Month: December 2021

…by a south-facing window in Edmonton, working on the edits of my forthcoming book, Blue Portugal. There is some snow, ice, and beautiful sunlight glowing pink in the trees where magpies mutter and plan. Edmonton appears in the pages of my book and it was here, in the Provincial Archives, that I found a hidden story about my family’s past, one I puzzle through in an essay called “The River Door”. I’ve just been working through this essay and I am filled with a strange yearning to have the years of my childhood to live again so I could ask the questions I am left with. In the photograph, my grandparents are holding my older brother on the porch of the house they built in Beverly. It must be 1951. My grandmother had lost her first husband and brother in the Spanish flu epidemic, then an infant, and somehow, with 8 living children, she found my grandfather and married him. She was as far away from her childhood home in Moravia as I am from her now. My grandfather as far from his village in Bukovyna as I am from him. (I am farther away than that.) I am carrying their story now, sharing it with other members of my family, and soon, with anyone who reads my book. This is weather they would have been familiar with and when I walked out to the bakery earlier, I thought of them, thought of the pillows my grandmother stuffed with goose down, the little quilt she made for my brother out of scraps of her housedresses and my grandfather’s pyjamas, and I was walking with them under the light-filled trees, holding their hands, as I will hold my grandchildren’s hands a little later in the day when we go on an outing.

When I had a telephone conversation with my Edmonton grandson, just a few days before we were due to travel to visit him, he told me he’d been listening to a podcast of stories from Greek mythology. He excitedly told me his favourite god was Zeus and his favourite demigod was Herakles. So I packed the copy of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Wanderings of Odysseus, illustrated by Alan Lee, that his father and uncle and aunt had enjoyed as children. (I couldn’t find its predecessor, Black Ships Before Troy, but I hope it will show up.) We had lunch an hour or so ago and then Grandpa John suggested that H. might like to hear about the Cyclops. H. is five. The gorier the story, the better.

I looked over to see them in the tiny living room of this Airbnb, one reading, the other listening, and I was drawn in to the story all over again. The cunning of Odysseus, the dark cave (“And all this while, the Greeks sat very still in the deep-most inner end of the cave, cold-afraid and crouching in the dark.”), the horror as the Cyclops eats one crew member after another (“devoured as a mountain lion devours his kill, washing down the flesh with long drafts of milk”), and the moment when Odysseus sharpens one end of the giant’s olive-wood staff, hardening it in the fire, heating it again, and plunging it into the Cyclop’s single eye. The next chapter, “The Lord of the Winds”, has been promised for later today. I’m back to working on the edits of Blue Portugal and John is reading on his own. In this cold city, with the sidewalks icy and treacherous, we are as willing as any anticipate the moment when we huddle around the ancient (virtual) fire to listen to the old stories, to shiver in their spell, to dream.

Last night, walking back from dinner, back across the parking lot of the Sandman Inn, the night before a journey eastward, looking up to a waxing crescent moon, as clear and lovely as a minaret on a mosque, Venus bright as she’s ever been.

And fine birds brought you,
Quick sparrows over the black earth
Whipping their wings down the sky
Through midair–

I wished, for all of us grounded on this planet we have not loved enough.

And what I want to happen most of all
In my crazy heart.

(The passages of Sappho, Fragment 1, “Ode to Aphrodite”, are translated by Anne Carson)

Note: three years ago we were returning from Edmonton and tomorrow we’ll start the first leg of a return journey. The 2018 trip was very eventful and I’m hopeful this one will be quieter. Yes to the gingerbread house, the snow, the stories — but maybe I will be spared the fall on ice and the resulting damage to my retinas.

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We spent five days in Edmonton, visiting our family there. It was cold. Of course it was. Walking from the car to the house, I slipped on ice and my feet shot out from under me. Maybe I cracked my tailbone. The pain was (and is) pretty intense. But this is an injury for which there’s no treatment apart from pain-killers and time. It was wonderful, though, to spend those days with loved ones. One afternoon, John and I stayed with the kids while their parents worked. We made a gingerbread house which was a big hit, particularly the gumdrops. (Our house had long drippy streams of icing and did not resemble the suggested version on the box. And luckily Grandpa John was able to repair the broken wall with extra icing, though it kept threatening to cave in again.) Afterwards he read Kelly and Henry a story about other houses and a wolf who was able to blow them down.

