family history – As Far As The Eye Can See

When I was 6 my family loaded up our tent trailer, station wagon, our stuff and my beloved Nanny and we hit the trail. Taking advantage of my Dad’s holiday from being a school principal we headed east. That meant time with family in Montreal enroute to the Maritimes. Our destination was Springhill where my Nanny had her childhood, our accommodation was 11 km away where we parked our trailer beside a small white house with a big yard at Mapleton, Nova Scotia. I remember very little about that holiday, but I remember meeting Logan. He was my Nanny’s cousin, he was 73, and he taught me how to pick beans. I really liked him.

9 years later I would take my first plane ride. Part of our family flew to Halifax where my Dad had a conference. Nanny came with us again. After Dad’s conference we headed to Mapleton where we visited Logan and his family once more.

My Nanny and I in front, my sister Jan beside me, visiting with the Nova Scotia family. My mouth was still swollen from jaw re-alignment surgery I had a couple months before.

The visit included lots of music. Logan was very talented as you can see here.

Bertha serves a family favorite, Maple Cream, made from sap harvested in the family sugar woods.

Logan’s wife Bertha was so kind to us. I loved how I felt while there. They entertained the family from around the district and some connections were forged.

Seven years later I took French immersion on the south shore of Nova Scotia. I lived in a dorm there for five weeks. I tried poutine for the first time, it was presented as a must try Acadian dish. I was hooked ….but back to the story.

I could not leave Nova Scotia without visiting Logan and Bertha. I don’t remember how I got from Point de l’Eglise on the south shore to Mapleton but I do remember how sad I was when it was time to leave. There was no Disney level excitement happening, it was better than that. I felt so safe, so cherished, so relaxed, so cared for, so…..at home. The difference was that at this home I had a Grandpa type guy in my life, that was a novelty for me. I loved that. I loved Logan and I loved Bertha for who she was and how she welcomed me in their world. During this visit I would make a memorable connection with Norene, their daughter, 8 years older than me.

The next summer I was back. I was on tour with Up With People and our cast was in Maine. I couldn’t bear that I was so close to Bertha and Logan but couldn’t see them. I asked for special permission to leave the cast for a few days, I rented a car and headed to Mapleton. It was another special time. I needed it. My brother had been given a brain cancer diagnosis and died in the year since I had last visited. Up With People was amazing but hard hard work. Logan and Bertha were sanctuary.

My 1991 visit, standing with Logan and his sister Beulah.

It would be seven years before I saw them again. An airline strike in ’98 had the airlines scrambling to redeem their reputation and offering great deals on flights. My Mom and I were caring for my Dad at home, his dementia was advancing. We got a respite bed in a nursing home for him, I took a week off of my final year of seminary, we recruited my Mom’s sister and the three of us headed back to Mapleton. Logan was 97 by then, starting to falter, but we sat together in his pipe smoking porch and talked. Bertha wove her magic and we had another great visit, more time seeing the sights and visiting with the extended family.

in 1998 – my Mom at the piano, Logan beside her, Cecil in the front. We loved being able to join in the music.

Then I graduated, got ordained, moved to Gainsborough, met Russell, got married, had three kids, and started to become a rancher. There was no time or money for airplane trips. That was okay. The kids were fun and we made lots of trips back to Saskatoon. It was how it needed to be.

Last Wednesday Russ and I boarded a 5am flight in Winnipeg after a brief sleep in the airport parking lot and a 3am check-in. At 1:15pm we landed in Halifax. I am embarrassed when I think about the words that flew through my head as the wheels touched down. I said to myself, “I’m home.” It’s embarrassing because it makes no sense really, but for what it’s worth those were the spontaneous words that touchdown brought out of me.

We are on the plane home now, suspended somewhere between Toronto and Winnipeg. We had a wonderful but busy week.

Sadly, Logan and Bertha are both gone now. We got to visit their grave and drove by their beautiful home where their grandson now lives.

We drove to the Northumberland shore where Russ met cousin Norene (Logan and Bertha’s daughter) for the first time and we both met her husband Brian at their cottage. We walked the beach, talked, picked sea glass and savored the ocean.

Thru the day Norene and I got to talk about many things, including Bertha’s time of dying, it was good for me.

Time together in their gorgeous cottage.

We drove to Parrsboro where we met my Nanny’s cousin’s daughter in law Carol for lunch. Russ and I had spent time with her and her husband Cecil in Saskatoon 21 years ago.

2001 – My sister Jan and I beside Cecil, Russ and my Mom beside Carol.

21 years later, Carol explaining a little bit about the tides at Parrsboro

I think Russ felt very cherished by Carol.

Thanks to Facebook Carol and I have been in close touch for years, she calls me dearie in her comments and I savor that. Carol organized extra visits for us so we met family we had never met before and got tours of the most amazing farm and the sugar woods. It wasn’t Logan and Bertha’s old sugar woods but it was close by.

Gary, one of our extended family (Nanny’s cousins boy), is an expert in berry farming and consults closely with Millen Farms, his niece’s family business. He toured us around their amazing operation which includes pork, chicken, beef, strawberries, blueberries, rhubarb, turnips, corn. They supply much of the berries found in the east coast Costco stores. We had such an interesting morning.

A field full of strawberry plants, one of many.

Russ got to work for a minute in the sugar woods, taking the tap out of this tree and binding it up.

Harold teaching us about tapping locations.

The sugar woods were stunningly beautiful.

I took this selfie in the sugar woods. When I looked at it, I felt like I looked at peace. I felt that way.

