Chapter One

I have my pen and pad on my lap, ready. I smile at my Grandpère. He is so old and smaller than me now, his once brawny muscles shrunken away, but his wits are about him as clear as day. His dark eyes still twinkle. He sits in his favourite chair framed by sunlight streaming in through the window. His ever-present cane, which he always calls a walking stick, leans on the side of the chair. It’s covered with carvings of every animal in the bush. He is dressed in denim jeans held up by a flat-braided rope with its ends tasselled and beaded. His plaid bush jacket is tattered on the cuffs and looks as though it has seen better days, but he hasn’t worn the new one I bought for him and says this one is still good enough for now. It’s just like him, getting a little frayed on the edges.

I have promised to write some things down for him.

“Tell them,” he says. “Tell them, Anzel. Start with the people.” He pauses for a long time, closes his eyes and continues. “My childhood name was SiMon Wakim. It means Little Salt Brother. In English they named me Simon Walker. I still have that name.” He opens his eyes, smiles and nods.

“My people were a family of three brothers living in a village with their wives and children. We had four elders, three of them women and one man. The old people were still strong, but we all looked after them, making sure they had wood in the winter and food. We were happy.”

Grandpère is in storytelling mode, sitting up straight-backed in the chair, swaying gently back and forth with that look of detachment that tells me he is reaching somewhere for his words. His sentences are not coming out with the usual smooth flow that characterizes most of his stories. He loves to tell the old stories.

“We were living in the land of plenty,” he goes on. “Sometimes we were hungry but we never starved, and we always trusted a higher power would end our hunger. When it did, we always gave thanks, and the skinny times taught us to rejoice in the fat times.

“The people were safer then. There were no jails, but there was justice. There were no drunks. There was rarely any sickness. Everybody was good at something, and everyone fit in.

“At our gatherings we had speeches and dancing. It all was important.

“The families and the tribes knew their place in the world, but things changed very fast when white people and their God came into our land. Contact with white men made us grow up fast. Do or die. Many died. No one survived unchanged.

“My life has been witness to many changes. Some are good, some are bad.

“There are so many things to tell, Granddaughter.” He looks at me with faraway eyes. “I have to think for a while.” He smiles and closes his eyes. He was out with me early this morning in the garden and will probably sleep in the summer sun for a couple of hours, till lunch at least. I have such love for this old man. He looms through my life in all its seasons, his presence always so much larger than his frame, now that it’s shrunken in his late nineties, and very much still alive.

I leave him stretched out in his recliner in the breeze through the screen door, his hand on his walking stick, and go outside. The weeds in the garden are growing as fast as the young vegetables, and for the last two days I’ve been pulling them. There’s only one end of a row left to do, and I decide to finish it. The soil is warm, and the weeds come out easily. It is enjoyable to be out in the sun, and weeding feels more like play than work.

I come in a bit late to make a lunch of fried eggs and toast; it’s just going to take a minute. Grandpère is up already, sitting at the table. He mustn’t have slept long, since it takes him a while to walk from the living room to the table. Once I offered to get him one of those motorized wheelchairs, but he answered me with a look of utter scorn and told me that if he couldn’t walk from the window to the table, he would just as soon be dead. No arguing with that logic. No even mentioning it again.

He eats well, although lately he seems to do everything so slowly that I have a hard time adjusting. By the time I’ve cleaned the frying pan and counter, he’s done with his plate. “Thank you,” he says. “That was very good.” It doesn’t matter what kind of crazy meal I serve, he always says that. It always makes me feel good.

I take the eggshells and bread crusts out to the chickens. They scramble to grab the scraps, running with their snatched beakfuls to some quiet corner where they can eat without competition. Grandpère always leaves his crusts now. He says old men and babies don’t need to eat crusts. I don’t care. The chickens have never eaten as well as they have since he came here to live.

