Archive for the ‘What Would Laura Do’ Category

inspiring ancestor

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

If you search “What would Jesus do”, Google delivers 360,000 pages. Put a .com after the unpunctuated phrase, and you get a site promising you 10% off “the widest collection of WWJD bracelets and apparel on the internet.”  (Is it just me, or is there something deeply disturbing about this?) I don’t doubt Jesus existed or that he lived an exemplary life. But he’s not the easiest guy to relate to. (The Immaculate Conception, for starters… The walking on water business. The loaves and fishes trick. The crucifixion, of course – not to mention rising from the dead afterwards.) Really. How can a well-meaning but deeply flawed woman living two millennia after such a performance even pretend to model her behaviour after such a man?

shari__laura.jpgLaura Secord, on the other hand, is family. I share her bloodline and – amazingly – her profile. Her heroic acts – while impressive – happened less than two centuries ago, played out within a few hundred miles of where I live and, most importantly, remained within the range of the humanly possible. It’s at very least remotely conceivable that – on a good day, fortified with enough chocolate – I, too, could muster sufficient courage and perseverance to accomplish something mildly admirable (if not country-cementing).

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that mythical cow

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

You’ve probably heard about the cow… The one Laura Secord was supposed to have dragged across enemy lines en route to warn Colonel Fitzgibbon?

As if.

No doubt she milked a few in her day, but the woman wasn’t remotely daft enough to drag a slow-moving, cud-chewing bovine over the Niagara escarpment. Really. That was a bit of fiction invented by historian and government official William E. Coffin. Apparently he claimed Laura milked the cow in order to persuade an American sentry to let her pass. (Yes, I know it sounds implausible, even two centuries later.)

The trouble seems to be that, Laura – a woman of admirable discretion and humility – declined to boast of her exploits immediately after the fact for reasons of national and – no doubt – personal security. She only wrote of her pivotal role in the affair many years later when seriously pressed by financial circumstance (she was a widow; she was poor; plus ca change…) This caused some historians to question the legitimacy of her claims, never mind the military documents that backed them up. 

A woman? Save Canada?!

Fortunately, the sisterhood took up her cause, the record was corrected, and monuments laid. The rest, as I wish they would say, is chocolate.

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a chore list that’d choke a horse

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Laura Secord’s mother died when she was 8. Naturally — people being even clearer in 1784 than they are now about the indispensability of women — her father married again. A few years later, after his second wife died, he married a third time.

By then, Laura was 14, and had 10 siblings. (I know!)

No doubt as one of the eldest, she was expected to shoulder some of the work then classified as women’s. This included cooking, cleaning and childcare, of course, plus tending orchards, planting vegetables, raising chickens, milking cows, and churning cream.

And there was no mall-hopping in her spare time. That was spent spinning thread, weaving cloth, and sewing clothes.

I know what you’re thinking: no wonder the woman was slim! When would she have found the time to eat?

 And yes, it’s becoming only too clear:  slipping out of the house that hot June morning in 1813 – even if it was to negotiate a 30-kilometre walk in inappropriate footwear through dangerous territory – might have been a welcome change of pace for the slaving Laura.

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