My mother is not here; we mourn her still. This is one thing I have learned: to mourn properly is a lifelong task. From time to time I try on her beautiful velvet shoes. I’ve been saving her nicest size elevens; they don’t fit me yet and my feet aren’t growing anymore. A human’s growth isn’t indeterminate, stretching through a whole life like the beaver’s. Up north, farther north in Ontario, she used to sit under the birch trees, doing drawings in such miniscule detail, of deadfall, ferns. She must’ve had microscopes for eyes.
Later this summer we will go back north, take the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee, my father, my husband, and all our children, his and mine. I should like my children to ride a train before all the passenger trains are gone. Like we did, coming home from that Sudbury farm, with my aunt Prunella, the year before my mother died. Eating snack bar food and playing crazy eights all night long while the train rattled and clacked through the forests and swamps of Ontario. My sister and I had never stayed awake all night before, but were brave and persevering, helped by card games and sweetened snack bar coffee. Staying awake through the half-numbed navigation of Toronto’s cavernous Union Station, the walk along impossibly bright King Street to eat bananas and cream in a greasy spoon. Greasy spoons don’t serve bananas and cream anymore—only upscale breakfast bistros for the urban trendy do that. Another thing lost.
When it is still night Alice, Sandra, and I hear coyotes. What seems like hours but is perhaps only a few moments later, we watch the last of the luminous tent mushrooms wink out. Now that dawn is coming our campers feel safe enough to turn their lights off. My sisters and I stand on the hills, the lonely fields far from the house cloaked in pockets of mist—the sky striped lavender and pink. Time collapses and I think of all the years when we were young travellers, staying up around fires, surrounded by forests that stretched farther than the eye could see. We did it in many countries, sometimes together, sometimes separately and for a brief moment all those other dawns, other fires, other journeys collapse into one. What are these, I wonder: fire, night conversation, dawn? They exist to remind us how unknowable and mysterious life really is. The next day you see each other and feeclass="underline" this one I will call friend forever.
I have been living inside my mother’s skeleton for twenty years. It’s quite roomy and comfortable so most of the time I don’t even realize my confinement. As though it had grown, her huge ribcage spread out on these hills like the skeleton of a whale. I remember turning fourteen east of here, listening to spring runoff under two feet of snow on a farm in Lanark County. Our friend Ben sat in shirtsleeves, his jacket beneath him on a melting snow bank, playing the double bass while snowmelt also sang in underground rivulets. A series of phone calls at dusk; Kerry driving a blue pickup to the city; premonition soaking through me like darkening twilight.
My mother was born in Europe, where she learned to live for art. But she died here, in a still forested land, sitting for hours under birch trees on Kerry’s farm, drawing with a botanical exactness, but also an awe: what is this landscape, what does it say, what are its secrets? My mother came across the sea, all the pain of Europe’s war in her pocket. In her other pocket, two seeds: two children. Beneath the truly weird, almost fluorescent green of the forest canopy, up north in Ontario, she planted us, so that we might live.
Decades later we still live in the shelter of her ribcage. The rain comes through, but we don’t mind: at night we can see the trails of shooting stars, and the smoke from our cook fires wafts through the slatted bones. I may never find another place to live now.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Doug Back, and the editors of the publications in which these stories first appeared, including: Jo-Ellen Brydon, Julie Rouse and George Kirkpatrick, Lorraine Filyer, Candas J. Dorsey, Sally Tomasevic and Marcel Gagne, Keith Brooke, Darrell Lum and Eric Chock, Karen Correia da Silva, Sharon Hamilton, Bruce Kauffman, Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan, Bruce Boston, Claude Lalumiere, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Hal Niedzviecki, Joe Pulver Sr., Rich Dana, Rhonda Parrish and Greg Bechtel, Justin Isis, Brendan Connell, and Michael Callaghan. Thank you also to my faithful beta readers including Jan Thornhill, Kate Story, Anita Buerhle and Tapanga Koe. Thanks to Luciana Ricciutelli, Val Fullard, and Renée Knapp, my amazing team at Inanna Publications.
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