Fall Away: A Life Story

By Two Moons

The Story begins with a dream. The author is only fourteen, but the dream becomes a catalyst in her life. Five years later, her quest begins when she leaves her conventional family in Canada to live in the United States. It's 1967 when she arrives in Detroit.

It's a journey of transformation with a strong desire to be true to h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Dec 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648037467

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Copyright © 2020 by TwoMoons.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover by Rachel Timlin

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

PART TWO

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

PART THREE

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

PART FOUR

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

PART FIVE

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

PART SIX

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

Afterword

Acknowledgment

Dedication

To Philip, Aaron, Jacob, Rebekah, Daniel, Rachel, Mara, Joseph

A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

—Albert Camus

INTRODUCTION

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned,

so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

—Joseph Campbell

THE MOURNFUL HOWL of a lone wolf or yipping coyote only occasionally interrupts the peaceful atmosphere of this mountainous wilderness area. Sometimes, the rhythmic sound of ancient natives also drifts over the land, their ghostly forms hovering around simple stone abodes now covered by layers of soil strewn with pottery shards, arrowheads, and other artifacts.

This is my home; this is my life. It’s the opposite of my previous city existence: not a life I imagined as I sat in the Canadian woodlands of my childhood. But it was a life waiting for me. Waiting as I plotted my travel plans on a map of the United States when I was twelve. It got closer when I left family and friends in Canada to live in Detroit when I was nineteen, the year of the riots. And it got even closer after I read about Gandhi, the writings of Thoreau, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and articles in Mother Earth News. But it continued to wait as I lived in an unconventional Little House on the Prairie manner on a homestead in Michigan. And like a tightly sealed cocoon, waited while I raised and homeschooled my children, and their father and I tried to eke out an existence with the land and from our crafts and artwork. But it was only after the eking ceased, the marriage failed, and forty-seven years of my life had passed that I found this life, this life that was waiting for me.

The years preceding my move to New Mexico were similar to my experience of walking into the Grand Canyon. It’s not a straight shot down to the bottom of that majestic ravine. There are twists and turns, and just when you think you are nearing the bottom, another hill rises. You can choose to scurry along the narrow path, stare longingly at the bottom of the canyon, concentrate only on the outcome, or you can decide to be one with every moment, see the beauty in every step, stop now and then to take in the view, to appreciate where you are right now.

My entire life has not run in a straight line. But every journey to the top or bottom of my mountains—every respite or challenge, every path that greeted me prepared me for the next. While there were many exciting and joyful times, there were also some dark, sad, and dismal ones that got me off my path. Or did they? Some paths are laden with hardships that can be our greatest teachers. Some paths are fraught with distractions: distractions that can often help us get rid of the life we’ve planned for the life we really need, and, perhaps, our true destiny.

I’m going to become a citizen, I tell my daughter. Soon, everyone will know. It’s hard to keep something like this a secret. It will be all over their Facebook pages. Pictures of me at the ceremony, waving my tiny American flag, glaring from family and friend’s computer screens. Some of them will be surprised to hear I wasn’t already a citizen. Or they might not have realized I was born anywhere but the States, unless they noticed the funny way I pronounced some of my words.

In the forty-seven years of being a green card-carrying resident, I had not considered applying for citizenship. I preferred to say I was a citizen of the world. After all, I told myself, and sometimes others, my grandfather was born here. And some of my ancestors arrived shortly after the Mayflower. They founded this country. But over time, those ancestors blended with a melting pot of nationalities, and we lost track of our heritage and just fit in.

I thought with all that history behind me, I should have been made an honorary citizen, like people who get honorary degrees without going to college. Instead, I sit in an auditorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico with 187 other applicants from 56 countries. I wait through two hours of long-winded, heartfelt speeches and a televised greeting from President Obama. I hold a tiny American flag as I mumble through the pledge, especially the part about bearing arms. I shake hands with the Judge, the aged World War II veterans, and the women representing the Daughters of the American Revolution, which I am qualified to join. And then it’s over. I’m a citizen.

I cart the tiny flag, the poppy from the Veterans for Peace, the passport application, and the gold embossed certificate with my picture that looks like an FBI wanted photo, to my home in the southwest mountains of New Mexico. I do not feel any different. I’ve always felt connected to this country.

But what really prompted me to move here? I am often asked.

It’s a long story, I reply.

PART ONE

Clockwise from top left: Gramma and Grampa Wright (early 1920s); Mum and Dad, Marian and Eddie, Brackett on their wedding day (1946); Gramma and Grampa Brackett at their 50th wedding anniversary (1970); Me with my sister Brenda on right, in Toronto, (1951); Me and JoJo (1948).