I bring in the eggs, seven today from just eleven chickens. It pleases me that these old hens are laying well. They have the run of the place, and out here in the country they are welcome companions, protected from the wild by the two guard dogs. A lot of coyotes and foxes in the bush are fond of chicken dinner, so Duke and Blue make it their business to patrol the yard. Duke is old, a husky-collie cross, and may be the best dog we’ve ever lived with. Blue is only three years old, a Pyrenees-heeler cross, and is the most peculiar looking dog. His coat is almost blue, his expression is comical and his energy is boundless. Duke and Blue are good company. We’re friends, these two giant dogs and I.

Going back to the house by the long path, I pass the garden. It’s glorious in its summer array. Over the years we filled it with perennial flowers from around the world, all blooming here in the centre of BC. The vegetables now take up the open places: spinach and young salad greens, radishes and green onions, all ready for the evening meal. Picking enough for a salad for me and Grandpère doesn’t take long, but I see a few more weeds to pull and flowers for a bouquet, so when I get back to the house, I’ve been gone over an hour. I put the greens in cold water in the sink, set the flowers in a vase and go to visit with him.

He is back in the easy chair. He beckons me over and points at the notepad, smiling. “I am going to tell you the things I want you to write,” he says. I grab my notebook and pen, and he begins.

“When I was young, before I knew your grandmother, I didn’t know that life could be any different than it was. The older men went down to the Fort twice a year. They traded furs for coffee, flour, sugar, axes, knives, bacon, bullets and beads. Sometimes they brought back hard curled candy. I sure liked that candy. My mother went once, but she never wanted to go again. She never said why. She always wanted beads. Everything that passed through her hands got beaded. She told her stories with beads. The circles were us, and they had the right colours for the directions. She put a little bit of herself in every design, and her beadwork was treasured among the family and the tribe.

“The year I got to go to the Fort was the first and last time. I went with my two uncles and my father, and my older sister came too. She was two winters older than me, but I was taller and stronger. We helped with the packs. Two of our three horses had died in the winter of that year, so we needed more people to pack the trade goods. We had to trade for horses too that year, and Sister carried a pack full of baskets and beadwork to trade for blankets and beads. The women also wanted a steel pot. We were so excited to go that we planned for days.

“How can I tell you what I felt when I saw the Fort? It was huge. We came out on the bank of the Mighty Big Lake, beside the River that Brought the Pinks. Across the water was the biggest village I had ever seen. One of the buildings was huge. It would have taken all of us many summers to put up that building, and even then, none of us would probably have slept upstairs. My Uncle Tree, my father’s oldest brother, said it was the new trading post they’d finished two summers before, after the old one burned down.

“We made camp on the beach and made a fire in the circle there. It was sandy and hot. We took off our moccasins and leggings and swam in the lake. We had fresh fish and eggs, and Sister made a fish soup with things she’d gathered up on the way. I can still taste that soup. It was like nothing that people make today. It has the flavour of my youth.

“In the afternoon a trade boat came over and got us. It was the biggest boat I had ever seen, and I was very happy to get to ride in it. We each took a paddle, my two uncles, my father and I. Sister crouched in the bottom with our trade bundles between three pairs of paddlers and the steering man at the end. The boat handled better than a small canoe with all that manpower on the paddles. We crossed the lake in a big arc around the river outlet so we didn’t get pulled into the current. Sister and I stared about even though we knew it was rude. We couldn’t help it and we realized that neither could the grown-ups.

“The men who came to get us could speak our language, not well but well enough to get by. One of them was named David. He had visited our village with his wife Louisa, whose sister was married to my cousin, and their daughter Clementine. My sister and Clementine were friends.

“David was happy to see us and invited us to camp the night in his lodgings. We took our packs to his place. He had a shed beside the lodgings with two big dogs, very wild, tied up to the door. We could not go to the shed till he moved the dogs, which were very quiet and gentle with him. We put our trade bundles in the shed except for the one my sister carried, and he retied the dogs.

