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Cascade

noun

a waterfall descending over a steep, rocky surface.

anything that resembles a waterfall, especially in seeming to flow or fall in abundance.

Maybe it’s the sound of moving water, whether lapping over sand on a calm bay, or thundering over a cliff top, or moving slowly and languidly across a shallow bed of chattering pebbles. Maybe it’s the way it changes with circumstances, transparent and glassy one moment, and churning opaque white the next.  Whatever it is about water, its wisdom finally found me. The last three days, beginning with a beach in Victoria, then moving through a series of lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, brought me to a moment in my life I had assumed I would never reach.

Wherever I go, the memory of the two people who have most deeply betrayed me has come with me.  They have intruded on my happiness for years, and I haven’t been able to address it in a way that allows me to put it in the past and move on.  I am better than I used to be about actively banishing trains of thought that get clogged up with my resentment and rage, but never have moved to the point where these two people don’t matter anymore. The cascading thoughts of the last few days make think that moment has finally come

It all began with the High Holy Days ritual of Taschlich, the symbolic casting away of shortcomings and failures of the past year by throwing bread onto water, in this case at a beach in Victoria, delayed until now because of the smoke of last month. I came up with quite a list of ways I could do better in the future, but I balked at even the thought that this year could lead to relief from the burdens I place on myself by my inability to forgive.

I drove off from there for a three-day adventure on Vancouver Island, centered on the area around Strathcona Park and the Campbell River.  My plan was to choose short, easy hikes to waterfalls, and I picked out four. Over the next two days I saw them all, and the rivers that produced them and the lakes from which they came, or to which they flowed. One, Lupin Falls, is shown here

I went through old growth forests, through golden pathways of falling leaves, through phalanxes of towering cedars, hemlocks, and firs, across massive fans of roots and rocky rubble.  With each experience I felt a lifting of burdens of all sorts, to the point of true joy at being where I was—and only there, nowhere else in my head or otherwise.

I am not sure when it first hit me, or even if it hit me at all or just evolved, but my thoughts were eventually able, for the first time, to drift to these two people without judgment. They are who they are. They have terrible, deep psychic wounds that cannot be healed and these played out in hurtful behavior toward me. One of them, Michael Bart, my partner in Until Our Last Breath, has defamed and belittled me for years as having made inconsequential, secondary  contributions to a book I wrote in its entirety. Anyone who has poured his or her soul into a creative work will understand the pain of having such a huge accomplishment appropriated so callously, as if his ideas and editing  gave him greater standing than the person who actually crafted all the words.  

Perhaps there is some debt or shortcoming he feels as the son of Holocaust survivors ( the subject of our book), that made him need to create the lasting legacy of a book. I can step outside my anger now and say that I am glad he has that legacy. I am glad he has a book that gives him standing to go out to speak to audiences because it is important both to him and to me that his voice be heard, and that voices now long silenced be remembered. I wouldn’t have taken on the project if I didn’t think this.  As to his need to shove me aside? Apparently, authoring a book is what he needs be true, even if it isn’t.  Say whatever he will,  the truth is I wrote the book. Every word.  Period. I have finally put to rest the harm he did to me.  It is now entirely his burden and not mine to carry.

I still don’t know what psychic wounds sent my first husband into the tailspin that destroyed our marriage and his career, and I’ve already alluded to him enough in previous posts that there is no need to say anything more here. I am sorry for whatever it was—some lack in his experiences as a child or some awful tweak in brain chemistry, or something else entirely— that made him unable to hang on to the success he had made of his life in the early years of our relationship. I loved and admired him for so long. I don’t know why that was never enough to pierce the self loathing, and I understand now that nothing and no one ever could have.  I am sorry he flew too close to the sun with waxen wings. I am sorry that his fall made him unable for decades now to receive the admiration and accolades a successful career and a long and happy marriage might have brought him.  Still, it is clear to me there is nothing that could ever fill that sad and yawning hole at the center of him.

Today I sat at Nymph Falls, more rapids than falls,  at the edge of Strathcona Park, pictured here.

