Fran Eldridge’s reinvention, dedication reflected in short stories

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When Fran Eldridge began writing short stories loosely based on her childhood in rural Nova Scotia and adult life on the Prairies, they were for herself.

An East Coast lady who says things like “good on ya” and “hun” and giggles when something delights her, the 74-year-old Saskatoon author has lived a life worth writing about.

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It just took her a while to realize it.

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She dreamt about writing while growing up in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, inspired by her favourite books and the worlds their authors created.

“I admired the person that wrote it, so I wanted to be that,” she says. “But, of course, I’d go upstairs and I’d sit down and I’d have my pen and paper and I thought ‘My life’s dead, there’s nothing in my life worth writing.’ And here, many many years later, a lot of the stuff that I write about is what I did when I was that age.”

Like a book with many chapters, Eldridge is a master of reinvention, driven by a craving for change and an appetite for knowledge. She is the type of person who takes out every library book she can find on a subject, signs up for courses and seeks mentors.

“When I was interested in something, both feet went in. And when I left it, both feet went out,” she says, with hands wrapped around a cup of tea at the kitchen table.

Sitting beside Eldridge is her first book — A Moment of Clarity — which was launched in May. It’s a product of that intense dedication and a reflection of her many lives.

“She just continually amazes me, how she’ll move from one career to the next,” says Eldridge’s long-time partner, Leah Currie. “If Fran isn’t challenged, she gets restless.”

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Each of the 22 short stories in her book features a protagonist who has a definitive moment of clarity, not unlike Eldridge.

She compares growing up in rural Nova Scotia to growing up in rural Arkansas — they had a wood stove, swam in the Annapolis River and frolicked in the forest, sold fruit at a roadside stand and walked two-and-a-half miles to school.

Eldridge has two older brothers, three younger sisters and a younger brother. Her mother was a war bride and her father was in the Canadian Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

She says they always had a dog, and they were always poor. Her dad was a well-driller and plumber, but not a business man. At one point, they almost lost their house.

Eldridge remembers being embarrassed to go to high school because she couldn’t afford gym shorts.

“When I think back now, if we weren’t so poor, it would have been a wonderful life. But it probably was good for me,” she says. “That’s the reason I came out west, because there was no money to go to university, which is what I wanted to do.”

Feeling too financially insecure to try her hand as a writer, she moved to Edmonton to live with her aunt and cousin at age 16. Eldridge loved the wide-open Prairies compared to the valley, where you couldn’t see around the next corner.

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She finished high school, worked and eventually went to nursing school at the Royal Alexander in Edmonton in 1967. She applied for a job in Yellowknife, where she had one of the wildest experiences of her career.

In November 1972, Marten Hartwell, a German-Canadian Arctic bush pilot, crashed his plane in the Northwest Territories. He was flying a pregnant Inuk woman and a 14-year-old Inuk boy with appendicitis from Cambridge Bay (now Nunavut) to the hospital in Yellowknife.

Hartwell was rescued 31 days later. He was the only survivor, keeping himself alive by cannibalizing some of the crash victims, including Eldridge’s friend and fellow nurse, who escorted them on the plane.

Eldridge was the nurse on duty when Hartwell arrived at emergency with two broken legs. The hospital was filled with the sound of ringing phones and the flash of camera bulbs.

News of the rescue had gone international.

“And I felt sorry for him because this must have just been incredibly overwhelming for him. I had to get him undressed so we could take him for X-rays. So I reached up to close the curtain around him (and) they took a picture, and it was in Time magazine,” she says, flexing the arm captured in the photo.

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Currie walks into the kitchen in the middle of Eldridge’s story, teasing that she always brags about her “famous arm.”

When Eldridge left the north, she was planning to nurse in Australia with her best friend. Instead, she got married to a man from Saskatoon. They moved to Regina, where Eldridge finished her nursing career in 1981. She applied for an employment relations officer job with the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN), later representing nurses at grievance arbitrations.

She worked with the union for about 20 years.

That’s where she met Currie, who also worked as an employment relations officer in 1992. Eldridge was her mentor and Currie loved the way she treated people.

Around that time, Eldridge was diagnosed with breast cancer. She realized she didn’t want to be married — a moment of clarity.

In 1994, Currie and Eldridge became a couple.

A year later, when she was 46 years old, Eldridge had a double mastectomy, three months apart. She’s been cancer-free for 28 years.