“Their home was not made like our lodgings. It had a metal stove with a chimney and wood on the floors. The floor was covered with the nicest furs, the softest and best quality furs you would find anywhere, and Louisa cooked things we had never tasted before. My sister, Clementine and Louisa talked and giggled and played games with the little ones till they were all sleeping. Then the women curled up in a corner with the pack of things my mother and aunties had made. They told Sister how much each thing was worth and said they would help her trade. They made sounds of pleasure at everything in the pack. There were gifts for each of them in there.

“The men and I had a drink of whisky. My first, but it was sure not my last. My uncles had warned me it was a custom of the white man, and it was rude to refuse. They said it was like drinking horse piss, but it did not feel so bad once it was down. They said to only take one drink, for it was strong medicine that did not agree so well with our tribe, it was white-man medicine. I was not prepared for the warmth it spread through my body, nor the feeling of joy and appreciation that accompanied it. I found a love for my kin and even for Louisa’s man that night, which seemed to surpass all that I had felt before. If my uncles and father had not been there, I am sure I would have tried much more than one drink.

“The men talked about the winter — they had been trapping all winter — and they told tales of the animals and where they found them. At that time the names of the lakes and rivers were all different than now. I liked to listen to the stories. The talk of the men was a living history of our people. When Uncle Tree said he had been to the place where the people came over the neck, we knew it was the neck of the giant who had fallen long ago in a quarrel with another of his kind. We could see in our minds’ eyes the calm lake, the birch forest with the gigantic mountain peak behind stretching to the sky, mirrored behind with peak after peak making the giant’s spine. There was snow on top of those peaks in the heat of the summer days, when old man sun stayed in the sky for most of the day and night. How I would love to see that place again!

“The next day we woke up early. One of the small kids had been crying in the night and was hot and cranky in the morning. Louisa made some medicine and gave it to the child, and pretty soon he was sleeping. We went off to the big store where the trading was done.

“There were so many things in that store that I did not know what they were for. I was looking at some of them when a big white person dressed in very smooth clothes reached out and touched me on the hand. He moved in sign to say not to touch with my hands. I nodded and didn’t touch anything else, but I looked at everything. I did touch one blanket, very gently with the back of my hand, just to feel its softness. I wanted it for my mother.

“The trader was happy with the furs. He said ‘plenty big’ and ‘plenty soft’ at nearly every skin. He tasted the pemmican and said, ‘Very fresh, very good.’ Our men were smiling a lot, and Louisa’s man was helping them by saying the words in our language. The trading took nearly all day, but everyone seemed pleased when we got back to the house. The little one was still very hot, and Louisa took him down to the lake and bathed him in the cool water, then gave him some more sleeping medicine.

“We were in a hurry to start back, so the same men took us and our goods back across the lake. We caught the horse and took the other one that the men had traded for from the herd. No one had used that horse yet, but he knew the rope and followed our old mare willingly enough. He was one year old and a stud horse. My father said in the spring next year we would have one more horse, and I was glad to have more horses again. We slept there that night and in the morning we broke camp and headed back.

“Our loads were light on the way home, and we were full of stories of the things we had seen at the Fort. We had a big metal pot for my mother, and in it was the soft blanket I had touched in the store, wrapped around many small packets of beads and even some seashells that had been traded in from the coast. The thought of my mother’s joy made us all happy.

“We had two cases of bullets for both guns. They would last us a long time. Our mare’s packs were bulging with flour, sugar, coffee, ten pounds of dried apples and two sides of bacon. The apples were so good that we ate them with dry fish on the trail and never cooked a meal till we were home.

“All the men had traded for steel knives with cases that slid onto our waist belts. I must have pulled my knife out a hundred times on the trail home. The handle was bone, and it was mounted on the blade with two bolts. The nuts were recessed into the handle on the other side. To tighten the handle there was a slot on the bolt to turn it. I was fascinated and proud that I had such a fine knife.

“The trail home took us six days. We had such a party when we got home. Our uncles and Father laid out everyone’s things one by one, and no one was left out or disappointed. My mother shared her beads with all the women there, and every little girl had a fancy comb for her hair, and every little boy had a fold-up knife. The women cooked bannock, and we all drank coffee.

