by Licia Canton

It wasn’t her choice to come to Canada fifty years ago. Like many others of her generation, she left a rural setting to follow a man to a distant metropolis. No doubt, she would have preferred to not live in a small basement apartment in a cold city where she didn’t have friends and didn’t speak the language. For forty years she worked in a wholesale meat plant with men who were stronger but less efficient than she. Even during the summer she wore steel-toe boots, cotton-covered steel-mesh gloves, a hairnet under a hard hat and a woolen winter sweater under her white butcher coat to keep warm in the refrigerated workplace. She might have preferred tilling the soil under the Venetian sun as she had done as a young woman.

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