Under the Covers: A Life of Gumption, Passion, Gifts, and Secrets

By Patricia Hetherington

This evocative collection of linked stories explores the hope, heartache, and messiness of life and love, revealing how, in the deepest corners of our beings, we long for healing.

Patricia invokes the presence of her deceased grandmother in a reverie and they reminisce while waiting for a resistant story to emerge. When she navigates the treacherous terrains of family sewing traditions and Spain’s gruelling cross-country pilgrims’ trail, unexpected truths are found in the depths of transformation. A woman’s quest for the perfect cinnamon bun becomes a metaphor for living without regret. Lessons passed from mother to daughter hinge on choosing the perfect coat. But when a crisis inspires the wrong purchase, a mysterious appearance delivers redemption. Through dance comes reckoning-with yearning for fatherly love, with confronting her own raw sexuality, and by accepting the harsh truths of aging. An old flame ignites an obsession and a gutsy reflection yields a potentially life-changing insight. Reaching a tipping point of overwhelm and panic spurs the exploration of harrowing episodes, and wholeness is found in a powerful naming. After a decade of maintaining a rambling heritage home on her own, Patricia feels bitterness rise in herself and slips away from her annual Christmas party. Faced with their father’s impending death, she and her sister, Joann, sense the arrival of their mother from her heavenly abode, which allows them to be together as a family once more.

With intelligent, clear-eyed prose, these stories reach into the heart of what it means to be a woman fully alive to her inner and outer worlds. Lyrical, sensuous, and unflinching, Under the Covers: A Life of Gumption, Passion, Gifts, and Secrets is a poignant, entertaining testimony to a life lived authentically

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Patricia Hetherington’s career path has encompassed teaching, training, and selling real estate for twenty years. At midlife she changed gears to complete a master's degree, becoming a counsellor and publishing the memoir The Winter Gardener: A Woman's Journey from Futile to Fertile (2007). She has walked unharmed on hot coals to impress a new lover and trekked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. In 2016 she quit her day job, throwing back the covers and pushing forward to publish a new book. She lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada. Visit www.patriciahetherington.ca.

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“OMG I could not put this beautiful book down. Having a loved one who has mental health challenges, I appreciate Patricia’s full expression of these challenges so that others can be drawn toward their own light.”
—Susan Freeman, MBA, PCC, executive coach, speaker, and author

“Authentic, gritty, sometimes whimsical. This is a bold telling of one woman’s willingness to pay the price for fashioning a life she could call her own by drawing upon the strength and wisdom of her courageous forebears.”
—Annette Aubrey, MSW, Reg. MSW, Systemic Family Constellations facilitator

“Whether you are a mental health professional, a reader looking for a compelling story, or a brave human being hoping to find companionship on a sometimes lonely road, Under the Covers will befriend, inform, and hypnotize you.Here is a feast of ‘insider knowledge’ about mental health interwoven with glimpses of a family’s story and day-to-day life on the West Coast.”
—Arden Henley, Ed.D, RCC, vice president and principal of Canadian Programs, City University

“An unwavering response to life runs through this rich collection. At once poignant, sensuous, and entertaining.”
—Susan Page, executive director of San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patricia Hetherington
• Release date: Mar 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9780978279523

Book preview

Praise for

Under The Covers

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OMG I could not put this beautiful book down. Having a loved one who has mental health challenges, I appreciate Patricia’s full expression of these challenges so that others can be drawn toward their own light.

Susan Freeman, MBA, PCC, executive coach, speaker, and author

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Authentic, gritty, sometimes whimsical. This is a bold telling of one woman’s willingness to pay the price for fashioning a life she could call her own by drawing upon the strength and wisdom of her courageous forebears.

Annette Aubrey, MSW, Reg. MSW, Systemic Family Constellations facilitator

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"Whether you are a mental health professional, a reader looking for a compelling story, or a brave human being hoping to find companionship on a sometimes lonely road, Under the Covers will befriend, inform, and hypnotize you. Here is a feast of ‘insider knowledge’ about mental health interwoven with glimpses of a family’s story and day-to-day life on the West Coast."

Arden Henley, Ed.D, RCC, vice president and principal of Canadian Programs, City University

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An unwavering response to life runs through this rich collection. At once poignant, sensuous, and entertaining.

Susan Page, executive director of San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival

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"A gripping memoir of love and despair, Hetherington’s Under the Covers reads like a ticking time bomb. So powerful is her prose that her recipe for lemon meringue pie had me on the edge of my chair. Here is an author riding roughshod over herself in the service of truth and self-discovery. I found myself speed-reading, as if the pages might self-destruct. What a ride! What a read!"

P.J. Reece, author of Story Structure Expedition and Story Structure to Die For

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title page

Copyright © 2018 by Patricia Hetherington

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

Rosepointe

Publishing Gibsons, BC

www.patriciahetherington.ca

ISBN 978-0-9782795-1-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-9782795-2-3 (ebook)

Produced by Page Two www.pagetwostrategies.com

Cover design by Naomi Macdougall

Author and cover photos by Ingeborg Suzanne (IS Photography)

Interior design by Taysia Louie

Ebook by Bright Wing Books (brightwing.ca)

18 19 20 21 22 5 4 3 2 1

To my sister Joann Hetherington

Contents

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1 The Code

2 The Dart

3 The Bun

4 The Coat

5 The Dance

6 The Gift

7 The Tipping Point

8 The Fire

9 The Pie

Gratitude

Landmarks

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Body Matter

"We have voices that want to be outspoken and

bodies that want to move and shake, stories that

need telling and secrets that need spilling."