“The next day my uncles and their families went back to their own lodgings, and our village dispersed to our summer camps. Our family went one day’s journey west to the berry grounds and started picking strawberries to dry for the winter. We were there for less than a week when my sister started sweating and became very hot to touch. She never got better, and after a couple of days, she broke out all over with red spots. No one knew what to do. We bathed her with cool water and tried to get her to eat, but she lost her connection with everything around her. One morning she did not rise. By the time she died, my mother, my father and both the little ones were fevered. I was the only one who did not get sick. Within two months our entire family had died. I took my father last to the woods and tried to understand the meaning of this. Our family had rarely been sick, but now they were all gone.”

Grandpère pauses for quite a while here, and I scramble to keep my notes up with the story. I know I’ll have to start typing it; no one but me could make sense of this scribble. Tears are leaking out of my eyes. We look at each other; Grandpère’s eyes have matching tears. He continues on in a shaking voice.

“That summer went by in a haze. Even now, after all these years, I barely remember how a young boy put his family one by one into their resting grounds and tried to make sense out of his life. At summer’s end, I decided to go to the Fort. I didn’t know how to live all by myself, and my uncles’ lodgings were bare and silent. No one came home to the village. All I could think of was to go to the Fort.

“I will tell you about life in that town next time, Grandaughter.”

It’s the first time in all these years he’s told of his family. I look at him in astonishment, tears wet on my face. “How old were you then?” I ask.

He looks up. “Maybe fourteen winters. In my family I was already regarded as a man. Men grew up quicker in those days. That is one of the things I am looking forward to on the other side, seeing them all once again.” His voice grows wistful. “After all this time, will they still know it’s me?”

“Of course,” I say. “You are you, and no one could mistake you.” We laugh, and we both wipe our faces with our sleeves. That makes us laugh more. My grandpère is a tease and a practical joker, and his sense of humour has never changed.

We have dinner and then sit on the porch in the late evening sun. Grandpère is such good company for me, I think, as I knit a sweater for my baby grandson. I was so lonely for so long after my husband died. Lorne and I were married for forty-two years, and the heart attack that killed him was as unexpected as it was final. The first few weeks and months after he passed away were filled with family and friends, but gradually they stopped dropping by so often, reassured that I was “Doing great!” and “Recovering well.” I wanted them to stop feeling pity for me, because I cannot bear pity.

I think back and remember those long, empty days. I planted the garden, tended the animals and bartered my tractor driving in haying season for winter hay for the two horses and my milk cow. The milk cow dried up, and I had the neighbour butcher her. Now even the horses are gone. One was my old saddle horse who lived till he was forty years old, and one was the colt meant to replace him, never broke to ride till he was middle-aged, and me still calling him the colt. I hear he’s a roping horse now, and my nephew is winning money riding him. Good for him. But dogs and other animals do not fill the lonely place inside us that longs for human company, and when Grandpère’s second wife died the following year, I was quick to offer him a place to live in my home.

We rock and make small talk till the sun touches the horizon, and then we make our way to our beds for the night. Grandpère tells me to let him get a head start, since I have a habit of turning out the lights before he gets settled. For such an old man he does well. He is fiercely independent, and the only time we butt heads is when I get too “mother henny,” as he calls it.

The next morning is another warm, sunny day, and he is up sitting at the breakfast table when I get in from letting the chickens out and opening the greenhouse windows. The cucumbers, peppers, zucchini and tomatoes are all starting to bear, and I have my shirt held up like a basket filled with the makings of an omelette.

He is impressed with the things I grow to feed us. I am Métis. Our ancestors taught us to be self-sufficient, and I am proud to say if the trucks stopped coming tomorrow, we would not starve, just eat a little more plainly.

“Good morning.” He nods at the vegetables, stretches his nose out with a little snap, then winks and smiles. It’s a language without words, like when my big dogs sniff their appreciation of the supper smells.

