Memoir

Childhood like sunny days and ice cream melting all over your face, like muddy hands and muddy feet and a muddy face, is hard to find in days like this days crammed with anatomy tests and stat tests and English essays.  And summer places with family gathered around in the living room, listening to the radio, or in the dining room, all around the roast and potatoes and gravy and fresh baked bread, seem so distant in days trapped inside, trapped in books and desks and little white halls.  But all of the experiences that shape us keep on building, endlessly, so the roots are what's holding us in place.  Things like family, and friends and tree houses with your name carved on the trunk.

It was a cold summer and I was up to my knees in the water, looking out at the harbor.  And I was thinking about how good it was, in that moment, to be there, so far from everything, so far from schedules and expectations and tasks, so free from everything, so safe.  In that water, the bits of pebbles and sand, the broken bits of shells under my tanned feet, I looked over at the little Island my family owns, the patch of trees growing up all around, hiding a little log cabin my grandfather built decades before.

Since I was born I have spent sunny summers swimming in the harbor, baking rhubarb pies and lying in the grass, on the hill by the little cabin we own.  Every year, my family and I take the flight over and are greeted in the small, empty airport in Halifax by my grandmother, with her soft cheeks and her pink nails.  And some years I arrived with my Winnie the pooh backpack, and some years I arrived with braces, or wearing my favorite sketchers, or wearing my new choker necklace, or with books we had to read for school.  And at first my parents would pack my bag for me and my siblings, but as we grew older, we made "To bring to Canada lists", annually, independently.

We drove the thirty minutes at night, on an empty stretch of highway in the middle of trees and bits of harbor and bodies of water broken up and scattered all over the place.  And eventually we turn down Anderson road, made of gravel and dirt this time instead of cement, with trees and berry bushes all along the lining.  The house we put our stuff in is old and small.  I know everything about the house, everything about what's in it, and where everything is, and who sleeps in what bed and in what room every summer. I know that the wallpaper in the kitchen downstairs is white with strawberries, it's the same as the wallpaper upstairs in the nursery, but the wallpaper in the nursery is peeling all over the place because my sister and I used to peel it when we were little.  I know that little house likes too smell good, like fresh baked dinner rolls or Nanaimo bars or lemon squares all of the time.  I know that little house creaks, especially right next to the bottom stair, and you're not allowed to run anywhere in the house, or jump, anymore. 

I love entering that house every summer, I love that nothing changes there, I love the familiar smell of fresh cut grass after my grandmother mows the lawn in hot afternoons, that part of Canada, like the cement of a great monument, holding everything together.

Of all the sun speckled memories I have of Canada, there is one that stands out, because it's the only one that's not filled with laughter.  When I was about six, I remember standing on the wharf, looking out at the island, not with the usual blissful gaze, but instead, I looked down, towards the water, where my grandfather’s ashes were being scattered, twitching softly in the breeze.  My cousins all around me, because they were older and had known him for longer stood crying and holding each other.  No one said much of anything, and my grandmother, of course, was silent.  It was an expected death, he had been in a wheelchair for months, slowly weakening because of the cancer that wasn't curable but still, it was a sudden loss, a sudden presence gone, a sudden lack.  He had wanted to be scattered, to be a part of this place that we all learned to love so much, to fall into the water and suddenly become it.  When we were older, my sister told me that when she was little she always got scared swimming in the harbor, over to the island, because she thought my grandfathers arm would reach up and grab her from under. 

Although my grandfather isn't there anymore, there are always new faces coming and going, always more photographs and home videos to add to the collection.  My grandmother, most dependably, is there every summer.  Three feet tall, we stood in circles around her pink cushioned chair, and had to sing her songs, to get jujubes.  She always has a stern look on her face, which is why, when she does smile, you remember how much she loves you or how much she is proud of you.  It's sad to know that with time, she too, like the old house will start to break so much that something must be done.  She always says "Alright." Like if you didn't know her, you'd think she was mad at you.  She's in good health, luckily for all of us, but already talk has started of what we're going to do with the house when she's gone. 

