Been quite the few days.
I am tired of hospitals, I know the rest of the family is too, but most of all my Mom.
All of my family has been in and out of hospitals for many months now. Whether it is due to their own physical and emotional health or someone we are visiting.
Despite this trial and tribulation (especially for Mom) in the past few days, we have rallied together and have worked together and taken care of one another. We have also found moments to laugh just live in the moments of being together... spending time together.
As the doctors helped aid Mom (and she got better with their love and care) I was able to see my grandparents on the weekend, just as I originally planned.
As we visited we harvested the garden for the next day and a half, had fires roaring for roasting food as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebration for some relatives, and just ate a lot of food.
For harvest we hauled four gallons of yellow beans, four gallons of green beans, several zucchinis and cabbages, five gallons of carrots, and dug up two batches of potatoes. I also did watering in the green houses filled with tomatoes, peppers, and squash and gathered raspberries just for an extra activity; I really enjoyed that.
While I was in my aunt's (Dad's youngest sister), Big Sis' old rooms for my nightly accommodations, I awoke in the middle of the night to something outside. I didn't hear anything, but I sensed something. The air had changed. I would learn in the morning that no one else had awakened to it, and I would learn something new about nature as well... it was lightning. Heat-lightning as my Papa explained to me, as it had no thunder to go with it.
Out in the fields to the east, the sky way up high was navy blue with stars shining extra bright. Below those stars was dark clouds, and lightning was shooting down to the ground in bursts of thick zig-zag bolts, or, sometimes, in spiderweb-like formation. As they shot down and lit up the sky you could see the details of the clouds and they were coloured in purple, gold and soft pink.
Meanwhile Sam was back in town and she saw it too, but they had thunder rolling through too. As she captured big bolts of lightning on camera there was a ball of lightning that zoomed across the black sky like a shooting star. This was something neither of us knew existed.
Later in the night, after I fell back to sleep, I awoke to a pack of coyotes singing. Then one lone coyote just out in the field where the lightning had been just a couple of hours before. He would wake me another couple of hours later, but he was now just at the edge of the field by the road the cut between the farm house and where he was. I heard the Red Beast come out from the back of the house to sit just under the window of the room I laid in; Red Beast being my grandparents dog. The coyote went silent after that. I wonder how long before he wised-up and left.
For how temperamental the Red Beast gets just over one of my Aunt's dogs who is a Husky when he tries to bond with me, I can't imagine what a coyote would face with it being a total stranger.
If Husky tries to come and say HI, particularly when Red Beast hugs me (as I am one of the few family members who allows him to stand up and give me a giant embrace) Red Beast is quite annoyed and snarls at poor Husky. Therefore, coyote may face more than just a snarl.
In the light of day my favourite meal at Granny and Papa's (breakfast) I find out about heat-lightning, balls of lightning. While everyone eats eggs, bacon and toast with butter, I have Granny's marvelous home-made bread (vegan friendly for me) with her homemade berry sauces.
I survey their house and many memories flood to me as I do.
The home Granny and Papa live in was built shortly after they were married. Next year is their thirtieth anniversary and therefore it will be the house's thirtieth birthday. Their home has not changed since it was built. It has given me comfort over the years that their home has remained constant, the same.
The way my grandparents stare and flirt with one another has also, like the house, remained the same. Their love is one of the few I have seen in my lifetime to stay strong, steady, and true. It makes me so happy to see and even feel by just watching them together that I could cry, for joy of course. Perhaps it is because I hope and pray that all of us are that lucky.
Just before I left the Farm, Granny and Papa expressed their happiness that I would be around to work up north for awhile until I got new employment in the city, because it means we have more opportunities like this past weekend to spend time together. I promised that I would make sure I did while I was close by for the time being. It filled my heart with joy with the thought of it.
I grew up on this Farm, and, the farm down the road before my parents divorced and sold the house and land when I had just turned sixteen, which is already half my lifetime ago.
The house we had built there still stands. I was just about to turn fourteen when it was completed. We had built a couple of others on the property and then sold them and had them removed, but this one was the last one my parents built and it I always see it coming and going from my grandparents; it's not hard to spot it because it sits on a hill, you can't miss it.
The homestead my great-grandparents built and resided in for fifty years of their lives is still there, well, a chunk of it anyway. That piece that is left is where the old living room and two main bedrooms were, the rest of it was destroyed by all of us through demolition with the old yellow caterpillar and a giant fire. We still have photos of that night. But the chunk that reamins to this day got cleaned out of all the decay, animal feces and debris and was turned into a storage shed... kudos to the brave souls who took on that endeavour! The rest is all original and has just been painted over with white paint and green on the trimming.
I stared at it from the car both to my grandparents' home thinking of how the trees and shrubs that was once so small when I was very little are now towering over the car and are full, lush, green.
The small lake the house lives above on the hill is now being overrun with algae is covering the land where all the old barns, corrals, pump houses, chicken coops and fences are still managing to stand. Despite the algae the water has made the areas it has spread to dark green, and very lush.