Clockwise from top left: Me and sisters Debora and Brenda with Dad (1957); Me in center with Debora and Brenda and Mum in back, in Oakville (1960); Seventh grade class pic: me second row far right, Mr. French in suit & tie. Best friend Elizabeth, back row second from left (1959–60).

1

The Crystal Ball

Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

—E. E. Cummings

I’M RUNNING through a wide-open field as if my life depends on it. A tall, dark figure is rapidly gaining on me as I make my way to a large canvas tent sitting at the edge of the field. I tear back the flap covering the opening and duck inside. My pursuer peeks in and goes no farther, giving me a brief opportunity to look at his painted face and the feathers sticking up at the back of his head before he disappears. At the opposite end of the tent sits a gypsy wearing a babushka and colorful garments on her squat and full body. She doesn’t seem the least bit surprised by my hasty entry as she gazes into a large crystal ball on the table in front of her. She looks the epitome of warmth and protection, and after what I assume was my narrow escape, I feel safe inside her tent.

It wasn’t that I thought this dream bizarre or prophetic scenes were viewed in the crystal ball, which set it deep within my memory, but that I had the same dream for seven nights in a row. On the final night, the dream changed. The protective tent disappeared. I was frantic by the time I spotted the gypsy walking through another part of the field, her canvas shelter rolled up and balanced on her shoulder. With my pursuer close behind, I reached her and cried out. But she continued walking, wobbling slightly from the weight of the tent, and without a glance in my direction said, You’re now on your own.

I wanted to think, at this juncture in the dream that my week-long running companion and I stopped abruptly in our tracks and had a good long laugh before going on our merry way—game over, as the gypsy fortune-teller tromped off into the sunset. Instead, I woke with a gasp.

I was fifteen at the time, the oldest of four daughters. Although I read a lot of Nancy Drew mysteries—far past the time my light should have been out—sometimes able to predict the endings, I didn’t know what to make of this dream. It was 1962. Dream interpretation books were not yet popular, but they wouldn’t have provided insight to the meaning of my dream anyway. Many years and a galaxy of miles from my home in southern Ontario, Canada, would have to pass for that. But I never forgot that dream. I carried it with me like a talisman or omniscient oracle long after I realized its meaning.

So mystified was I at the recurrence of this dream, I approached my mother, hoping she might help decipher its meaning. I often woke her with my frightful screams. I was usually only partially awake, eyes wide open, but still experiencing horrifying visions as she guided me to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face.

My mother didn’t have a clue about how to interpret my dream. Had her mum, who we affectionately called Lovertubs, lived close by, I could have asked her. Although she never lived in a tent, wore a babushka or gazed into a crystal ball, she did read fortunes in tea leaves and an ordinary deck of playing cards.

Lovertubs, or Granny as we more often called her, would predict the coming of handsome young men and mysterious packages. On the top of each card were words I didn’t dare try to read. Not that doing so would have bothered her. It was just that the cards had such an enchanting presence, I didn’t want to disrupt the magical moment by trying to decipher her scribbles. Granny might have known what my dream meant, but by the time of her next visit, I would forget to ask.

Granny was overweight and a bit frumpy. She always made surprise visits, arriving by train. The obvious clue to her arrival was the scent of Avon and a case of spring water by the front door. Granny would not drink our chlorinated tap water. At night, she shared my bed, my head at one end, hers at the other, so we could massage each other’s feet or tootsies as Granny called them. Sometimes, she tested my innate ability she said most people had or could develop, by playing a game of guessing the denomination and suit of face-down playing cards. I often guessed them right if I didn’t think too hard or for too long.

No one else seemed intrigued by Granny’s psychic talent. After she passed away, my mother said Granny had just played at fortune-telling. She never viewed her predictions with much seriousness. But I saw her readings as a way to confirm my thoughts and dreams for my future and to provide some much-needed direction. I anticipated her visits. I cherished our time together with her deck of cards, the leaves at the bottom of our teacups, and our tootsies at bedtime.

It was only much later in life that I realized Granny was my hero. Not a quick draw like my childhood TV hero Annie Oakley, and not like the calm and wise Buddhist monk, a mentor in my later years. Granny was more like the mystical, plump, jolly Santa, full of laughs and surprises. But more than anything, she ignited in me a curiosity for things less mundane and more esoteric.