A very wow moment was when I sat down directly across from Gloria, meeting her for the first time I saw a clear and striking resemblance to my Nanny. Gloria is my Nanny’s cousin’s daughter, genetics are really something.

We had four days in Nova Scotia that didn’t arise from my family connections. They hold other stories that will wait to be told.

I titled this blog “A Love Story” because I feel like somehow it captures the powerful reality of attachment to a place, the reality of family ties and shared family stories and the mysterious way that some people just put down roots in your heart and they can’t be removed, not that you would want them to be.

In a way page 1 of this particular love story happened in 1913, when Nanny first breathed the Springhill air. It got more interesting for me in 1974 when my feet first settled on Nova Scotia soil and I started to forge my own plot line. What a treat to review it all today, 35,000 feet in the air, and realize anew how blessed I am. Paul writes in the Christian Scriptures that love never ends. I believe him.

Addendum: As I polish this up and add pictures, five days after writing it, I am very aware of the turmoil in Nova Scotia right now. Hurricane Fiona has wreaked havoc, especially around the area where we visited the big farm. Over the last few days our hearts have been so tenderized by the concern we feel for our people there and what they are going through. Love never ends and it keeps our hearts on edge and maybe thats the way its supposed to be.

I wrote this first part of this blog almost six days ago, on Tuesday morning.

I am wading through my first morning home after many days away, reckoning with how weird I feel, both physically and emotionally. Last Wednesday I drove the 550km that took me to Saskatoon where I got welcomed by my sister Linda and her husband Stu and we hunkered in for some days. Linda has a gift for hospitality and I was treated like a queen. My sister Jan flew in from Vancouver and stayed with my sister Margie and her family. Together the four of us, with help from my cousin Jodi tackled boxes and boxes of my Mom’s photo albums and some boxes of miscellaneous photos. I feel like what we did in wading through a lifetime of memories in their fullness is pretty rare, not something people get to do more than once in their lifetime if at all. From this rare point of view I want to report back on some of it.

The two things that I can’t stop thinking about are humor and love. Humor because it bubbled up often and allowed us to be real about what we were dealing with and yet not wallow in self pity or sadness. That meant for example that when Ella Fitzgerald came up on the playlist crooning about heaven, Janet, in split second creative humor, neatly revised the lyrics to address our situation. It meant my tears about reviewing pictures of our last happy party when my Dad was still a little bit well turned to laughter, as Linda looked over my shoulder and said, “and we weren’t even that happy.” It was true, dementia was taking its toll on all of us. There was something about the vantage point we had, more than 20 years later, that had us all laughing at her comment and pretty hard. We reviewed albums and albums from the 1980s which made it so inevitable that one of us would say something about hair, it was Margie, who with her very deep and sincere faith intact said “Why did no-one tell me that my hair was so god-awful?” It all just struck us so funny. Most of the things we laughed at are not typical knee-slappers, they might not strike you as funny, but it’s the mystery of humor, how it illumines our lives and helps us cope.

I got that far with writing then stopped. Now I am back at it, Sunday night. I have just spent much of the last hour looking at some of the pictures gleaned from our work bee. A word about process seems appropriate here. We set up in Linda’s living room, it was an invasion of sorts. Four big tables set up, the dining room table turned into a laptop and scanner station, for four days Linda’s space was pretty much turned upside down. Margie, Linda and I peeled pictures out of albums and sorted the content of the boxes, Janet received our sorted piles and using a high speed scanner we had purchased she did the painstaking work of scanning and catalogueing these pictures. Thru the wonders of modern tech we now all have access to all the pictures we handled. Can you even guess the number that Jan scanned? It was 6,700 on the nose (thats a prairie expression which means “exactly.”) Our discard pile was almost as big as our keep pile, so we looked at alot of pictures over the days.

Sitting here tonight I wonder about what makes humor possible. Definitely our stage in our healing work was part of what made us light hearted enough to laugh more than we cried. Perhaps it was the way that we had to keep a loose grip on reality because it was always changing. One minute being drawn back to 1981 and then 1939 and then 2002, all found in a combined box of pictures. Do you have one or some of these? I didn’t know my Mom had so many. I saw pictures I never saw before. Reality is a little more loose under those conditions and that loose-ness maybe encouraged humor. Maybe too it was about something kind’ve major. A kind’ve major truth, a truth that bubbled to the surface for me as we were preparing to start and discussing process. There was some anxiety rising to the surface…..what if we mishandle this and lose out on something special? We agreed we would look through the discard piles before they were garbaged in order to assure each other that we had all we wanted. It hit me then, this kind’ve major truth, I said, “girls, we have survived being orphans for a whole year now, we have lived without these photos and without our Mom and Dad for a whole year and we made it. What this represents now is the icing on the cake. We know we can make it, so everything here is bonus.” Its true. With that as our underlying truth it seemed like it was easy to live with a sense of gratitude for every one of the thousand moments our hearts smiled to see a familiar face, place, and item. With those smiles on our hearts the humor was more able to flow. In the end we never reassessed our throw aways we just let them all go.

I mentioned at the start that love and humor were on my mind. Perhaps the biggest reason that humor could flow is that each of us came to our time knowing we were loved and we are loved. Our parents loved us well, that is our most profound blessing in life. We all have taken into our hearts the faith our parents started in us, that tells us that we are beloved children of God. We all have established our own families, we have spouses, children and pets that welcome us home. That is major.

I have a few pictures to share with you. I am not going to make them orderly or chronological. It will give you a glimpse of how our minds were spinning thru these days together.