I watched  water slide effortlessly across smooth rocks and pool in shallows, only to be pulled out again and sent hurtling down to slam against boulders, and roil and bubble in an opaque battle against itself until it is released into the calm again. Life is kind of like that, I thought. And then, suddenly, a salmon leapt out of the water, making its way upstream.  Yeah, I thought, life is kind of like that too.

But maybe that’s what this turning point will mean for me. Maybe I can finally  stop swimming upstream about this part of my life, stop letting all this negativity pound down on me.  I don’t need to forgive or not forgive them. That’s what I didn’t understand until now. It’s more just an acknowledgment that they behaved consistently with who they are..   Let them be caught in whatever cascades their behavior unleashes.  It has nothing to do with me.  I have a beautiful life to nurture.  I think I can do a better job of that now.

A male friend of mine recently posted a challenge to describe oneself without words, using pictures of three fictional characters. One of his choices was Santa Claus, and it made me laugh because it did fit his generosity and cheerful nature.  I struggled to find a way to share my three fictional characters  in return.  Mrs. Claus?  Get real!  Who would leap to identify with her?

In the end, I gave up. I couldn’t do it.

Well, I came up with two, actually, but they were both from children’s media. I will get to who they were  in a minute, but I want to dwell on that for a while. What does it say that, with a Ph.D. in English, I can’t find three females in literature who could together, even in jest, create an image of who I am?

Why is it that to come up with anyone, I have to go back to stories of fictional little girls, written for real little girls who are still at an age where being spontaneous, daring, quirky, and individualist are still prized? What adult female literary characters would represent my love of self-reinvention, newness, adventure, and commitment to principles?  I could point to Amelia Earhart, Annie Oakley, pirate Grace O’Mally,  and RBG, but they are real people. and there are precious few of those.

How incredibly has literature failed us when women have to identify with male characters in order to identify with anyone at all.  How much easier it is to find fictional women who imploded under their circumstances, prostituted themselves in one or another of a thousand ways to men, became horrible people in the process of defying stereotypes, or paid for the crime of self-assertion with social ruin, or death at their own hand (or the second, following on the heels of the first).

Hopefully, things have changed. I love seeing girls in t-shirts saying “Forget Princess! I want to be X” with X being rocket scientist, president, or something equally ambitious.  Cheers to whoever bought them the shirts! I assume there are books and television characters whose behavior sends the message of female agency and efficacy, the ability to shape our world, and shape and reshape ourselves in that world because we choose to, not because we are forced by more powerful others into it. I am just blank about who they are.  Write to help me out, if you can!

I challenge anyone reading this, particularly women, to decide who their three images would be.  I’d love to hear if you did better than I did.  And now for my two. I have never watched Dora

the Explorer, but I have to figure I would like her and identify with her spirit of adventure.  In first place is one of my childhood heroines, Pippi Longstocking. She was the picture of boundless energy and cheer, making up a fun life as she went along, heedless of what other people thought she should do. She did no harm to anyone, and did so much to enhance the lives of her little friends who before she came along were already dutifully falling into line to become boring, unimaginative adults.  I’m not sure I ever wanted to be her, but I certainly did want to know her, to be her friend, to let a little of her rub off on me.

No, my triad will not have Madames Butterfly or Bovary on it,  nor Scarlett O’Hara, nor Jane Eyre.  It won’t have any men on it either, despite having found some Don Quixotes, Garps, Pooh Bears, and others I could feel some identification with.  I guess I will just have to stick with being my own unique self, and create a collage of countless pictures of me just bring me.

My life was nearly upended twice by fire.

Many years ago I lived with my family on the edge of a canyon full of the low, dry brush we in the West call chaparral.  One day, when my two sons were still pre-schoolers in day care, a fire came up our canyon. That afternoon, as I was driving home from teaching at San Diego State, I saw a plume of dark smoke rising in the distance in the direction of my home. As I made the twists and turns in the road as I got closer, it became clear the fire was very, very close to our canyon. “Oh shit! Oh shit!” I kept repeating aloud as I drove.  I knew my boys were not home and were not in danger, but it seemed harder and harder to believe I would not arrive to see everything in ruins.