2

Tierra Sagrada: land of calm abiding

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or find it not.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I CAN’T REMEMBER a time when I didn’t think of Granny as I tried to decipher some mysterious or plain, down-home meaning in the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup or the images on my tarot cards: colorful pictures containing suits of cups, swords, pentacles, and rods or those of Native American, Oriental Zen, or the fairy realm. Over the years, I have also heeded prophecies in rune stones, and the oracle of the I-Ching with throwing of coins. And I paid attention to the readings done by a woman who channeled predictions as she typed at her computer. My son Daniel once had his fortune read in the swirling motion of his coffee. But along with keyboards, tarot cards, tea leaves, and oily coffee swirls, I’ve learned that much of nature, many dreams and unusual insights and coincidental incidences also hold some deeper meaning, and the opportunity to tune into our intuition, possibly changing the course of our day or life forever.

Recently, I started using a regular deck of playing cards where I scribbled brief meanings on the outside edge, just like Granny. Whenever I use them, I sense Granny’s ghostly form leaning over my shoulder to offer hints about the significance of each card: the love and good fortune of hearts, the fun and rewards with diamonds, the hard work associated with clubs, and the difficulty of spades. Sometimes, I get a whiff of Avon and the smell of musty old suitcases, and I wonder if a box of spring water will magically materialize at my door.

I live in what seems like the other side of the world from where Granny lived. Although New Mexico became the 47th state in 1912, Granny might have thought it was still part of Mexico. It’s not an uncommon misconception. When the Summer Olympics were held in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996, telephone operators treated some of our residents like aliens from another planet (perhaps, descendants of the ETs whose spaceship crashed here in 1947) telling them that visas were needed before flying in for the games.

Granny might have found the area where I live rather strange compared to her hometown in southern Ontario, Canada. Her view was of fertile flat farmland scattered with cornfields, forests, and expansive rivers and lakes. Mine is of a wide-open country with hills and valleys and a scattering of scrubby pine and junipers and mountains towering above 8,000 feet. While Granny tromped through lush green fields and dense, damp forests, I walk gently upon a brittle sun-bleached land, not wanting to upset the delicate flora or step on a sharp cactus.

I live with my husband, Tomas, in Catron County, the largest county in New Mexico, an area covering 6,898 square miles. Although its larger than some states, it’s one of the least populated counties. Elk outnumber human residents. Less than 25 percent of the land is privately owned. The rest is public, managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The Gila, Blue Range, and Aldo Leopold wilderness regions, along with the Apache, Gila and Cibola National Forests are all located in Catron County. I can walk out the door of our house and wander into the wilderness in any direction.

Because of the scattered population, landmarks used for giving directions are sometimes unusual: Go straight about five miles until you get to a big cottonwood tree, the one with the broken limb just past a dead pine tree and a field of cows. Then turn right and go past what looks like an abandoned graveyard. Turn at the second dirt road on the left, the one with the wooden gate half off its hinges. Look for the house with a rusty metal roof and two big black dogs that may or may not be there to greet you.

A pile of rocks I once rearranged by our driveway, looking similar to a duck, became a useful landmark when my son Aaron and his girlfriend drove down from Michigan one year. Aaron had forgotten the detailed map I had given him. When he stopped to ask if anyone knew of our whereabouts, because we were new to the area, the best someone could come up with was that duck, that pile of rocks, something different on the usually unchanged landscape.

Speculations about us newcomers spread among the locals. We were in our early fifties at the time and might have looked too young and energetic to be classified retired. I imagined their discourse: Must be some of those Y2K’ers and hippies at that: her in a long skirt and hair in a braid, him with a bandana around his head. Or Hari Krishna’s or Buddhists. Heard they have prayer flags and a Buddha statue in their garden. They could be exercise freaks, how they walk a mile down the highway to get to their mailbox. Or environmentalists, cleaning up the trash along the highway as they do. And we probably won’t be seeing them at any of our fire hall barbecues. No doubt they’re tree-hugging, animal loving, granola-eating vegetarians.

All of those guesstimates, which I later heard were actual assumptions, were pretty accurate. But I’ve never been one for labels. I’ve never classified myself as a Buddhist, although I believe and practice many Buddhist principles. And I never thought of myself as a hippie, although I was opposed to the war in Vietnam, wore sandals, long hair, and tie-dyed some of my clothes. Although I have a daily exercise routine, a mixture of yoga, chi gong, and aerobics, I’m not an exercise freak. It’s usually Tomas who walks two miles to get the mail. But I do care about the environment. I would never cut down a live tree or use chemicals in our gardens.

Eventually, the duck disappeared, and we became known as the newcomers who live up at the ruins, once a native village where partially exposed stone walls, pottery shards, arrowheads, and the occasional finding of an intact bowl is all that remains.

We named our place Tierra Sagrada, Spanish for sacred land. Our first dwelling, built with rocks and indigenous materials from the land, was small and round like a miniature pueblo kiva. We planned on the great rocky outdoors being our lounging area as the natives before us had done, a roofless extension of our humble little home.