However, it also could be deceptive to the eyes of those who don't know the area and make the mistake of stepping out there. If people ventured out in the bog and didn't know what was there beneath the green surface they might get sucked in, and have a heck of a time getting out; even more worrisome, not make it out!
These thoughts that rushed through me saddened me in a way and yet I am happy and grateful that I have a good memory, and that the details of my childhood living on this land and constantly exploring this land before it became a swamp are still very strong in my head...
The lake was once clear, blue and sparkled like diamonds on sunny days. And on windy days it actually made wavess, sometimes waves with enough strength to splash hard against the shore. Families of ducks and geese that we befriended over the years would return to have kids, and then their kids returned each year to have children of their own. Then at night I could hear the water lapping, with the frogs and crickets singing, and sometimes a swan or two quietly honking as coyotes howled in the fields that surrounded our house.
On nights when the coyotes sang for longer periods of time sometimes someone else would then howl with a deeper, more haunting call who have only wandered down from the forests that are twenty miles down the road from where we lvied; a stranger who would come to visit, sending chills and a thrill of excitement through my body at the sound. That howl was definitely NOT a coyote. They usually rendered the coyote families silent with their bellow.
The creeks and small ponds that connected to our lake all cut paths through the other farms, forests, fields and hills nearby; connecting us all. I wondered thorugh all these places for half my life, whether it was sunny, rainy, snowy or during autumn weather.
In spring and summer I found the most amazing bugs to watch, flowers to smell and pick, and small animals to observe. During a rainfall I watched how the droplets splashed and shined on the giant plants out in the forests; and the deeper I went the bigger they were, like something you'd see in a rainforest on TV. As I adventured in the rain or when we had some flooding I wore my large rubber boots, and would sometimes brush against beavers swimming by me; they never paid much attention to me, even if they were rubbing right against my boots as they swam by. Not one of those critters ever got upset with me or hurt me, and it was only when I was older and family members started sharing stories of their own encounters with the beavers on the Farm that I found out how beavers could attack you and could do some serious damage, and that they were in fact quite temperamental. I think it was because the beavers and I both knew we were of no danger to one another.
In fall the leaves were a kaleidoscope of red, orange, yellow, light green and even gold and bronze. In October when all those leaves fell the branches had very spooky Halloween-like feel to them; whether their twisted and entwined with one another, or were each individually, creepily sticking out toward me like the long arms of a skeleton. And! Out in the fields during this season I would lay on my back, preferably by the one creek that cut through the land to watch the bald eagles flying overhead. They were always hunting during this time because usually their little one were born and were hungry, so their homes were nearby, but I never found a nest... not sure I would be brave enough to approach one anyway, and just out of respect.
In winter I needed full winter gear with the big old boots and lots of layers and everything to keep warm. It could get so cold out the Farm that the spruce trees wouldbe covered in a very thick frost that ppeared like white flowers blossoming on their brances. And when the snow fell from them it was in my best interest to run because it was liek God dropped large snowballs on me. As soon as I heard tinkling and jingling of the snow and ice like the sound of sleigh bells I knew I was going to get hit with snow. The sparkle of the snow was just like glitter on Christmas decorations. Wisps of snow that danced and swirled in the air over snow drifts on very cold windy days seemed magical, and it still does to me. I loved it all.. even when it was seeping into my ankles, numbing and reddening my skin there.
When my great-grandparents chose this land for their children to grow up on they chose well. They knew what they were doing I think, they chose it for the view; the beauty and mystery it has always seemed to hold.
The last time my great-grandmother saw it was almost a year before she died. My Dad's cousin brought her from the seniors home where he told the nurses that cared for grandmother that they were just going shopping around town for a little while and would be back in a couple of hours. He lied. She had made the request to come out to the Farm one last time, and, it wouldn't surprise me if she told the truth when she arrived back; honestly, she was so loved by the nurses and so respected I don't think they would have argued with her.
They arrived around lunch time that day, just as the sun's rays danced across the rippling waves on the lake. And as we all stared out at it she took my hand and squeezed it hard, making it feel like her strength and determination from her four foot eleven petite frame flowed through me. She was ninety-eight at the time and I was fifteen.
A wind came through during this moment and she closed her eyes and turned her face to it, the breeze rustling her silvery-white tendrils. She smiled. She stayed like that for awhile.
When she opened her eyes the tears spilled down her cheeks; tears of both sadness and joy, we all knew this was going to be her last time she ever saw the Farm. But little did I know it would be my last spring there, soon my last summer, and that the fall and winter before this had been my last as well... From then on just carrying the memories and spirit of the land wherever I went, to this very day.
I had a dream a few years ago that I had built a house on our old land in the image of the old homestead. I made it self-sustaining and environmentally friendly... I even had the old water pumps re-installed.
As I stood on the porch and looked at the land it was exactly as it was when I was a child.
But as for myself I had stopped aging somewhere in my forties and lived a life of hiding from the world except for family and those nearest and dearest to me who were all still growing old, some even had died by that point in my dream. It was as if the land and I were now rejuvenated and immortal.
Every now and then I think on that dream. It makes me smile.
~Ange.
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