The smoke had already begun to dissipate as I turned up our little road but the smell told me what to fear.   I came over the rise and saw a blackened canyon, but my house intact.  The fire had burned partially beyond it, and neighbors were still standing in my yard, holding garden hoses they had used to spray our roof.  The fire department had been there briefly, sprayed a little and left when the last encroaching flames were doused.

While the ground still smoldered, I invited our neighbors to come in for a beer to thank them, and they told me I had missed the news reporter who arrived on our street and gushed at the miracle that a house nearly surrounded by blackened vegetation had been saved.

“Miracle?” They said. “We hosed down your roof! It was no miracle.” And they were right to be angry that their courage and effort was so blithely dismissed.  Lesson one in “miracles.”

My next near brush with fire happened when I was nine time zones away, teaching in Florence. I had recently moved from San Diego  to Lake Arrowhead, about two hours away, in the San Bernardino Mountains. That house, shown in photo, was not only my emotional refuge at the lowest point in my life, but the place where every last thing I owned, from papers, to furniture, to photos, to memorabilia, to clothing, was waiting in my little nest for my return.

This was back in the time when if you wanted to check your email you had to go to an Internet cafe.  In Florence one afternoon I had a message from my sister in Northern California, telling me she was tracking a fire that was heading in the direction of Lake Arrowhead.  I went onto the website that reports on California fires and my heart sank at how close it looked and how quickly it was spreading.

For two days, I lived in a nightmare duality of idyllic Florence and the image on that fire map, showing the fire less than twenty miles away, then ten, then five.  My mental anguish was exacerbated by the nine-hour time difference and the fact that the Internet cafe was not open very late or very early, meaning that I could not get updates in anywhere near real time.

And still I had to teach. I showed the fire map to the program supervisor, who shut her eyes and directed a few pleas to the powers above and then asked, “Are you going to go home?”  It was just October, two months to go before the semester ended, and since I was one of only two professors in our program, that would have been disastrous.  I pictured my collapsed and blackened house and burnt-out car, and said I would stay, regardless. What was there to go home to that couldn’t wait?

And so I waited. What would turn out to be the final day of this anguish began after a sleepless night and an interminable wait for the Internet cafe to open.  There was no hope, based on the last fire map, and I just expected confirmation that everything was gone.  Instead I saw an email from my sister, subject in all caps: IT’S SNOWING!!!”  In October. In the Southern California mountains, where it rarely snows before December.

The fire was out. It had not reached my house. Months later, when I finally returned, I drove to a neighborhood just two miles away, where houses lay in ruins.  One flying ember could have lit a treetop in my yard, but it didn’t. Everything was just as I left it.

So yes, it’s okay to pray for unexpectedly positive outcomes when fires are raging, but better to pray for those brave enough not to count on miracles, those who do what they can.  The snow felt more out of the blue than water from garden hoses, but what really saved my house both times was people who fought the fire long enough for something beyond their power to defeat it. People beat fires down as best they can for as long as they can,  and that is enough sometimes but not always. The snow fell on smoking ruins in Lake Arrowhead as well. A most unfair miracle, if that’s what you want to call it. I squirm at the word, and am grateful for all the lessons, like these, that I have not had to learn the hard way.

As my little boys stood in their Underoos looking at a canyon that was nothing but ashes, I examined the underside  of our deck, so blackened and crumbled it seems clear the house was actually briefly on fire. I was flooded by the kinds of insights one has to be emotionally vulnerable enough to let in through the distractions of the ordinary.  The loves of my life were down there, healthy, curious, and resilient. We had a home, and an affirmation of community. That night, we went to the drive in, and as the boys dozed off in the back seat, I realized that I could drive away and never look back because all I really cared about was right there in that car.