When we first moved here, a raven cawed endlessly from the top of a tall pine tree. I wondered if he was a shapeshifter, one of the ancient natives squawking about our presence on this long uninhabited hillside. But I think the spirits of the land have accepted us; that our intention of walking gently upon the Earth, hopefully leaving a light imprint, has pleased them. Now, the raven just squawks for the stale pieces of bread and crackers I save for him. He dives in, lands next to our small stone pond where a variety of wild birds, lizards, and sometimes a red fox comes to drink. He pecks at the crumbs I set on the low rock wall, gobbling up my homemade whole wheat bread first. He seems oblivious to me and our cats Karma and Zen watching from inside the house.

Many Y2K’ers did flock to this part of the country, cramming storage sheds with clothing, kerosene lamps, canned goods, and other household items. In the event of an earth-shaking disaster, New Mexico was touted as one of the safest places to be, which seemed ironic since it’s the birthplace of the atomic bomb. It also houses the world’s chief nuclear weapons research plant in Los Alamos. But it is a state generally free of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods, and we took some of that into consideration when we decided to move here. However, while many Y2K’ers left when the year 2000 arrived uneventfully, we had no intention of ever leaving.

Clouds are building on the horizon. I never noticed such unusual shaped clouds before coming here. Spaceships. Rockets. Animals. People. One day, a huge dragon appeared. He looked ready to take over the entire valley or lay down next to our house as a feng shui protector. But he soon fizzled out before having a chance to do anything of consequence, first transforming into an elongated elephant, then a flattened crocodile, before turning into ordinary patches of cloud.

Today, the clouds are dark and ominous. The sun has disappeared, no longer charging our array of photovoltaic panels, our only means of electricity. It’s monsoon season. Rainstorms are horrendous occasions, nothing like I ever experienced in Michigan. Thunder booms and echoes off the rocky cliffs causing me to jump and the cats to hide under the furniture. The much-needed moisture will soon turn the pasture green and dotted with a colorful array of wildflowers, like an Irish landscape. And the narrow spring-fed Tularosa River will be transformed into a real river and not what some people up north might call a creek. But when the rains stop in September or October, it’s back to the dry sun-bleached land once again.

I shake out my rubber clogs sitting outside the door, just in case a scorpion or spider has taken up residence. We’re a shoe-less house. Not just to keep dirt and mud from being tracked inside, but also the little sharp weed seeds called goatheads, which are a painful surprise if stepped on with bare feet. I head to the garden to pull a few weeds and lay pine needle mulch between the rows of corn before it rains. While doing so, I think about calling my mother, thousands of miles away in southern Ontario, Canada. I want to rattle her memory about my childhood and my fortune-telling granny.

My mother is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to memories of the past, memories that help clarify some of my foggy recollections. The past is where she feels most comfortable. Current times don’t interest her. She is content sequestered away in her tiny apartment, free of nosy neighbors and outside activities. My two youngest sisters are her only consistent but infrequent visitors.

A few years ago, my mother taught me how to knit socks. Now, she says she can no longer knit, that her thumbs are arthritic from serving so many cups of coffee when she used to waitress. She contents herself with jigsaw and crossword puzzles and watching apartment dwellers come and go on the remote camera views of her tiny television.

As I shake pine needle dust from my clothes, my mother is packing her life in cardboard boxes. She’s moving back to Brantford, which she abandoned four years ago after moving to the snowy north of Sudbury, Ontario, near my youngest sister Marina and her family. Two years later, she moved again—to Ingersoll, the hometown she left sixty-one years before. Everyone hoped this would be her final resting ground.

It was her life in Ingersoll my mother always reminisced about and claimed was so much better. Life was simpler and quieter before gas-powered lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and other noisy devices, she said. Milk and coal were delivered right to your door. Kids set up lemonade stands and made a few bucks on hot summer days. We traipsed through the woods to pick wild elderberries, which your granny turned into pies and jam. On weekends, we watched our dads play horseshoes. In between pitching shoes, they listened to boxing matches on the radio. Sometimes, they had to hide the radio to avoid paying the yearly license fee.

In our high-tech age, many of those simple pleasures have faded away. Walks in the woods swapped for some TV nature program, meeting new friends exchanged for thousands of impersonal possibilities on Facebook, and long informative letters replaced with choppy little tidbits on E-mail. The ringing of cellphones often interrupts restaurant dining experiences or relaxing train trips. One time, on a crowded train from Chicago to Detroit, I heard all about a fellow passenger’s love life as she talked non-stop into her cellphone.

