prospect cemetery - the women

None of these women seem fragile. They were pioneers in a cold, foreign land where no one understood them and no one could pronoune their names.

They look like my mother and all the other immigrant women who left Calabria with dreams. They kept to the old ways while sending their children off to Canadian Catholic schools. Eggplant sandwhiches in their lunches. No peanut-butter and jam for their sons. (I envied the English children their white-bread lunches.) These women were Italy's hope after the war, but instead left for the gold-paved street of l'america.

The last photograph on the bottom right is of a different type. She must have come to Canada young enough to assimilate, to take on the ways of the English. I suspect that the others, with their earth-mother beauty, would have kept their classis looks had they lived and died in Italy instead of Toronto. Did these women find the dream? Some must have.
(The thumbnail points to the larger image.)