Chapter 4 & 5

... the bubble pack packages arrives ...

I don’t know how to describe the feeling of seeing a bubble pack envelope with my name on it, and knowing that inside there is a long awaited book, and one of the chapters is mine. I didn’t set out to have this happen. What feels like years ago, Rebecca asked me to come to Victoria to attend a workshop with her. People who had written papers on polygamy were work shopping their drafts and if I would write a personal reflection, I could fly in for the weekend and join the group. She thought a mother-daughter coupling of personal essays would be another way to visualize how polygamy touches lives lived outside of its reality.

... I am amazed to see my name in print ...

I like to write memoirs. I don’t know if I wrote about the conference when it was happening. I can bring back cherished glimpses of that weekend: fantastic conference food, walks in Finnerty Gardens, the way other presenters fleshed out answers to questions that had passed through my mind, a social evening during the conference at Rebecca’s house, the question period after each essay was read. All seem to come to mind in a split second.

I have the advantage over Kelvin who has just seen the book and knows nothing about the essays in it. I listened to and later read Rebecca’s Chapter 5 essay. I know that the picture published inside of her essay is meant to approach the question of “who is family”. The setting is the Wedding Reach of the summer stream we love and tend. Nearly all of Richard’s siblings, their partners and their children have lined up for a wedding photo.

... I press down the spine to look at the text ...

David Drummond took part of that picture and developed it as part of his cover design. What we see is the feet of Duncan’s relatives in a frame above a mantel piece. Drummond does not know Rebecca and has never been in her house, but the fireplace looks like the one in her front room.

Rebecca says that the cover design makes her want to move her eye up and out of the frame of the picture searching to find out who these people are.

Left side of picture
... Joaquim, Bonnie in short skirt, Anita in long skirt ...

I see the design a different way. The picture is longer than the mantel piece. My interpretation is that the design is underlining the fact that no family can be contained in a frame that is only the length of a mantel piece.

Kelvin was reading the book for the first time last night. I asked him what he thought of the cover design. He came to the picture cold, not knowing any of the above and described the cover without mentioning the picture. When I asked him about it specifically he said, “I think this is a picture of some cowboys and farmers.”

 Right side of picture
.. the feet of Xavier, Dalton, Duncan, Kelve ...

“How many pairs of feet,” I coached. He began to study the picture closely. With the hint that the bigger picture can be found on the second page of chapter 5 he could see – yes, a wedding photograph that he knew. Joaquim and Kelve frame the collage, dark pants and shoes on either side. Few know that beside Joaquim’s legs are the large rocks out of which the stream flows under the culvert.

Starting at the left of the picture are Joaquim’s shoes, Bonnie’s functional crocks, Anita’s strappy sandals and then the feet of three little boys. The boy in the middle wears black pants and only his gray shoes let us now he is there. On either side of that boy is the cowboy stance of Xavier and the one-legged stance of Duncan, Duncan’s other leg flipped back, his hand hanging down just above the flip of that right leg. The viewer of the cover will never know that these three boys have their arms around each other’s shoulders.

I am going to have the people whose feet appear in that picture, sign the frontispiece of my copy of Polygamy’s Rights and Wrongs: Perspectives of Harm, Family and Law. UBC Press, Vancouver. Calder, Gillian, Beaman, Lori G. (eds.). 2014.

Tomorrow I will get the signatures from Anita, Bonnie, Kelve and Dalton.

Arta