Elsie Stocks is matriarch of an artsy family
Author’s mom a Strathcona market fixture
If you’re a CanLit junkie, you’ve probably read Dance, Gladys, Dance, the awardwinning debut novel of Edmonton-born Cassie Stocks. It’s a quirky, tragicomic Prairie tale about wannabe painter Frieda, a lost, wry soul whose BFF happens to be a ghost. The book earned Stocks the 2013 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
But I’ll bet you didn’t know the author’s mother is a veteran vendor at the Old Strathcona Farmers Market.
Elsie Stocks, 85, is quite possibly the sweetest, winkiest, floweriest, jokiest, smiliest, huggiest granny ever. Perhaps you’ve seen her on market day: a lively, silverhaired woman in a ruffled, proudly garish floral apron at the Stocks Greenhouse stall at the south end of the old bus barns.
Elsie is the embodiment of a sunflower, if ever there were one. For years, I’ve admired this effervescent, boldly dressed stranger selling cut blooms and plants at the greenhouse stall. With her glowing grin, tendency for hugging market folk and collection of striking, anklelength aprons, I felt a pull to her. But I never asked her name.
Then, last Mother’s Day, Cassie Stocks posted a picture of the woman on Facebook, and I gasped in delight. My sunflower is a famous author’s mom! I soon learned Elsie and her husband Wes (Cassie’s dad) are Old Strathcona Farmers Market originals. They have been selling their plants and flowers there since the very beginning: 1983, when the market was still outside.
Elsie and Wes first dipped their toes (er, thumbs) in the greenhouse business in the late 1970s, when Cassie was still a rascal in junior high (she had one book under her belt: Sidewalks Should be Purple, a load of nonsense co-written at age 11 with pal Karen Johnson; Elsie got it printed and bound). The family lived on an acreage off Wye Road near Sherwood Park, Cassie the youngest of four kids. Wes, a trained accountant, couldn’t work due to health problems, so the couple decided to expand their hobby greenhouse into something larger.
“We added on and added on,” Elsie recalls. The gardening was therapeutic for Wes, who preferred to work with the soil while Elsie took their product to town to sell.
A family operation, Stocks Greenhouse is now owned by Cassie’s older brother Ben and his wife, Karen. Karen can remember having to “help out” in springtime in the ’80s, just so she could hang out with her then-boyfriend. Cassie had to pitch in, too, especially during the springtime madness.
“I still get the twitch in the spring: I should be in the greenhouse, I should be in the greenhouse,” says Cassie, who now lives in Eston, Sask., with her teenage son. “And when it rains, I relax, because the plants don’t need watering.”
Elsie can’t stay away from the greenhouse, even though she and Wes aren’t at the helm anymore. “It’s addictive. I’m 85 and I still love it. I often think, I couldn’t stay home all day. I’m a permanent fixture.”
She’s a fixture at the market, too. Running the stall is a social activity, and one of Elsie’s granddaughters usually helps out. “I get more hugs there than anywhere else,” the octogenarian says. Her embraces are soft yet firm.
Elsie has 20 floral aprons, created and sewn by Cassie’s creative older sister, Donna. Because of all the frills, it tastes half an hour to starch and iron one, Elsie tells me, yet she does this in preparation for market day. Once, when Donna said she didn’t want to sew any more, “I said, ‘I’m going to work until I’m 90.’ So she made me two more!” Elsie recalls.
This is one creative bunch. Brother Rick is a painter, as are Elsie and Donna, who go to watercolour courses every week together. Cassie used to paint, too, like the protagonist in her novel, but she decided she had to give it up to get good at writing.
The author (who lived in Edmonton until four years ago and studied professional writing at Grant MacEwan University) says her mother has always been a good role model. “With Mom, there’s always been a real go-getter attitude, a ‘you don’t sit down no matter what life throws at you, you carry on.’ We have been called a matriarchy,” she says, and laughs.
Cassie is only in town for a day, passing through on her way home from a trip to the Okanagan. She’s found a sense of home in Eston, she says, and residents “have adopted me quite a bit.” Before her book won the Leacock Medal, she was known around town as “the lady with the threelegged dog,” (that would be Frieda, an English spaniel). After winning the prize, she became “the lady with the three-legged dog who wrote the funny book.”
“We’re so proud of you,” an Eston resident told Cassie after she’d won. “It’s too bad you weren’t born here.”
Greenhouse matriarch Elsie has read the book three times and still recalls fondly the trip to Orillia, Ont. for the Leacock gala. “It’s mind-boggling, even now,” she says (Cassie snorts). “In Orillia they treated us like royalty.” Cassie admits she cried when she saw her picture on display in the Leacock Museum, among the other writers who’ve won the medal.
In a guest post on the Leacock Medal website, the author writes to the award committee: “I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for my fabulous year … I did a ton of festivals (and still have more to come this season), interviews, and activities that I never would have had the opportunity to do without winning the Leacock. It made an incredible difference in my literary life … I hope to go down in history as the only Co-op grocery store clerk to win the award. If another clerk submits a book, please discard it immediately.”
We’re looking forward to her next novel (working title The Amazing Adventures of Mattress Boy). She’s feeling some pressure from the public to get it written. Relax, Cassie, tune out the world. Books are like plants. They need time and love to grow.