Marjorie Elizabeth Ireland

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

Marjorie Elizabeth Ireland, the middle of seven children born to Rachel and Sidney Cavell of Sarawak Township and herself the mother of seven, died on Monday in Peterborough, Ont., at the age of 81 following a long illness. A gracious, soulful person, she was always surrounded by the extended family she loved and the children she bore and raised in waves, but she managed to find the bee-loud glade of her favoured William Butler Yeats.

Born on April 30, 1935, at the Owen Sound General and Marine Hospital, Marjorie grew up on the Cavell farm on Cavell Road north of town, at a time when the Howell fish lorry still made the rounds. The younger sister of Bill, Joan and Phyllis, Marjorie was the middle support in a working farm family bifurcated by the onset of the Second World War, with younger siblings Gayle, Kaye and Alan coming in quick succession in the 1940s. Marj’s early life bridged an era: horse-drawn winter sledge rides to the main road before walking on to Sarawak’s one-room school house; milking the family’s Holsteins; racing a belligerent goat around the farm – a goat preserved in family lore for climbing on the car roof of a visiting radio salesman from Owen Sound. But it was her early passion for books that marked her as a Cavell and daughter of teacher Rae, delighting all her life in the vivid memory of electric light first coming to the farm just after the war ended in 1945.

By the age of 14 she had met the boy, on the school bus to town to begin Grade 9, who would be her husband for 60 years. She married Clifton Ireland at the Sarawak Church in August 1956, but not before she had graduated from the Owen Sound Collegiate and Vocational Institute with honours and been accepted into the Bachelor of Arts program at the University of Toronto on a Latin and English scholarship. Like so many women of her era, Marj was not to complete that degree until decades later, but by 1955 she had an Ontario teacher’s certificate from the U of T and began teaching the same year. By 1957 she and Clif, a U of T engineering graduate, were touring the byways of Canada in a brand new Volkswagen Beetle, a travel theme that would mark their life together.

“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evenings full of linnets wings.”

Married peace was to be short-lived for Marj, as son Philip arrived in 1960, followed 18 months later by twins Karen and Sandra, followed by Todd, who died inexplicably after only a day on this earth, and then a turn of an entirely different sort: triplets Brent, Brad and Lisa in 1967.

Summers (and some brave winter weekends) with those six surviving children at a spartan cabin built on the cobble shores of Georgian Bay not far from Clif’s Keppel birthplace, gave way in 1976 to another big move, this time from Galt, Ont., to the wilds of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., where Marjorie arrived with three older kids navigating high school and triplets sorting out their own education maze. She became a tireless advocate in identifying, diagnosing and finding learning strategies for children with learning disabilities, shepherding all six of her kids to university degrees while becoming an invaluable special education teacher for a generation of boys and girls, including a decade working with the city’s most challenged students at Etienne Brule school.

And it was in northern Ontario that Marjorie found her figurative bee-loud glade. Whether at her city house in the arbour of a hardwood thicket or the summer home nestled on a glassy bay of St. Joseph Island, Marj was a nester with a restless mind. She revelled in poetry and novels ¬– reciting verse from memory until her final illness robbed her of this gift – and later renewed her passion for travel with Clif when time and life allowed. She named the St. Joe’s cottage Innisfree, after the Yeats poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

Marjorie died peacefully surrounded by family on August 1, 2016 fittingly enough at the Saint Joseph’s at Fleming long-term care home in Peterborough.

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

Marjorie is survived by her beloved husband Clif, and children Philip and his wife Sheila McIntosh, Karen and her husband Bruce Cheadle, Sandra and her husband Kevin Carton, Lisa and her husband Rob Palmer, Brad Ireland, and Brent Ireland and Christine Simon.

She left this world nine grandchildren, Julia, Emily, Sam, Arden, Erin, Steven, Ethan, Eliza and Cavelle and too many nieces and nephews to list.

Predeceased by sister Joan Simmons, she is survived by brother Bill Cavell, sisters Phyllis Patterson, Gayle Tisdall and Kaye Procyshyn and brother Alan Cavell.

A private family service is being held at Comstock Funeral Home in Peterborough. Interment will be at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the former Sarawak Township. Donations in memory of Marjorie may be made to the non-profit literacy organization Frontier College (www.frontiercollege.ca) or the charity of your choice. Online condolences may be made at www.comstockfuneralhome.com.