung wide apart in a vast land of dreamers who came to this land one or two generations ago.

We landed at Toronto Pearson Airport on a cold and windy December night. On arrival, we settled in a place called Scar-borough. It was one of those suburban communities planted in places where strawberries and corn were once cultivated.

The fulfillment of a dream would come much later to my father, a country farmer who had tried to make his way on an assembly line, making ceramic tiles at my uncle’s factory. There was no shortage of demand for tiles. They were arranged on floors of housing developments by workers from different areas of the globe, mostly Europe. Papa rose to the position of line manager and later owner of his own tile company.

16