a morning arrangement

Some mornings I begin with a tarot reading. Do I believe in the tarot as a form of divination? I do, and I don’t. But I like the formality of the process: the question, the cards, the sense of conversation between the cards and the seeker. This morning I didn’t do a reading but as I was spreading out some old family photographs on the dining table to try (once again) to figure something out, looking closely at groupings I’ve looked at dozens of times, hoping for something I’ve missed or ignored, I realized that this too is a divination.

The two children in the photograph above are siblings, a brother (my father) and a sister (Julia). They are the two offspring of my grandparents John and Anna Kishkan. But the two children never knew each other. Julia was born in 1921, the first child of my grandmother’s second marriage, and her 10th child. Julia died in 1924; her death certificate lists cause of death as “septic tonsillitis”. She died at home. Two years after that, my father was born. I don’t know how old he was when this photograph was taken but maybe 4? His ears stick out. They did that his entire life.

When Julia was perhaps, what, 10 months old ?, she was photographed with two of her half-sisters from my grandmother’s first marriage, and my grandmother.

The photograph at the top one that was kept in an old wooden frame in a closet in the basement of my parents’ house in Victoria. I remember asking my father if I could have it and he replied fiercely, No. It’s mine. If I wanted you to have it, I’d have given it to you. He hoarded things without taking care of them. The photograph, along with another, of him with his parents, were dirty. The protective glass was smeared. They were stuck into their frames with masking tape. When he died, my mum asked, Who will want this old stuff, and of course I did. Not long after I brought the photographs home, the framed ones and the ones in the Moirs Happiness Package, and for a time I studied them at every opportunity, asking them, as I ask the tarot cards, about the past and what it means for the present and the future. At one point I took the photograph of my dad and his sister to a photographic lab in the town near where I live and asked them to clean it and possibly restore it. It got complicated because the man doing the work kept phoning me to tell me it would cost more than the estimate and did I want him to continue and for awhile I said yes. Until I realized I was being strung along. I went to collect the original, the one at the top of this post, and the result, which was this:

It’s clearer, yes, and the detail is good. He chose to reproduce it in grey scale and so the hand tinting of the original is lost. And that’s what’s interesting to me because there are notes made by the original photographer on the backs of the two photographs brought together in this portrait of my father and Julia.

See what I mean about how these things were stored? Stains and the dust of almost a century. And my heart breaks just a little when I think of my grandmother arranging to have both children brought together in a single photograph, as though Julia was more than just a name to my father, a ghost in the house, the child who died before he was born.

So I’ve laid out the photographs, trying to find a reading that will help me to understand more about those years of my family’s history in Drumheller, the years after my grandmother’s first husband and her 9th child died, the years of the squatters camp on the Red Deer River, the years across the river in a rough wooden house, which burned in 1931 (the photograph of Julia’s funeral has the family and other mourners assembled in front of that house), and then a subsequent house — on the same land or somewhere else? I can’t say. The newspaper report of the fire says there was no time to save household belongings. But there are these photographs, a story hidden in them that I have been trying to read, a story about the past, the present, and the future. A divination.

And this morning, thinking about this, I looked up at the photograph I keep on the wall by my desk, the second of the two stored in a closet in the basement of the house in Victoria. Apart from the photograph of Julia’s funeral, my grandparents in the middle, in front of the coffin filled with flowers and their 3 year old daughter, both of them looking forlorn, this is the only other photograph I have of them.

The battered frame, the card deteriorating, the original image of my father on the wicker chair somehow repurposed yet again. In a tarot reading, in the Celtic Cross formation, this might be the final result, a kind of destiny, in which two immigrants meet, one of them the mother of 9 children, one already buried, a husband also buried; they meet, marry on Valentine Day in 1920, make a life together that is shadowed by loss, and where a granddaughter they barely knew is laying out a handful of photographs, a divination, a direction.