What would you do if the ground beneath your feet was about to disappear?
It won’t stop raining, and Catherine Blackwood, textile curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is supposed to take her collection north to drier ground. Instead, she fixates on finding the lost bones of Tecumseh, and heads southwest into Flood Zone Four to the flood-ravaged fields of her family farm where Tecumseh fell 200 years ago in the Battle of the Thames. His remains have never been found.
Catherine’s family are pulled one by one into her obsession, as is young Rebecca, who has just lost her parents to the floodwaters in Ohio and lives alone on a historic homestead with ties to the Tecumseh legend. She must decide if following Tecumseh’s dangerous route north will rid herself of the ghosts that haunt her.
Working against the rain, two young physicists and Catherine’s daughter, an artist, probe deeply to understand the very nature of rain, hoping to change its course. Hoping to bring a solution to climate change across the globe.
What they don’t know is the last bit of earth they stand on has her own agenda, and with the help of rain, she will get what she desires.
Laura Wythe is a teacher and artist. She uses words like colours to paint her story, sentences like embroidered threads to bind us to her vision. Her characters move through the setting, images as fluid as the environment they stand in. She lives in Southwestern Ontario.
The Bones is available on Amazon in October 2017. A limited edition of an illustrated version will be available next summer, after a show of textile-based art at London’s Masonville Branch Library in April 2018.
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