Life to its lees

“Life to its lees” is a toast the narrator makes in a family gathering, drawing on a phrase associated with her mother, Lottie. Its brief appearance joins a present act of wit to an older family inscription, letting a saying about embracing life carry both personal memory and playful performance.

The Phrase and Its Inheritance

The narrator raises her bottle and proposes “to the lees of life,” explaining that the toast recalls a poem Lottie sometimes pulled “from her hat.” It also echoes the inscription beneath Lottie’s photograph in her old high school yearbook: “Lottie drinks life to its lees!” The phrase is thus not merely an improvised toast; it has a history in Lottie’s own words and in the family’s memory of her younger self. Lottie winks at the narrator, acknowledging the callback without interrupting its lightness.

The Toast in the Gathering

Nelson notices the moment and reacts to what Lottie has just recited; the girls clap and ask whether it was a song. The narrator’s toast keeps the performance going, turning the remembered saying into a shared joke. Nora’s question, “To the what?”, then makes the expression’s unusual wording part of the exchange. The conversation quickly shifts to the girls needing to use the washroom, and Nora tells her friends that her mother is a hippie. Against that casual, comic scene, the toast gives Lottie’s old yearbook line a renewed life: it moves from a private keepsake into a phrase spoken aloud among family and friends.