Grandpère says, “I had a dream last night. I was really awake, but it was not here and now, so I know it was a dream. I was in a hotel, and I couldn’t find my room. I kept thinking I had found my room, but every time, strangers that I almost knew came in, and I knew I was in the wrong room. They were so familiar, but I couldn’t quite put a name to them.” He stops briefly and shakes his head, looking puzzled. “After many wrong tries, I found a teacher. He took me to a room with a round table, and all the people whose rooms I had been in came in too. He asked us if we knew who we were, and I suddenly realized that they were all me. Then everyone disappeared except one young woman who was annoyed with me for still being in her room.

“I said to her, ‘Do you see? We’re all in each others’ dreams.’ “‘I am awake and at work and I am not dreaming,’ she said, and then she disappeared too.

“What can that mean?” he asks.

I believe that dreams have their own reality and meaning, so I give this query some consideration but all that comes to mind is the phrase from, I think, the Bible. “My father’s mansion has many rooms,” I say to him.

He tips his head as though he’s caught some meaning from this, and we are silent till we’re done eating. He tells me that he wants to walk to the old sawmill landing this morning. The landing is about a quarter mile from the house. Lorne had a small sawmill set up there when we were developing the property and building the house. Now it’s just an opening in the woods. There’s still a big pile of sawdust on one side and a mountain of slabs on the opposite side. There’s a good trail to it, and it’s a delightful walk, so off he goes, and I feel free to do whatever I want. I type my notes, trying to put in the right punctuation and perk up my rusty typing skills.

By noon I’m up to where he left off, and I’m not having to look at the keys anymore. I type directly into the computer. How I love to use backspace and delete and move sentences around! This is surely one of the good things of this age. Computers and hot running water; easy to come up with two good things.

We have sandwiches for lunch of green pepper, onion and baby lettuce. Both of us have false teeth, so we can chew anything now. We never see each other without our teeth in; it seems unfair that teeth don’t last as long as bodies do. I have a sudden image of a skeleton with false teeth, still bright and pink, and it makes me chuckle. He wonders why I’m laughing, so I tell him. He laughs too. It takes little to amuse us, two old fools.

He has brought in the eggs and watered the greenhouse. The walk and these small chores have tired him, so he goes to the easy chair to nap. I finish knitting the sweater and decide to embroider the circle of life on the back. I put one feather and one arrow inside the circle, one for bravery and one for rightness, and then I embroider a small flower for tenderness. When the kids bring the new baby on the weekend, the sweater will be ready. He is my tenth grandchild, and they have named him Seth. It is an old name, and its time has come again. I like the name.

I wander into the sunny room. Grandpère is awake and wants me to read him what he said the day before. I do.

Then he closes his eyes and says, “The Fort. It was just as I remembered. I put my pack on the ground and lit the fire. I turned the two horses loose and waited on the lakeshore. Pretty soon a small boat with only one man came over. It was David, Louisa’s man. I told him of what happened, and tears came to his eyes. He said it was measles. He’d heard measles were killing the people but hadn’t thought it was true. He told me that I could live with them, for he had plenty to do and he could use the extra hands. I was grateful, and for the first time in months, I felt like my life could go on.

“It was very different living in town. Louisa’s father was Métis and had come west from Manitoba when there was trouble there, bringing his two daughters with him. He settled with an Indian woman who came from the bush up north, and they built a wooden lodging just up the lake from the Fort. He spoke French and English and a bit of our people’s tongue. Louisa and her sister could speak all three languages well and taught their children to read and write.

“Louisa and David made me feel like part of the family, and there were a lot of chores. I did them willingly. Everything was so new to me, and they made me feel good with their praise. They were not happy that I could not speak English or French, so that winter they all taught me those languages, and I sat with the small children and learned to read and write English. It was a gift to me that I respected all my life.”

And indeed that is the truth. Grandpère always has a book handy. When he moved in with me, he came with ten big boxes of books. We filled two bookshelves in his room with two rows on most shelves. I still haven’t finished reading his books. He has some classics in there. He’s read Don Quixote, and I saw him laughing when he was reading it.

