“What happens in the heart simply happens.”

All week I’ve been gathering my thoughts and ideas about the time we spent in Portugal and Spain earlier in the month. We spent a week in London too but somehow I don’t need to think deeply about those days. We saw some plays, a textiles exhibit, we took the train out to Verulamium to look an ancient mosaics and eat venision bourguignon at the 6 Bells pub in St. Albans, we walked the Regents Canal from Little Venice to Camden and saw a young swan preening by a pub door, and we had a drink at the Lamb Pub, draw in by a chalkboard on the sidewalk with a quote from Ted Hughes: What happens in the heart simply happens. Maybe that’s how I feel about London. I lived there for a few months when I was 21, working in Wimbledon, and it felt familiar then–the buildings and boroughs out of novels I’d loved forever–; it still feels familiar, even if the line-up to the British Museum was two blocks long this time so I abandoned my plan to visit the caryatid there and even had a booked time for my visit. But my favourite church, St. George’s Bloomsbury, was where it always is, tucked in between more modern buildings, and if the building supply shop on Marchmont Street has gone out of business, well, I guess that’s progress, though not the sort I’m comfortable with.

I’ve been gathering my thoughts. They’re a little unwieldy and I don’t know what will come of this. It was Portugal, in 2015, where I first encountered a phrase that entered my heart with such precision, in the Museu Nacional de Arquelogia in the Lisbon neighbourhood of Belem. We’d gone by train to see the exhibition, O Tempo Resgatado Ao Mar (Time Salvaged from the Sea), and it was truly magnificent. Standing before a case of artefacts from sunken ships, I read the display card:

As a society closed in on itself during the crossing, a ship represents an architectural structure that is destined to travel, equipped for the survival of her inhabitants who are isolated at sea for weeks or months on end.
     The internal distribution of this human microcosm, confined by wooden planks, iron, the clouds and saltwater, reflects, in its own particular way, the organization and hierarchy of a society on land that drove this community to its fate.
     During the crossing, for hundreds of men and, in this case, some woman and children, stern and bow, deck, poop deck, topsail or hold became opposite poles of a small world saturated with divisions between social classes and geographical loneliness.

In the quiet exhibition room, that last phrase — geographical loneliness — spoke so clearly to me. Find out about your grandmother and her voyage, it asked of me. Her voyage in 1913 from Antwerp to Saint John with 5 small children, travelling below deck, sleeping on mattresses filled with straw or seaweed, and then her journey from Saint John to Drumheller to join her first husband, not on the homestead she believed she was coming to but rather a shack in a squatters camp on the Red Deer River. It was this moment, reading the card, that led me to write about her, to research my family history in more depth than I’d done before, a quest that shows no sign of ending, and I can only say, What happens in the heart simply happens.

I’m gathering my thoughts and ideas. Our story is ongoing, changing, developing, and small pieces of information arrive still. A letter found in a tin box from my mother’s biological mother to her biological father, neither of whom my mother knew, the great-great-grandchild of my grandmother’s brother who followed her a month later from Antwerp to Drumheller and who died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 (he was living a shelter dug out of the river bank) and whose family in Moravia had no idea of what happened to him. (Their loneliness, my own, this distance between us.) I’m gathering my thoughts. Last night I dreamed of our room in Granada, its view of the Alhambra through a window, shutters open to sunlight and moonlight, I dreamed of the little bird that came to the sill and plucked the hair I’d just removed from my brush to take away for its nest. In some cities, tossing a coin to a fountain ensures your return. My hair woven into a nest for this year’s hatchings? What does that mean? When the dancer was leaving the floor in the Sacromonte cave, she met my eyes. She held my gaze. Does that mean return? Will she be the one to teach the steps of the ancient dance, her hands over mine, our heels clicking, geographical loneliness temporarily assuaged?

Note: the quoted passage is from the guide to O Tempo Resgatado Ao Mar/Time Salvaged from the Sea, published by the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Lisboa, 2014.