Her aching limbs couldn’t always participate in the things our agile, elastic bodies did.  We spent afternoons taking turns tubing.  As a small child, I remember being whipped across waves on the old purple and black tube.  My sister and I went together, usually, because we were about the same size and weight.  On windy days the brutal waves pounded us, and we would skip and skid across the waves when we were small, since we were so light.  Around age 11, we were in our prime for tubing.  We had totally mastered how to tilt your weight to one side when the boat turned one way, how to use the handles to our advantage while maintaining speed, basically how to not fall off.  We’d be going at top speed and slowly our bodies would sink further and further back on the tube until our arms had reached their maximum outstretched length, our fragile legs dragging in the wake, slowly getting numb from all the pounding.  Our hands, clenched and freezing would grip onto the little plastic handles until we’d be yelling so much and then BAM an unexpected wave and we were forced to let go, the speed and intensity suddenly slowed completely as the water gently welcomed us.  The boat would circle around and we’d get on the tube again, hair soaked, claiming “our” side and together we’d go for another spin. “Faster!” we’d yell out until we knew our dad, driving would be able to whip and cause us to fly off any second.  Afterwards, shivering, we’d walk up to the house, clippings of cut grass our grandmother mowed sticking to our wet feet, and out of breath, we’d enthusiastically go over the best flips, falls and turns.

It wasn’t until last summer that I noticed the glory momentarily fade as it one night became an argument between grown adults, grown siblings over money and property and "this is mine and that is mine".  I remember sitting in the sunroom, while it was dark and cold out, after another endless day of tubing and waterskiing and grocery shopping, huddled around the scrabble board with my little straw haired cousins and trying to talk louder than our parents who were outside, outside yelling and arguing.  Their emotions must have kept them occupied because the mosquitoes swarm incessantly on those windless nights. And their fight was drawn out over an hour, with a final crescendo and then their silent walk back into the house, separating into different rooms, going off to bed.

That night, my uncle and my aunt left, pissed, and drove the two hours home.  It's weird when you get old enough to notice all of the tension, the passive aggressiveness, the glances and body language between your parents and their siblings when you thought they were and always had been the best of friends.  Of course, in time, decisions about property will be made, and some will leave happy and some will leave the same as they started, I just don't want to see that little house change.  There was talk of ripping it down, building up a new house, a bigger house, and of course this has its practicalities.  Every summer the house is jam packed with people, brimming with distant relatives that drop by for big barbeques on the porch, but I don't want to see a sleek modern refrigerator and double beds with matching sheets, I want the little house that always creaks and cracks and never changes.

Recently, my 20-year-old cousin and I were talking about it, talking about how much we loved the harbor.  She said that she couldn’t wait to come here when she was older, when she started having a family “so we can cook our kids all that good food like grandma makes, and we have to do the lobsters too!”  Annually, we get lobsters from the little market 10 minutes away.  The lobsters come in cardboard boxes that are wet and bent by the time they get to the house.  When we were younger, we would lay them all out on the floor and name them, according to behavior, some would foam at the mouth, some would flap their tails, some would pee on the floor.  We played with them, amused and totally fascinated, my brother used to teach me how to hold it “like this” and he would put his thumb and middle finger on either sides of the cold crustacean, paranoid, nervous, but proud.  And with our weak child hands we would hold the lobsters up, until they became too heavy, or until we got bored of it. Eventually, I stopped eating meat, and saw the lobster tradition as a cruel thing, seeing as after our little ceremony we’d hand them to my grandmother, who had been boiling a large pot of water while we’d been fixated on our lobster friends. Plop plop plop, suppertime.  The Berkeley in me bellowed and it became another thing I hadn’t seen as a child. 

Nonetheless, nostalgic, my cousin and I talked about how we would make sure our kids did the same, how our traditions would carry.  How regardless of its walls or windows, we would gather family in our little world for a long time.

I know though that this place will stay there in time forever, and it’s meaning will always be the same, regardless of its physical beauty.  It’s careless nature, and it’s fun spirit, it boasts about family value and traditions.  For generations, we with the passed on last name will run around barefoot in fresh cut grass playing soccer, kicking the ball between plastic chairs for goal posts until the mosquitoes are too bad and we are called for supper, big old adults, racing for the ball, against athletic kids, nephews. And this place will shape everyone that it touches because people will carry it with them, wherever they go.  And carrying it throughout my endless days I do, geese or marbles always reminding me of the harbor.  I am too familiar with the fish n chips, the lack of diversity, the Tim Hortons and the Dairy Queen.  And in Berkeley, so far away from that with its infamous diversity, its Indian, Thai, vegan food, is so different.  Like broken bits of pottery making up a mosaic, Canada is one of those faded pieces of a bowl, firmed with cement, so that it’ll never go anywhere.