My life contains many simple pleasures, such as planting and tending our vegetable and herb gardens or sharing a meal and good conversations over hot cups of tea or coffee by the warmth of our woodstove. In warm weather, we sit outside under the pergola, where willow branches shade us from the blazing sun. I enjoy breathing in the natural world that surrounds me: the red hue of sunrises and sunsets, the occasional arrival of a brilliant rainbow, and shooting stars in a dark sky while soaking in our hot tub or cooling off after a steaming sauna. I take pleasure in our silent no talk Sunday mornings and our quiet times apart: Tomas hiking the mountains or working on craft projects, me secluded in my writing cabin or hunkered over the stove creating a new recipe. And I still prefer snail mail letters, mulling over the contents while leisurely sipping a cup of tea. I cherish the space between receiving and sending a letter, and the quiet, uninterrupted time to form a reply.

I hope there are still a few people holding on to some of those old-fashioned ways; getting together for a cup of tea, chatting over garden fences, enjoying dining out or hiking in the wilderness or climbing to some mountaintop without talking or texting on their cellphones.

We intended to maintain a simple life when we moved here, just the basics—a low-tech existence, no television or radio. We did not want the media blasting mostly disheartening world events and bothersome information to infringe upon our life. When people touted the advantages of computers and Internet access, I said I was happy with my little electric typewriter. As well, I told our inquisitors, if we had Internet, our guests might not be content to watch birds during the day or stars at night. They might want to connect with the outside world, check their E-mails, scan the web. I like how they get the chance to detox from technology and experience a simple, slower pace. I further justified my seemingly old fashioned mindset by informing them that Wendell Berry still wrote his books with an old manual Remington.

After years of not wanting to become like my mother, always dwelling on the past, moaning about those good old days, I now find myself doing the same thing. But my mother was right. Life was simpler back then, and not just in her younger years but in mine as well.

My mother’s low-income apartment complex in Ingersoll is two blocks from the funeral home where her old grade school classmate Wilson Macbeth is the director. How easy it could be if when her life approaches its end, she walks down to the funeral home, hands Wilson her receipt marked PAID IN FULL, then hops into one of the empty velvet-lined coffins to take her final breath. Since she would already be dressed in her finest clothing and no ambulance or hearse was needed, she should qualify for a refund on the funeral charges, perhaps enough for us to hold a small party in her honor. Of course, the timing is of grave importance.

That scenario has now come to an end as my mother moves once again. Ingersoll wasn’t the same as it used to be. Memories of her old hometown were sixty-one years behind the times. Most of her long-ago friends were either six feet under or living in old age homes. My mother said she would rather die before submitting herself to an old age home. She recently saw an interview with Shirley MacLaine. Shirley said we live many times, so I’m not going to donate any of my body parts when I die. If there really is an afterlife, I want all my body parts intact when I come back. And I don’t want to be cremated. I’m afraid of fire. Besides, if Shirley is right, I won’t be in the ground long anyway.

But, Mum... But before I have a chance to share my thoughts on the mystery of rebirth, Mum says, Never mind. I’m not taking any chances.

When my mother does die, there will be no formal funeral service. She has requested an unceremonious burial in the Ingersoll cemetery, next to her mother, sisters, brother, and other family members and friends from her past.

In all the years we have lived in New Mexico, my mother has never visited us. Once or twice a year I tried to convince her to come. I wanted to share our beautiful place with her, show off what Tomas and I had created.

Oh, I’m too old to make such a long trip, Mum says.

How about taking the train or plane? I’ll pay for the ticket—a birthday gift.

Oh, I could never take being confined on a train for two days, and I will never fly.

One year I even offered to drive to Canada to bring her back to New Mexico. But she is committed to driving no farther than her doctor’s appointment, the grocery store, and the China King Buffet.

My father might have visited us in New Mexico. He never let age get in his way, but years of excess alcohol and cigarettes got the better of him. Not long after we moved here, he lost a leg to diabetic gangrene. We didn’t have a phone at the time, so I wasn’t aware of the impending surgery to remove my father’s leg. But all that day, I felt unsettled. I finally drove two miles to a telephone booth to call my eldest daughter. Rebekah.

I’ve been trying to reach you telepathically, she said. Papa’s in the hospital. He wants to talk with you.

My father wanted advice on what his surgeon had recommended. Why that’s ridiculous, I gasped, to cut off your perfectly good leg because it might avoid another visit to the operating room if it too becomes gangrenous? My father agreed.

Dad was in and out of the hospital then. One time, before being admitted, a nurse asked him who the Premier of Canada was. Oh… some jerk, he replied. The nurse laughed and took it as an appropriate answer, confirming his positive mental state. He later commented that had she asked for his address, she would have thought otherwise. That hospitalization was the result of a conflict with the drugs his doctor prescribed, whereby my father’s memory became so muddled, he called my mother, who he had not spoken with since their divorce twenty-five years before. My mother responded with an open heart and continued to do so during his remaining years, sometimes visiting him at the hospital and later at the nursing home.