At first, she couldn’t decide if she wanted to get breast prosthesis. A friend told her it wasn’t her style, and she agreed.

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“I’m a horse; I’m a bit tough, physically, Eldridge says.

“Kind of a rough and tough gal,” Currie adds. “She comes across as a very confident woman — which she is — but there’s also a sensitive side to her that not too many people see.”

Eldridge’s friend, Larry Turner, agrees. He says you can see it in her treatment of animals — releasing mice instead of killing them and taking care of the neighbourhood birds — as well as her treatment of people.

“The old cliché: ‘A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet’ — that’s Fran’s attitude about life,” says Turner, who recalled how Eldridge recently took care of an elderly couple that didn’t have close family nearby. “She loves to meet new people; her time is their time.”

Turner met Eldridge through his wife and Currie. They get together for dinner and game nights, where Eldridge cooks, laughs and debates the merit of many moves.

Turner was happy to help her with the next adventure.

“I thought of growing things,” Eldridge says in a way that feels like she had discovered a secret. “I thought, ‘Why am I doing (union work) anymore? I need to do something else.’ And I just loved it.”

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In 1997, Eldridge bought 40 acres of land near Dundurn. She was so excited that she called the seller on Christmas Day to see if the deal went through.

Eldridge got every book she could find on herbs. She points to the couch where she sat and read for three days. The future author took a greenhouse course, a business course and worked for Dutch Growers to learn everything she could about herb farming.

Fran’s House of Herbs was born. Eldridge is just as excited about the memory now, jumping up from the table and practically dragging us to a downstairs bedroom.

“There is the little herb farm,” she says proudly, pointing to a framed aerial photo of her plot of land with four green houses that they built themselves and a little red house.

“Isn’t that cute?”

Turner had a farm background and helped Eldridge with many construction projects on the rural property.

“Fran is a true do-it-yourselfer person,” he says. “She’s quite willing to throw herself into it. She was always very enthusiastic about trying something new — that was the fun part of working with Fran.”

When Turner and his wife bought their house in Saskatoon, Eldridge was there to dig new flower beds and move trees.

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Eldridge sold the greenhouses and stopped selling herbs at the farmers’ market around 2011. It was a tough decision, but the days were long and arthritis made it harder to work.

Eldridge and Currie still own the land and use it for gardening, with Eldridge growing her own backyard herbs.

Turner wasn’t surprised when Eldridge turned her focus to writing.

“This is Fran being Fran,” he says. “She’s always willing to try something new and throw herself into it with full energy.”

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Eldridge started taking writing classes for seniors and, four years ago, joined a six-person writers’ group. Each member takes a turn hosting and they present their work to the group, allowing for feedback.

Eldridge says the group helped her craft her short story collection into the shape of a book.

“I really find that her characters are engaging. They’re the kinds of characters that people can relate to — ordinary folks in ordinary situations,” says Kathy Morrell, who is part of Eldridge’s writing group.

“I think her style matches her characters. It’s plain writing, and when I say that it’s a compliment. Her characters are not going to use sophisticated language, and Fran doesn’t use sophisticated language either. And that’s very much a positive because it reflects who her characters are.”

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Eldridge’s walls are adorned with framed trinkets from exotic places the couple has travelled, including Hong Kong, Cairo, Jordan and Australia. Eldridge wants to go to Borneo and Currie has her heart set on Portugal.

They’ll get to both.

“That girl just wants to learn,” Currie says with a laugh. “She’s coming 75 and she’s still learning things like crazy. That seems to satisfy her.”

Currie edits Eldridge’s stories but says she won’t touch her latest project: poetry. Eldridge is working on a poem about her mother and wrote another about country singer Patsy Cline.

Her poetry is fairly straightforward and understandable, just like her stories.

“With Fran, she finishes her stories,” Currie says. “That moment of clarity, it crescendos to a certain point in time, and the reader becomes aware of it. There is always an ending — sometimes happy, sometimes sad. The endings to her stories might not necessarily be finite, but it makes the reader think.”

Eldridge takes all the intrusive thoughts that prevented her from writing long ago in that cold Nova Scotia bedroom, and she compares it to the sage advice that compelled her to finally do it: “Just finish it.”

“That’s one thing you can say about Fran,” adds Currie.

“She finishes the job.”

bmcadam@postmedia.com

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