Aunty Angie came for three nights from Victoria and so there was a trip to the new museum, tickets for a performance of “Nutcracker in a Nutshell”, and a sleigh-ride around the snowy streets of Strathcona, pulled by Sugar and Spice, blond Belgians from Rattray.

On our last day in Edmonton, I wondered at the shooting stars, long streams of silver, I was seeing to the side of my right eye. And the tangles of, what, hair?, that kept drifting across my vision. After some calls to various medical facilities, Brendan and John took me in a blizzard across the low bridge over the North Saskatchewan, its surface a constellation of ice stars, to an emergency room where I was examined, then examined again because I was lucky enough that a resident ophthalmologist just happened to be in the hospital, and told I almost certainly have a posterior vitreous detachment*. I won’t say I wasn’t a little scared but it was also strangely beautiful to have a glimpse of my inner eye. The ophthalmologist was puzzled when I asked why I was seeing a particular landscape and a skyscape and thought maybe it was my brain trying to make sense of the instruments and their intense light. Her immediate concern was to try to make sure I could have a follow-up examination at home this week or she was going to insist I stay in Edmonton for further retinal examinations. But finally we left, drove back in the blizzard, and ate Cristen’s delicious dinner (saved for us to enjoy with the bottle of good wine John had bought and the box of assorted macarons I’d chosen at an excellent bakery the day before).

The next morning we woke to a foot of snow over the cars on our street. But people were out and about and so we packed our rental car and drove carefully to the airport. Shooting stars were the least of my worries as we passed abandoned vehicles along the Calgary Trail. We flew home with stories of snow and those silver stars and beautiful children on a horse-drawn sleigh and the mystery of what my eye saw, and didn’t. I am seeing a specialist tomorrow to have another dilation but I think that I will be fine. I think of that wonderful poem, “Stories of Snow”,  by P.K. Page—I was lucky enough to hear her read this several times in her beautiful patrician voice—and what it tells us about vision:

And stories of this kind are often told
in countries where great flowers bar the roads
with reds and blues which seal the route of snow –
as if, in telling, raconteurs unlock
the colour with its complement and go
through to the area behind the eyes
where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies.

*In fact it was a bit more serious in that when I arrived home and saw the coast ophthalmologist, he determined that my retinas were tearing away and he did immediate laser surgery to repair them. You dodged a bullet, was his assessment.

The days meander. I wake, I make coffee, a fire, feed the cat. Some mornings I swim. I try to stay straight in my lane but my body drifts, sidles. It wants the next lane and maybe the one next to that. The news cycle meanders. One day we are all holding our breath as the rivers rise, flood farmland, as mudslides destroy roads, wash farms into the rivers already swollen with rain. The next day we are all holding our breath as the new Covid variant, named for the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, floods into our anxieties. Meander too is Greek in origin, though now located in Turkey, near the ancient Greek city of Miletus, a river that gave its name to a concept. The Greek historian and geographer, Strabo, said of it that ‘…its course is so exceedingly winding that everything winding is called meandering.’ We are holding our breath. It’s the Christmas month. Gifts accumulate in the basket by my closet. Some will travel to Edmonton next week and some will be mailed. Others will wait under the tree for the beloveds who will join us here.

So a day meanders. Three needles currently meander through red and blue cotton, the quilt I am working on, stitching rivers through its three layers, a way to explore the sinuous curves of the rivers eroding the banks containing them. How much thread these meanders will take because of course a river doesn’t flow, or these rivers don’t, as a crow flies; they turn and ox-bow and sidle and erode. Or they would, if they were water. I am hopeful the thread will hold, in both senses: that the quilt is strong and that the two spools of special red sashiko thread last, are sufficient to their task.

