by the way

I'm working on shaking a few things up. Change is a-comin' and it will be ... deliberate.

Viola Sylvesta

I shared this post last year on Angela Kelsey's women-honouring blog in celebration of my grandma's 100th birthday. I re-share it here today as we both mourn and celebrate her passing last night. I say mourn, because for all of my life my grandma was someone who believed in me 100% and always always had my back with love and prayer. And, I say celebrate, because at 101, it had been some time since grandma had had the quality of life that she valued and deserved, and we know she is in heaven with grandpa, her youngest daughter, so many of her friends and siblings, one grandson, and her heavenly Father. 

I am so grateful that my sons got to grow up with a great-grandma, and that Rivers got to meet her last year. And I miss her fiercely. 

So much love, and goofiness

---

She was born in the Spring of 1912. To a family with brothers and sisters and a father whose dreams kept them destitute in a way that we, two and three generations on, only read about in Steinbeck novels. She grew up with dill pickle barrels on general store porches. With horses that were tools first. With gold mines gotten to too late and dust storms that blew away suppers. She grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and in places north, east and west of them. Somehow she got herself educated. She went to university in San Francisco, a city even then to a family-loving farm girl. Somehow, in 1920’s America she became an ordained Pentecostal minister. An ordained woman minister. It boggles my mind even though it’s a fact I’ve known all my life.

She married late, for her generation, finding her life mate in another devoted minister at summer revival tent meetings. Their courtship was conducted mostly in letters - hers questioning; his cryptic. The next summer, at those same tent meetings, they eloped. And suddenly, she had a new family to consider.

My dad was her firstborn - joining the family at his grandmother’s house in Idaho. Grandpa worked in the mountains then – preaching being a side calling for a man who worked magic in wood and had a family to feed. My everlasting memory of my grandfather is the faint smell of fresh sawdust. A second son followed, and then four girls, in that little town in those cold Idaho mountains.

And then came a call from God – move the family to Canada. Six kids from six months to nine years loaded into a camperized school bus and transported from Idaho’s coal country to Canada’s Cariboo country. They lived in that bus for a winter. And she cooked on a fire in the snow, and over a woodstove in the bus when possible. But they were there at God’s calling, in the place where they knew they needed to be. And it is where she lives to this day.

I don’t know a lot about the in between – between 1950 when they arrived in Quesnel, and 1968 when I was born there. My first clear memories are of Grandpa building the lake house when I was four – their retirement house that was bigger than anything they’d owned while their six children were at home. Big enough that my aunts and uncles and cousins returning from the mission fields of Africa would always have a place they could land. Big enough that we could have Christmas dinner for 20 plus and all be at one long crooked table. Big enough that it was the only house I knew that had a library room built in under the stairs. 

Oh how I loved the smell and quiet of that closet of books.

It’s a cliché to name your Grandmother as the woman who inspires you, but my Grandma was and is so many things, that I couldn’t think of anyone else. My Grandmother taught me to relish words – consuming and using them. She is a woman of words - like me, sometimes too many words. Hers come out straighter than mine, sometimes with unintended reverberations. I think of her well-meaning ‘I could help you with those eyebrows’ every morning when I tidy those hairy caterpillars, though at 13 I was startled by the thought. I will admit that I took it personally when she pointed out to me that I might be ‘book smart, but other people have other kinds of intelligence that are more useful.’ But it was the perfect lesson for a cocky teenager who had a very limited ability to see the struggles of people around her, even in her own family.

Grandma put her constantly growing family second only to her faith – she happily put aside her education and career to be a wife and mother. She never learned to drive a car; never had her name on the bank account until Grandpa died. They had the kind of traditional marriage that makes us squirm as women today, and when he died some part of her never really lit up again. She’s been a widow for 24 years and she still misses him.

And yet, she is the woman who taught me to stand strong, to create, to be myself, and to never let my strengths be more important than someone else’s weakness. A month after I left my husband, while my sons played in the sunshine in the park, she said “You’ve picked a hard row to hoe, my girl. But I know you can do it.” Then she patted my arm and we went to find ice cream. There were days, that year, when I thought she was the only person who still loved me.

I remember it often. I started graduate school a month later, and her words became my mantra. I moved cities three years later, and they echoed off the streets of this unknown town. I entered and exited relationships - some person-building, some shockingly devastating – and always those words reverberated her faith in me. My sons have stumbled and struggled and she’s always been there, with her love and faith in me and in them.

We celebrate her centennial birthday next week. The entire family - or at least an amazing percentage of it – making the pilgrimage to Quesnel to honour our matriarch: her surviving five children and six children-in-law; seventeen grandchildren and their partners; twenty-one great-grandchildren, and a sweet weeks old great-great grandson that so many of us have yet to meet.

We are only a smidgen of her legacy of faith and love.

The last seven years have been hard on her health: a stroke at 93, breast cancer at 97, burying her golden haired youngest daughter, and the unrelenting march of time have all left her memory wobbly. With all those people and the hullabaloo of a party, she’s unlikely to remember me clearly. She certainly won’t understand who my partner is, and why it’s such a miracle for me to be there with him, happy, and safe, and loved at last. But I go not for recognition, but to recognize.