Gregg Levoy, Vital Signs:

The Nature and Nurture of Passion

1

The

Code

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wooden lawn chair

The sound, soft as gossamer, rouses me from sleep.

Where did that come from?

A familiar voice snipes in my head. You know darned well where that comes from. My inner critic flaunts her superiority. And don’t believe for a second that you can worm your way out of this one. Besides, how long has this thing hung around? Fifty years?

You can call it a word—if you want to play semantics—but it’s nothing more than a sound. Even so, it’s stuck in your brain like an unwanted guest. Don’t fool yourself—it’s a force to be reckoned with. A living thing with a will of its own: an enfant terrible demanding delivery and development.

The acidic commentary winds up. Let’s face it, it’s got you. Even if you have nothing but a silly sound to build a story around. If you ask my opinion, it’s time to buckle down and start writing.

I admit it: she has a point. Besides, I’m riled up now; there’s no use belabouring the matter any longer. I climb out of bed, head to the long marble table I’ve used as my writing desk for years, pull out a chair, and plunk myself down. Tall brass candlesticks stand on the table like Hermes’s columns, marking the threshold of a journey. My eyes travel past them to the lawn and ocean beyond—shimmering, rippled. A log floats by, set free from a boom or dragged from the shore by the fury of an undertow, the ocean claiming anything it wants as its own.

The moment presses down on me, forces my attention back to the work that awaits. Still, I stall; gaze at the sharpened HB pencils, run my hands reverently over the stack of paper, as if drawing assurance from its smooth white surface. My critic—vigilant as a hawk—sees me falter and stop.

Anxiety floods my body; my mind, like a bird on a wire, hops from one thought to another stored in the warehouse of my memory.

The year is 1961. I’m with my mother in the sewing room of our new house in Smithers, British Columbia. I’m thirteen years old. A bulky wooden table dominates the cramped room; an old black piano sits along the far wall. Counting three other essential items—the ironing board, steam iron, and Singer sewing machine—there’s barely enough space to turn around in. Sometimes my sister, Joann, is in the room playing the piano, but rarely sewing—not if she can help it.

I stand on the table, stretched to my full height, my head almost touching the ceiling. Still as stone and barely breathing, I compose myself for the supreme moment when my mother marks the hem of my skirt and my project is finished.

The two of us stuck in a tiny room, with me on the table and my mother about to perform the precise ceremony. She carries her wooden dressmaker’s stick and walks solemnly around the table. Moving steadily clockwise, her eyes fixed on the unfinished hem of my skirt, she pauses at short intervals to squeeze a small, red rubber ball on the stick and discharge a fine, white line of chalk onto the fabric. Pooooof! she goes. Pooooof! Pooooof! The sound bewitches, captivates me for half a century, suggests magic and immediacy.

Pooooof! The genie pops out of the lamp. Pooooof! The prince appears. Pooooof! The royal carriage disappears at the stroke of midnight. Pooooof! Nothing more than a sound bite that has remained uncelebrated forever, and unfairly so. Until now.

Standing tall on the table, I feel proud that I have made the skirt myself, because it connects me to our family sewing tradition and to my maternal grandmother, Nan Capewell, who was a skilled seamstress.

Nan lived in England in the early 1900s and worked at a manor house in the Sherwood Forest, sewing one-of-a-kind clothing for the two young daughters of a rich businessman whom she was required to call Master. Ultimately, Nan grew weary of living cooped up like a bird in a cage. Reading her memoir, which she wrote decades later, it seems that she grew even more weary of being labelled an old maid.

At the age of thirty, Nan took matters into her own clever hands and immigrated to Canada, ending up alone in northern British Columbia, which, although harsh and isolated, offered her freedom to live her own life. She became the pioneer wife of a handsome French Canadian who was smart and hard working. He was a prospector who struck gold with his partners in the 1920s. He owned a livery stable, ran a pack train of horses, delivered goods and mail to remote settlements, and farmed a homestead near Telkwa.

Few women could have matched Joseph Bourgon, but Nan was equally determined and resourceful. At the centre of her being ran a swift-flowing current of energy that spilled over everything she created in the north country, untamed as it was.

Nan was a passionate gardener and avid homemaker who, unlike many pioneers, managed to feed her family on vegetables grown in her own garden and stock they raised themselves. Her flower beds flourished—producing armfuls of lilies, asters, snapdragons, sweet Williams, hollyhocks, brown-eyed Susans—enough to fill her home and satisfy her longing for beauty. She coddled her chicks as if they were her own precious children and kept her hens laying steadily to support a small egg business, keeping the money as her own independent source of income to spend on a rare treat. On a wood stove, Nan conjured up cream puffs made with fresh farm cream and angel food cakes made with the whites of one dozen eggs whipped to stiff perfection with a hand beater. On her Singer machine, she produced her own endless line of couture garments from any fabric she could find. She turned draperies into party dresses for her daughters and could take a man’s woolen overcoat, turn it inside out, and transform it