A day meanders. We swim, we talk, we do our chores (cutting wood, doing laundry, writing overdue letters), and then one of us sits by the fire to sew and the other one heads out to the printshop to prepare a Christmas card, something he does gladly because last year he wasn’t able to operate our old Chandler and Price letterpress, treadle-driven, and this year he has recovered enough from a slightly botched surgery to pedal the press as he feeds paper under the friskets and hopes the ink covers the lino block evenly. It’s a block we’ve used before but this year it will be printed in a different colour and there will also be sewing involved. No more hints! You’ll have to wait!

When I woke just after 5 a.m., not yet ready to meander downstairs, I could see a few stars of the Big Dipper tangled in the firs. Not Dubhe and Merak pointing to the North Star but the elegant handle, in place, light spilling out of its old well-scoop like winter water. There was frost on the blue metal roof and I thought of that beautiful poem by Li Bei (whom I first encountered as Li Po 50 years ago), translated by J.P Seaton:

Before the bed, bright moonlight.
I took it for frost on the ground.
I raised my head to dream upon that moon,
then bowed my head, lost, in thoughts of home.

If you’ve visited this site before, you’ll know that one of my abiding interests is family history. When I was younger, I wasn’t particularly interested, or at least I couldn’t imagine finding out much beyond the little my parents knew (or didn’t know) about their families. But I realized when my own parents died that I could see myself as a woman who looked for the family stories, who puzzled through their details, and who shared what she discovered. I didn’t have much to go on. A few photographs, a few names, a couple of dates. But somehow I’ve learned so much about the places my ancestors came from and even more important, who and what they left. Who they left. I’ve been lucky enough to travel to the villages my paternal grandparents left and through the wonders of the best kinds of internet connections, I’ve also found possible family members. A woman in the Czech Republic who is distantly related–her grandfather was a cousin of my grandmother–took some photographs of my grandmother’s family farm in Horni Lomna in summer and it gives me a clear locus for the work I’ve done in determining some of my grandmother’s early life.

When I went to Ukraine in 2019, I was lucky enough to visit my grandfather’s village, Ivankivtsi, and then a few days later, some relatives who’d learned I’d been there–at the time no one could direct me to possible family members but the priest who came to show us the church said he’d tell the worshippers that Sunday and see if any of them knew of Kishkans–drove a great distance to meet with John, Angelica, and me in a hotel in the Carpathian Mountains where we tried to determine our relationship. They brought gifts of sparkling wine, chocolates, and a rushnyk I used to hold the bread for a meal when my children were here. I’ve kept in loose contact with one of them and she wrote yesterday to resume our joint project to determine how the branches on our particular family tree should be drawn. A niece in Quesnel has indicated an interest in learning more about our family and I’m hoping to meet a first cousin three times removed late next week (her great-grandmother was my dad’s half-sister); she has been working some of the same trails as me and we’ve been sharing our work.

In my forthcoming book, Blue Portugal and Other Essays, the title essay gathers together strands of my grandmother’s story, red threads, green leaves, and phrases of Moravian folk poetry woven into the music of Leoš Janáček. There are ways to make family history. Some use charts, databases, boxes with dates and relationships. I use some of these too. But mostly I try to write the places and people into some sort of living text that will hold them, hold us, as tenderly as branches hold their leaves against the wind.

 

Our house has a garden at the front…

It has fruit trees, a hollow that could be a creek, a fence to keep animals close to the house. A pig? Some sheep? Perhaps a cow. My grandmother learned to make cheese before she came to Canada, fresh curds my father loved; she made butter to sell, and noodles golden with eggs from the chickens that ranged through the yard of the house in Drumheller, even entering the house for crumbs or the cool shade of mid-day in summers. Did she ever sing the songs I am listening to now, the folk poetry of her area, did she hum as she made cheese, did she dream of a true love coming from the mountains as she washed clothes in a big tub behind the house, within the sound of the Lomna River?

The river will flow away,
and nor is love here to stay,
it too will pass forever,
like a rosemary leaf it will wither.