Another time, the doctor didn’t think dad would make it through the night. Better have your family prepare for the worst, he said. The following morning, his bed was empty. But my sister Debora breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted Dad down by the nurse’s station drinking coffee and flirting with the nurses. Those types of situations tended to bring out dad’s humorous side, so hidden in his younger years.

When Dad was hospitalized in the middle of moving into a senior apartment complex, my sister Brenda enshrined one of his living room walls with a framed poster of a World War II bomber. It was not the Lancaster bomber Dad had been tail-gunner on. However, it still seemed ludicrous, as though anyone would want to be so blatantly reminded of life in the war. The plane was in flight, and although it did not show bombs being dropped on cities or villages in Europe, the possibility of death and destruction was easy enough to imagine. Dad endured its presence, not wanting to offend his daughter, and perhaps enjoying the nostalgia. His chair faced the TV—which was always on—and the bomber above it, where he eventually struggled to maneuver his wheelchair and tried unsuccessfully to walk with an artificial leg.

After my father passed on, Brenda ended any further association with our sister Marina and myself because we questioned some of her decisions regarding dad’s funeral arrangements and the allocation of his belongings. She was the executor of his will. Such dissension between family members had amplified at various times throughout our family’s history and would continue to do so, like a curse or genetic affliction.

The last few minutes of my father’s life, two days after his seventy-ninth birthday, were spent with two young nurses. It seemed fitting for someone who once had a girlfriend younger than me. Dad was struggling to breathe and mumbling incoherently when the nurses first arrived. Then he sat up and clearly exclaimed in the direction of what appeared to be an empty corner of the room, I’ll be right with you. Those were his last words before slipping away.

Although we had installed a phone by then, we were on a camping trip, so I didn’t immediately know my father had died. But outside our tent that night, a lone wolf howled.

While I can no longer rattle Dad’s memories, I still have Mum. I want to ask you some questions about Granny and my childhood. How did Granny learn about reading cards and tea leaves? I asked my walking encyclopedia of a mother.

3

Tea Leaves

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

—Albert Einstein

IT WAS Granny’s neighbor Vera who showed her the art of reading cards and how to interpret leaves at the bottom of teacups. Leafy images of stick people became future acquaintances, soldier or gun shapes were signs of impending trouble, outlines of birds represented travel, and lightning streaks meant a change in residence.

Vera was renowned for her fortune-telling. People came from miles around for readings. Besides reading fortunes that brought small monetary donations, Vera raised seven children and a room full of canaries. Why birds, and why canaries in particular? Did she sell them? Show them at the county fair? I asked my mother.

I don’t think so, she replied. Vera just liked them.

Sometimes, the birds got out of their cages and flew around leaving little milky blobs on the furniture, and flies would sink into the butter or float in the milk left out from breakfast. When a client was expected, Granny helped clean and tidy, making Vera’s house look halfway respectable for the upper-class women who usually came for a reading. My mother, then just a young child, often tagged along to help with this purification process: dusting, de-feathering, and cleansing Vera’s slovenly ways.

Jovial, happy-go-lucky Vera made up for her untidy nature by being the most cordial and helpful neighbor. She was the salt-of-the-earth type of woman, a friend you could always count on, spill your innermost secrets and aspirations to, and have the most natural of belly laughs with. Because of those virtues, her husband and family and friends overlooked her lack of housecleaning skills. When visiting, there were no formalities, just open the torn screen door, walk in and holler her name. When Granny was ready to deliver her babies, Vera was out that same door in a flash, eager to help out.

Granny’s first pregnancy, conceived out of wedlock, was similar to her own conception. She was born in a home for unwed mothers. Her adoptive parents changed her name from Mary to Alwilda. Granny always suspected that one of her parents was closely related to her birth mother, but she never knew for sure. Not even years later when she searched for her birth parents and found her father, Harry Parr, then living in Toronto. But she never met her mother, then buried somewhere in the Ingersoll cemetery.

Granny once pointed out the Newton farm where she was raised. It was a large two-story brick house with cornfields on all sides. Her usual happy go lucky disposition changed when she started reminiscing about life on that farm. We moved to town when I was sixteen, she said. My parents had two teenage sons when they adopted me, and one of the sons came back to take care of the farm. I wasn’t happy about leaving. Not just the farm, but my horse. I really loved that horse.