He continues, “Their children all had lived through the measles; they said the white blood in them knew how to live through it. I guess no one was immunized then. It was a topic never discussed around me, for I was trying to put my grief behind me.

“It was your grandmère, Clementine, who was the kindest to me. It was not long before we had a special closeness that did not go unremarked. We were still just teenagers, but a longing grew in me to have her for my wife. I could not ask, having nothing to give but the horses, and David had many horses already. The only things I brought from the bush were my knife, my father’s gun, my clothes and bedding, my mother’s metal pot and a bag of my mother’s that she had just finished beading. The pot I had given to Louisa and the purse to Clementine. The gun I kept.

“The next summer was a time of much activity. One of the happiest days was when a boat brought my Uncle Tree with his furs. He was as happy to see me as I was to see him. Not all of his family had gotten the sickness, but he knew my family was gone, for he had seen the ash pile and a fresh cairn of rocks among the trees at the berry grounds. He just hadn’t known who survived. He offered to take me away with him, and while I was tempted, I did not want to leave David and Louisa’s house, nor did I want to leave Clementine.

“So I stayed. The news around the Fort was that we could cut fir, float it down the river and get paid in coin. There were six of us who cut down trees all summer, David and I, his oldest son who was one year older than me and three Canadians from the town. There were a lot of Canadians living in the Fort, mostly half-breeds, French and Indian. They were hard workers. It took a long time to fall a tree. Those were big trees. We had to be able to get them into the lake, so they had to fall just the right way. We cut the wedge with axes, then used a long saw. It took two men all morning to cut a tree, and the rest of the day to cut it to the right lengths. We used poles to roll the trees into the lake, where we lashed them together four across and boomed them.

“When it was time, we opened the boom and let the trees go down the river. It was hard to get them moving, but once they were in the river, they took off fast. The Canadians went ahead in two boats so that they could catch them downriver for the mill. Before the snow fell, they were back. They brought us three bags of coin. I didn’t even know how much money it was. I put it on the table and said it was for Clementine.

“David just laughed and gave it back to me. He said, ‘If you want to have Clementine, you’re going to need this.’ That was all he said. He laughed, and Clementine would not even look at me. She told me after that I should have asked her first. But she would have said yes anyway, she said. That winter we worked on a house for us. We made it wooden, just sixteen feet wide and twenty feet long, but it seemed like a castle to us. We were married by the Catholic priest even though we didn’t attend the regular services. Louisa insisted, and we went along just to make her happy.

“The next years were very good. There was work around the Fort, and I made friends with some white men. Louisa’s father played fiddle, and how they all loved to dance! We rolled up the furs, and they danced on the wooden floors. They took turns dancing, one by one and sometimes two at a time, keeping time to the fiddle. I never could get the hang of that fiddle, but I could keep rhythm on the drums.

“One of my white friends was named Sven. He had golden hair and bright blue eyes and a real sense of fun. He liked to drink whisky and get roaring drunk, as he called it. The first few times, I drank too much and threw up, but then I could drink till my memory of things was hazy. I drank a lot when our first boy was young, but I still did my work in the day. Clementine spoke to me about it twice, but I didn’t listen. Then one morning after a wild party, I woke up at my friend’s house, and I was sleeping with another woman. I couldn’t remember if we had sex or not. I was so ashamed. I crept out of the furs and started home. I was just about to our house when I saw our door open and my Clementine kissing on my friend Sven, who was leaving.

“I was enraged. I could not speak to them, so I crept out of sight and kept walking till I was deep in the woods. Then I lay down and cried like a baby. I stayed there for two weeks, arguing with myself. Who was to blame? My Clementine? Did I not just wake up in the arms of another woman who I cared nothing for? My friend Sven? Maybe, for he saw opportunity in the arms of a lonely woman. Me? Yes. I had been drinking instead of paying attention to what mattered most to me, my Clementine, our son and our life together.

