to be continued

Yesterday I came downstairs and heard John talking to someone on his phone. He was talking to our son Brendan. It was a video call. How lovely to see Brendan’s face on the small screen! But…what? He was calling from Paris? We hadn’t known he was away but he’d arrived in Paris from a week in Germany, doing some sort of arcane* math with research partners. He stepped out onto the balcony of his temporary flat in Paris to show us the Eiffel Tower, glowing in the distance. Inside there was a small kitchen with a few dishes on the counters. What are you making for breakfast, asked John, and Brendan smiled. It’s evening here, he reminded his father.

I am always taken aback by the metaphysics of time and place. That you think of someone perhaps returning from a run along Mill Creek in Edmonton or skating with his children and he is thinking about dinner in the 5th in Paris. That he will run the next morning (today), while we are reading in bed at night here, he will run (we talked about this) through the Luxembourg Gardens and the Jardin des plantes. That we were heading out on morning errands and he was meeting a friend for a fashionably late supper.

Two weeks ago I was missing my children and their children and I bought packages of blank cards in pretty colours, panels of bright stickers, and folders of postage stamps, sending packages to the grandchildren to suggest we have a correspondence. They range in age from 5 to 9. About a week later, a pink envelope appeared in my mailbox with my name and address carefully printed on it. Inside, a sweet letter from my oldest grandchild. I love the idea of keeping in touch, she wrote, and then she told me about what she was reading, about a recent family adventure to celebrate her dad’s birthday in which there had been snowshoeing and doughnuts, and some other details that made me smile and also (to be honest) wipe tears from my eyes. This very human enterprise: staying in touch by letter. I wrote back to her. A green envelope arrived a week later, from her brother, with his news. He signed his name and then a PS: to be continued…. I’ve just put a sticker of the planet Mars on a card and today I’ll write back to him. Their cousins live farther afield and I’m hoping letters from them are in the mail too. Though in 3 weeks I will see that family in Portugal, 8 hours ahead of us, 5 hours ahead of their home . So perhaps their news will hold until then? (To be continued.)

It is something to wrap my thinking around. Over time, though in the moment, we can talk to one son in Paris, we can talk to his sister in our time zone, to his brother 3 hours later in the day, but all within the same hour here. That they are far-flung but also present in this house in so many ways. Sometimes it feels as though they’ve never left and are due home from school any time now, the bus dropping them at the foot of our driveway on its way to the end of the route, in Egmont. The black dog is waiting at the top of the driveway and when she hears the bus door open, she’ll race down to guide them home. She’s been dead for 25 years. That photograph at the top of this post was taken two summers ago. But last summer, the same children sat on that couch and listened to stories. Two of those children with two others not in the photograph met up in the Cariboo last summer. All of them will gather this coming summer for a wedding on Vancouver Island.

In the dark, it could almost be any time, any place. Closed eyes: the Eiffel Tower illuminated against the night sky. A tiny screen, a face: he’s just around the corner. Photograph of children leaning in to see the pictures in the book: last summer, next summer, their voices faint but you can hear them if you listen. Two little boys skating a trail on a frozen marsh: last week, here.

In Paris, Brendan said that his children were not quite clear on the concept of how the mail system works. That once their letters were mailed, I would not receive them immediately and write back at the speed of light so that a letter from me might appear in their mailbox the next day. It takes time. It takes time and there are mountains inbetween, rivers, Howe Sound, a long highway. I’ll drop a letter with Mars on it in the mail tomorrow. It was last week, it was next year. To be continued.

Note: * “arcane” because, well, math. I did attempt to immerse myself in math some years ago, taking a Great Courses online course in order to learn something of what my son knows and loves. I wrote a long essay, “Euclid’s Orchard”, about this process and how it became part of a complicated braid, with coyote music, quilting, and love. The book the essay gave its title to is available here.