A New Dress Everyday: Poems in My Mother’s Voice

Set in the late 1920s and 1930s, this is the story of teenage French-Canadian farm girls from Stoney Point and Pain Court and Grande Pointe packing up and moving to the city, to find work in Windsor or Detroit as house keepers and nannies for well-to-do families. Marie Anne Mineau was one of those innocent young women whose life on the farm and the village is dominated by religion, and all its expectations and superstitions. She speaks of ghosts in the fields and haunting the farmhouse, of weddings and lavish picnics in a black Walnut grove back the barn, of collecting eggs and doing chores, of a sister running off to be married, and Marie Anne’s own wedding, at barely 19 years old, and driving through the night to Niagara Falls with a man she hardly knew. The poems, written by Windsor’s Marty Gervais, are cast in the voice of his own mother who shared all these stories of him. It is a picture of a time and place now lost to history, but it was one that vividly captures the story of hundreds of young women who left rural Canada for good paying jobs away in the city.