One session with Marie, age 79, Ottawa.
One phone on the table. Thirty-two minutes.
Session 1 · Marie · Ottawa
She Was Babysitting on the Street When They Moved In
That's the part she has never quite gotten past — that she wasn't there. Her father and mother had carried everything into the house on Goulburn Avenue on the first of June, and Marie had been down the block looking after someone else's children because that was what she did, and by the time she got there the boxes were in and the door was closed and it was just a house on a street she didn't know yet.
Her father was going to take her there properly. On the fourth. In the morning. He was coming to get her and bring her to the new house, the first house they had ever owned, and she was going to walk through it with him and that was going to be the day it became real.
He never came.