Although Granny had fond memories of being an adopted child, she could not be convinced to follow in her birth mother’s footsteps and give up her child, a son she would name Claude. Wilda was madly in love with the baby’s father, William Bill Edward Wright, a handsome, strapping young man who had emigrated from England with his parents and five siblings when he was a child.

I have a picture of my grandparents taken in their younger years, perhaps before they were married. She’s pretty; dark brown hair in a puffy hairdo with short bangs. She’s wearing white stockings, white shoes, a dress that looks like fabric from a checkered tablecloth. A thin belt drapes around her waist. Bill looks debonair, like a movie star—a fairer version of Errol Flynn. His face holds a cocky expression; light blonde hair falls onto his forehead. He’s wearing a tie-less shirt and a loose suit coat. His one hand wraps around Wilda’s arm.

Two years after their marriage, Wilda’s parents died. Her sixty-five-year-old mother, who had always been sickly, died first. Within the same year, her father, while visiting family whose house he was not yet familiar with, opened a door thinking he was entering another room and stumbled to his death down a long flight of stairs. Wilda was twenty-three at the time, pregnant with her second child, Eleanor.

Marital life and less free time to cavort with pool hall buddies didn’t suit Bill. His loving and witty behavior that had initially captivated Wilda changed to that of a crusty, unpleasant one. Although those outside the home saw Bill as a gentleman with a dry sense of humor, at home, he was a stern disciplinarian. He seldom spent time with his family and showed little if any affection toward them. Although Bill was never involved with the military, he expected his family to abide by a rigid set of rules, not unlike that of a military camp. He wanted meals on time and children to speak only when spoken to, which wasn’t often.

While Wilda tended to the children’s needs and the responsibilities of homemaking, Bill worked long hours in a local factory. It was a noisy place that resulted in a minor hearing loss. Although this precipitated a convenient way to ignore Wilda’s complaints, it didn’t diminish the energy or interest required to produce three more children in the next eight years: Helen, my mother Marian, and Bette.

By the time Bette was born, the sweet wedded bliss had soured. The surly, aloof side of Bill so hidden in their courting days, appeared to be permanently anchored in his character. He developed a cold, humorless, indifferent attitude. Although he seldom imbibed in alcoholic beverages, he had a temper and would sometimes strike out at Wilda. Loud, harsh squabbling sounds often drifted from the walls of their home, wandered over the clothesline, rippled the water in the birdbath, bounced off the cedar shakes of the roof next door and flowed through her friend Vera’s open window two doors down. It didn’t take shapes at the bottom of a teacup to predict what the future held for Wilda.

In 1933, at the height of the depression, their home, a wedding gift from Wilda’s parents became too costly to maintain. The house was lost. Wilda, Bill, and the girls moved into a smaller home that they rented. Twelve-year-old Claude was boarded out to a family with two boys and, for many years, had little contact with his family.

With increased tension revolving around finances and cramped living quarters, Wilda’s happiness continued to deteriorate. When arguments with Bill reached an unbearable intensity, she stormed from the house and stayed with a friend until the fervor subsided.

The young Wright children didn’t often witness their parent’s marital disharmony. They were seldom at home. After school, they went hiking in the woodlands, not yet encroached upon by four-lane highways and shopping malls. They picked wild elderberries, carved their initials in trees, swam in the river during the summer and skated on it in the winter.

Three years later, Wilda, then thirty-six, left for good, leaving her four daughters in Bill’s care. She rented a small apartment where the children would visit and sometimes sleep over, all except twelve-year-old Helen. Helen refused any further contact with her mother, a rejection that lasted forty years.

Wilda would never speak to Bill again. If she saw him coming down the street, she quickly headed to the opposite side and kept walking. At home, my mother and her sisters were compelled to take the change of events in stride. If tears were shed, they were done on solitary walks or in the small bedroom they shared. Bill forbid any talk or show of emotion about what happened. And he didn’t offer any comforting words or warm hugs to ease his daughter’s heavy hearts. He continued to devote his spare time to pool hall activities and associations with male friends while the children were left to fend for themselves. The older girls helped with the needs of the younger ones, especially five-year-old Bette. Without a mother to monitor their activities, concerned neighbors took it upon themselves to holler at any of them if they were still outside when the streetlights came on.

In the late 1930s, there began a population decline in the small town of Ingersoll, as happened in many towns and cities across Canada as men left to fight in World War II. It was a similar situation as my grandparents experienced during World War I, the war to end all wars, which took the life of Bill’s older brother Harry. Young women quit school to work in ammunition factories, and adolescent boys donned dashing uniforms and hearts of patriotism, including Wilda’s eighteen-year-old son Claude. Many, like Bill’s younger brother Howard, went missing in action forever.

