"Today Is the Day" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - 3 Pages - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields
Buriedinprint.com
This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.
The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.
"Today Is the Day" is the 27th Short Story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted. It is among the briefest of her stories, It shows the tremendous versatility of Shields. "Today Is the Day" reads like an ancient folk tale. Here is the opening:
"TODAY IS THE DAY THE WOMEN of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies. They set off without breakfast, not even coffee, gathering at the site of the old well, now paved over and turned into a tot lot and basketball court. The air at this hour is clear. You can breathe in the freshness. And you can smell the moist ground down there below the trampled weeds and baked clay, those eager black glinting minerals waiting, and the pocketed humus. A September morning. A thousand diamond points of dew."
As fitting for a folk tale we have our troll:
"All the women of the village take part in the fall planting, including, of course, scrawny old Sally Bakey. Dirty, wearing a torn pinafore, less than four feet in height, it is Sally who discovered a new preserve of virgin blisterlilies in a meadow on the other side of the shiny westward-lying lake. There, where only mice walk, the flowers still grow in profusion, and the bulbs divide year by year as they once did in these parts. Sally lives alone in a rough cabin on a diet of rolled oats and eggs. Raw eggs, some say. She has a foul smell and shouts obscenely at passersby, especially those who betray by their manner of speech or dress that they are not of the region. But people like her smile. A troll’s smile without teeth. In winter, when the snow reaches a certain height, the men of the village take its measure by saying: The snow’s up to Sally Bakey’s knees. Or over Sally Bakey’s bum. Or clear up to Sally Bakey’s eyebrows. No one knows how old Sally Bakey is, but she’s old enough to remember when churches in the area were left unlocked and when people could go about knocking on any door and ask for a chair to sit down on or for a cup of strong tea."
"Today Is the Day" is a brilliant work.
The Carol Shields Literary Trust has biographical data and accounts of her novels,
Just from the title, I couldn't place this one in memory until you mentioned that it reads like an old folk tale, oh, yes, then I remembered straight away. These little colourful pieces I enjoy but only because I allow for time to pass between stories; if I read them one after the next (I know you don't do that either), these short tales would get lost entirely. The only passage I flagged was this one, which feels like a true observation for a wet autumn (here, but not quite yet) morning: "A September morning. A thousand diamond points of dew."
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