My grandmother is my inspiration. She is my living, learning, growing model of what a powerful woman is and does. She did not conform; she choose. From the dust bowl of Oklahoma to a senior’s residence in Canada, she has lived her life full of colour and love, with an unprecedented integrity. And I am reminded, once again, of the great gift of my Grandma’s faith in me. And her faith in her God.

a fragment

She was all sharp angles & hard edges. Staccoto. Treble. Dancing like she was marching to war. The kind of woman who turns a life to dry crumbs. She was a desert wind robbing all around of their damp pleasing joy.

Her hair poked out dangerously - metal shavings stuck to the side of her head. She offered neither cooling dew nor passionate steaming humidity, just the arid sucking

When she broke, all that was left were shards and dust. A shattering so complete, nothing could be salvaged.

yours are the sweetest eyes, i've ever seen

When the BB's were little, I'd tuck them in bed with a story and a song. BB1 preferred the stories - the more books I'd read the better, though I rarely got suckered in to more than two. BB2 liked the songs, over and over again. When he was three we went almost the whole year singing "Away in a Manger" at bedtime. 

After a while, we expanded our repertoire. Beyond "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," beyond lullabies and nursery rhymes. I made a booklet of the songs we loved, some from their favourite movies - "Baby Mine" from Dumbo and "You'll Be In My Heart" from Tarzan - and, somehow, some of my favourite love songs ended up in there as well. Of course, baby boys don't stay baby boys for long. They start reading for themselves. And then they say, as nicely as they can, you don't have to sing to me anymore, and you try not to take it personally. They do have to grow up. 

But this song, "Your Song," has remained my song for BB2. When he was in the hospital, I couldn't listen to it. I couldn't hear 'how wonderful life is while you're in the world' when he didn't want to be here. Eventually he got out of the hospital, and promised me he'd never go back. It was his birthday. Or perhaps the day before. 

And today is his birthday, two years later. It hasn't been any easy two years for any of us, but most of all for him. He has had some substantial growing pains, some set-backs, and some amazing successes. He's stronger, a little leaner, sometimes guarded, but moving forward. We're all a little more honest than we used to be. It's become essential. And also, I think a little more compassionate, if sometimes a little exhausted. 

I can't give BB2 a big house. But I can remind him, over and over, that sometimes I forget, and I get frustrated, and what I really mean is I'm so very glad he's in the world. 

PS - his eyes are blue. The most incredible blue.

dear shirley

Dear Shirley,

I wish I'd known in October that I'd never see you again. We did know you were in pain, but we didn't know why, and honestly - in the hustle and bustle of a big busy party - it was enough that you and Gerald were there. Smiling, hugging, quietly there. There were a lot of people we love in the room, but even that night I wished we could have found a quiet corner to sit in and catch up. I knew I could tell you anything, and I needed someone to be honest with - it was a hard weekend to keep secrets. I know you would have made it okay. I thought I had a picture of you that weekend with your big smile, and Gerald right behind you. I did have a picture, but it was fuzzy so I deleted it. I wish I hadn't. 

You know how some people are always in your life and you think they always will be, even when you don't see them for years? You were one of those people. I don't remember life before the Bennetts, I suppose because you were already in my family's life before I was. My parents have such amazing friends, and even with our sizable families, we grew up loving those friends like our own aunties, uncles and cousins. My heart breaks for Karen, Carla, Pam and Chris - and for Gerald, yes, though I can't even really fathom his loss. 

My favourite memories of you are from your house in Vernon - the best of places to vacation. I remember feeling so out of place - being the youngest in that sprawling brood of teens that our families created. I was the tween tag-along, tolerated, but mostly just. And you'd always be right there, keeping me busy, herding me through my years-long unrequited crush on your darling golden boy. I wished to be as beautiful as Karen, as big-hearted as Carla, as fun as Pam. My sisters had dibs on those friendships - those five older girls sure didn't need me butting in, but you made it okay to just be me - to sit with a book in the crook of a giant cherry tree and read and eat sun-warmed cherries until my stomach ached. 

I remember things that probably weren't at all the way I remember, but that's okay. What's left are not snapshots so much as puzzle pieces - a fold down divan, your work worn hands, your warm broad smile. All that's left now for any of us are the memories, and so we cling to them, frayed and fuzzy and partial as they may be. Mostly your smile and your laugh - I have no illusions that yours was an easy life, yet when I think of you I think of you smiling and laughing. 

We have no claim on missing you now - you have a partner of more than five decades who will have to learn how to go on without you. Your children, your grandchildren, your siblings - they will all need so much love to fill the void you're leaving in their lives. And still, we will miss you. I'll miss hearing about your adventures with mom and dad. I'll miss those increasingly rare occasions - the birthdays and anniversaries - when we get to see you, however hurried. 

Thank you. Thank you for letting a gawky book lover sit in your cherry tree. Thank you for your wise words, your big smile, your strong laugh, and your model of faithful love. 

You are missed. 

Shanny.