Near the end of the war, Wilda moved one hundred miles to the east, to her birthplace of Toronto. One can only speculate on what prompted this decision. Had she just grown weary of heading to the opposite side of the street whenever she saw Bill coming? Or had she planned her departure all along, just waiting for her children to reach their more independent teen years?

My mother Marian was eighteen when she followed her mother to Toronto. I developed an idea, without any evidence, just my own imaginings, that she went there to have a child out of wedlock at the same home for unwed mothers her gramma had gone to. It intrigued me to think that somewhere in the world, I had an older brother or sister. I hoped a brother since I had none. I imagined a fairy tale ending where our long-lost brother found us, and our happily reunited family lived blissfully ever after.

I wanted to think this less of an imagining and more my psychic prowess, but my mother assured me that the seemingly hereditary trait for getting pregnant out of wedlock, had skipped her generation entirely. The war took all the desirable men, she said. However, this trait would gain momentum and successfully re-enter in my generation, proof that there was a gene for unwed mothers, or we were just afflicted with healthy sexual appetites and lack of birth control knowledge.

Toronto was a busy and exciting city when Marian arrived, much different than the small farming community of Ingersoll. The vast expanse of Lake Ontario was a short distance from the magnificent CN (Canadian National) train station, and the gracefully tall Royal York Hotel where dignitaries and movie stars and other famous people often stayed. Sounds of seagulls and ship horns echoed from the busy harbor. Yeasty scents from bread and beer factories permeated the air, and trolleys clanked down the streets. Amid the noisy city, Sunnyside and High Park offered quiet walking paths and the shade of trees to picnic under.

Wilda and Marian shared a small room in a boarding house. They also worked together at The Blue Ribbon Company, packing coffee, tea, and spices. At the end of the day, they smelled of Danish pastry and cappuccino: scents of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and Costa Rican coffee. When they started packing cooking spices, and their hair and clothes reeked of garlic, onion, and aromas of spicy Italian sausage, they quit. Granny got a job at a restaurant and my mother at a toy factory.

It was in Toronto, where my mum and dad first met. They were pen pals since Marian was twelve. It was her sister Bette who connected them. Bette’s pen pal Eleanor was my father’s younger sister. In 1945, while Bette was visiting from Ingersoll, she and Marian made a short trip to their pen pal’s home on the east side of Toronto, but Eddie was not yet back from the war.

Eddie returned a few months later, after a brief stop at a hospital in England where he recovered not from war wounds but a case of pneumonia. He also fell in love with a nurse named Sonya, as did every other comrade in his ward.

My father was lucky to have survived the war. Forty-two thousand Canadian soldiers were not so fortunate. Although he put on a tough guy act of having done his job as commanded, dad was emotionally depleted when he arrived back in Toronto. His nights were restless, filled with nightmares and cold sweats. He had flown forty-seven operational missions over Europe, on the Lancaster bomber; forty-two were marker missions with the Pathfinder Platoon. Dad was the tail turret gunner, supposedly one of the worst positions. Had their plane needed to make a belly landing or the squad needed to bail out, Dad might not have survived. They were memories he tried not to think about. He tossed his medals of valor into a cardboard box, topped off with pictures of his air force squad members, adolescents like him when the war began, one whose son would become my pen pal.

When Dad was old enough to collect the Canada pension, his war years suddenly emerged from that cardboard box. Along with pictures of his grandchildren, the impetus in his late fifties for quitting cigarettes and alcohol, he decorated the walls of his apartment with his war medals and a letter of commendation from the King of England. When his dad passed on, he encased Grampa’s medals and put them up next to his. It was only then that my father shared his agony of thinking about all the innocent people killed in that war.

We didn’t always know where our bombs exploded. His eyes suddenly glistened with tears. I’ve always wondered why we were never instructed to bomb the rail lines. We might have saved a few Jews, or at least sent a message to the Germans. Dad grew quiet, wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. You know, they named a lake in the North West Territories after me—Brackett Lake—because I saved my comrades from an advancing German gunner. That’s how I got the Distinguished Flying Cross.

I pictured a small lake surrounded by trees in some remote area with hundreds of other such lakes, named after hundreds of other flying cross recipients, and probably not found on any map in a road atlas. This, I would later discover, was not the case at all. Brackett Lake, 5 miles in diameter, is a vital bird breeding region. Thousands of ducks, geese, and swans make use of the lake and surrounding area every year.

I believed in that war, Dad continued, that it was justifiable and could have been won sooner had the Americans not waited so long to join in. It was long after my father passed away that I understood how horrifying this time in his life must have been.

I think my mother fell in love with more than my father’s uniform. Eddie, or Ed, as he was often called, was serious, determined, and hardworking. His quiet and gentle manner was a change from the comical,