“Finally, when I had it all straight, I went home. First I stopped and told Sven he was no longer my friend, that we were enemies from that day on, and that if I saw him, I would try to kill him. I never saw him again. I went home, and no words passed between Clementine and me about anything for some time. Ever since, though, I’ve never been drunk. I won’t say I never had another drink, but something in me would make me stop.

“I stayed home a lot that winter, and Clementine and I learned to love each other more. The following year your mother was born.”

His voice comes from deep inside him, the words booming around the room, as I strive to keep up with his story in my peculiar shorthand. It takes a while for my head to absorb what the words mean. My mother was born the following year? My blue-eyed mother, impossible in her dark-eyed family? My mother, who was always teased about being a throwback to some unknown Scottish ancestor? Is Grandpère telling me that he was not my blood? That my blood grandfather was some blond man named Sven?

I can’t speak. I can hardly think. I just look at him. My thoughts are a jumble. I think of the family tree I treasure, with all the names of the ancestors hanging from the branches. Now in my mind’s eye a broken branch stretches rough and jagged above the canopy.

He looks steadily at me. He answers my unspoken questions. “I’ll never know. Maybe she was a throwback. I know I loved her more than the rest. She was a sunshine girl, my Annie, always smiling and dancing. She never lost that. But my story today was to tell about drinking. It is one of the bad things in this world. Days and years can go by in a haze. Some of the young men did not have as much to live for as I did. My cousin spent his whole life in a bottle, and his only reward was to die young with no pride and no friends.”

He seems unaware of the emotions swirling around me. He yawns and says he thinks he will catch a nap. I take my notepad to the office and fire up the word processor. But I cannot type. I make stupid spelling mistakes and soon I quit. I go out into the garden and crawl along the rows, pulling up weeds. Inside I am seething with emotion. I feel that a firm foundation has crumpled, as though who I am has been compromised. I try to tell myself that it doesn’t matter, but right now it does. It matters to me to know who I am. I feel this has changed who I am at some basic level.

With difficulty, I make myself think of other things. I try to notice the birds singing and to feel the heat of the late afternoon sun on my back. I think of my children and their children, and again I am overcome with the feeling that this has changed who they are. Lorne and I had five children, every one of them with blue eyes — not surprising with my blue-eyed Irish husband’s genetics, even less surprising now. I must be truly distracted, for I find I’ve pulled vegetables along with the weeds.

Giving up on doing anything useful, I take the dogs for a walk. There is a hill behind the house with a path to its top — we call it the lookout — where I scattered Lorne’s, my parents’ and my two lost children’s ashes. I always feel at peace when I sit up there. As we climb, the mosquitoes buzz around us, but they are the fat lazy ones that hatched recently and they don’t bother to land or bite. At the top of the hill is a smooth rock. I like to sit on it and admire the view. Today it is especially pretty. The light green of the new poplar leaves contrasts with the dark spruce and fir. The dead pines stand purple against the horizon to the west, and the dark green patches interrupting the forest in every direction are hay fields. Far off to the east, a tractor drones around a patch; from here it seems to be plowing.

Sitting on the rock, a peace comes over me, and I say firmly to myself that it does not matter. What makes a family is love, not genetics. I repeat this every time I think of Grandpère, and by the time I am ready to go down to make supper, I am calm.

After supper I decide to do some baking and make an apple crisp and a rhubarb-strawberry pie. The rhubarb has gotten very large, and the strawberries are just getting ready. We still have strawberries from last year in the freezer, and I remind myself to make them into jam pretty soon.

By the time I am done, Grandpère has gone to bed. I decide to finish typing his story and now I can do it quickly. The house is clean, and the guestrooms are made up for the kids’ visit. My oldest son Clint is coming for the weekend with his wife Patty. The new baby is their fourth child, another boy. They were hoping to have a girl, but they knew for months it was a boy. They showed me the pictures from the ultrasound and pointed out his tiny balls. It is a marvel to me still that we can take pictures of babies in wombs. It seems to take away some of the anticipation of birth, but at least I knew what colour to knit the sweater.