I remember the Old Colony, a 1950s dance hall on Portugal Cove Road, less than a kilometre from where we grew up on Bell’s Turn in a 1,300-square-foot house built by my father using cinder blocks pilfered from the Pinetree Line Cold War station at Red Cliff. Not much left of the old radar station today. Nothing left of the house on Bell’s Turn either. Knocked down to make way for the Outer Ring. And not a trace left of the Old Colony. A fire razed the building. But in its place, a phoenix has risen up where my parents once waltzed. Cambridge Estates, a seniors’ care home, sprung from the ashes.
This is where we are carting Mom. Not to dance, but to knit and live out her days …
Bio:
Susan Flanagan is a St John’s journalist and novelist. Supermarket Baby, winner of the 2019 Percy Janes First Novel Award, was published by Flanker Press in February, and in August her young adult novel The Degrees of Barley Lick will be released by Running the Goat, Books & Broadsides. Her non-fiction works have appeared in numerous periodicals, and she has been a columnist for both the Telegram and the Newfoundland Herald.