Emma Field Book I - coming of age in the changing times of the mid-19th century

Prologue

Toronto, Ontario,

The Dominion of Canada

17 May 1929

The silver-haired woman cocked her head to one side and smiled such a tiny smile that the man at the back of the room could not see it. But he knew she was smiling. He knew by the angle of her neck and the delicate motion of her fingertips on her lips that her eyes were soft and distant as she remembered.

"Who influenced me the most?" she repeated to the reporter perched on a wooden chair at the end of the third row. "I didn't know my mother. My father was good to me." She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly. "But I believe that those who showed me love and dignity...and the power of taking risks...influenced me the most."

"Who were those people then?"

"To start with...a girl named Vera, a man named Dr. Watson, and another named Ezra, a woman named Elizabeth...and a boy named John. Yes, they were the first to show me these things."

"They sound like ordinary folk. Surely, there must have been more influential people, women like Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stowe?"

The woman smiled again, both hands firmly grasping the podium. "Lucretia Mott and Dr. Emily Stowe? Yes, they influenced me...but they weren't the first. For some reason, it is always the people who first truly open or close their hearts to us who shape us the most."

She hesitated, staring at the pale blossoms of the apple tree outside the hall window. "And the place. The place where I began...that influenced me in ways I don't yet understand."

"I see," said the reporter, crossing his arms as he leaned back in his chair. The young woman beside him sat forward, timidly raising her hand.

"But what you just said is so soft," she said. "Your speech was hard – about changing laws to allow women to vote, to have an equal voice, yet what you just said about people and places is so soft. I don't even know what I'm asking...I guess I'm just puzzled."

The speaker nodded her head slowly. "Ahhhh," she said quietly. "Hard and soft...you can't have the one without the other. I wouldn't have been able to do this hard political work had I not first experienced the softness of love. And without the rigid or hard framework of laws which protect women as human beings, there is little room for softness – the safety and nurturance every child requires."

"Is that what those people did for you...the ones you named?"

The woman nodded and beamed with a smile so generous that even the man at the back of the room could see it. "Yes," she said. "They showed me 'all that is.'"

The young woman's hands formed a cup as though she wished to hold the words she knew to be both foreign and true. "I think that I understand. Thank you. How old were you when you met those people?"

"About your age. It's never too early, or too late, to begin."