The following spring, I noticed sprouts coming from a tree I assumed been killed by the fire.  I thought of one of my favorite poets, Theodore Roethke, and the closing stanza of his poem  “The Light Comes Brighter”:

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene

The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,

Will turn its private substance into green,

And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

Yes.  Hidden within the tree, and within my own mind, was the potential for growth, ready to burst out.  The road to Lake Arrowhead, which had been like driving through an ashtray at first,  was soon green again with the outpouring of life energy from scorched roots. Maybe my desire to break free of self-imposed boundaries was shaped by these two experiences that gave me a glimpse of another way to live, the way of “less is more.” It was a vision I would not act upon for decades, a way of thinking it would take many more losses to embrace.    Maybe my life has been a story of furling and unfurling, of retreating, regathering, and spending energy in a world that always has the potential to burst into green, even from the darkest of places.

I’ve been gone for three days getting to know Vancouver Island a little better.  The way I dragged myself into the motel the first two nights, I assumed this morning in Ucluelet (about halfway up the west coast of the island), I was facing a loooong day getting back to Victoria.

To my surprise, even with a stop for about 45 minutes to walk along a lake,  it  still took a little under five hours to drive the roughly 180-mile distance. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but to someone born and raised within a few miles of a California freeway, five hours is just not that long a drive.  The thing that is so strange is that in my first two days, the ones that wiped me out, I only traveled half that distance each day.

Well, I did take a few detours, and I did make a few stops to hike trails each day ( including today on my return).  I tried to see as much as I could of what is on the short list of must-dos for this part of the island, so I saw a half-dozen lakes, a grove of redwoods, waterfalls, rivers, rugged sea coast, beaches, and a couple of lively little towns.

Yesterday was frustrating because several parks were closed due to concerns for social distancing during Covid. I didn’t find either of the well-known west coast towns of Tofino and Ucluelet particularly interesting, and concluded that the problem was my expectations. I thought of myself as driving to Tofino, as if it were the destination, when in fact it just happens to be the town at the end of a remarkable drive.  One of those times when the adage “it’s the journey, not the destination” rings particularly true. Fortunately, I had been practicing gratitude all day for the beauty of the island, so as long as Tofino had ice cream (it did) it was okay by me.

For all the frustrations of yesterday, the other two days were one knockout after another.  I picnicked at a beautiful lake and walked the Kinsol Trestle (see photo below).

I had a great room with a killer view, and one of the best farm-to-table meals ever at a tiny restaurant  in  Qualicum Beach, followed by a twilight walk on the inlet.

I added Qualicum Beach to the growing list of places I might want to live for a month or two, then set off the next morning for the west coast ( here, to go very far up the west coast you have to drive up the east coast, then across the island). I stopped for about an hour to walk to the Little Qualicum Falls

then at Crawford Lake for a break from seeing the beauty only as I hurtled past in my car.

The frustrations began at that point, with an old-growth forest trail with a stand of massive redwoods (closed) and a beach and tide pools (closed).  This morning, refreshed, I decided to try again at about 7am to see this fabled stretch of coast,  and I found a trail I walked for about an hour before hitting the road for home.  The sound of the waves, the seals, and the old lighthouse horn was just what I needed to turn my attitude from disappointment to glory hallelujah.

Sometimes a little voice tells me, “here’s a good place to stop,” so I pulled off the road into Sproat Lake Provincial Park.  Wow!  It turns out, totally unknown to me, the best preserved petroglyphs in British Columbia are there, so I walked the half-mile or so to see them on a rock wall at the water’s edge.

They are so  beautiful and conveyed so vividly the former world of the First Nations people who had lived by this lake that I almost expected to turn around and see  their canoes gliding on the water.

Oh, and one more thing.  As I was walking back I heard loud bird noises and looked around for what was going on in the treetops  then I realized the sound was overhead, and I saw my first-ever migrating geese.  Okay, okay, I can hear some of my friends laughing, but with rare exception, in the waterfowl category,  I have been stuck with seagulls and the occasional heron most of my life.

So back to what I started with—how unburdensome the drive back was.  It always seems as if the first time you go somewhere it feels so much longer than coming back  I suppose mostly it’s the removal of the unknown on the return trip.  I found myself thinking, though, about how I would feel if I drove this route all the time.  It’s hard to imagine familiarity ever breeding contempt, as the expression goes, when it comes to natural beauty,  but I wonder if after a while one notices less, or if the opposite occurs, that there are so many things to love, so many things to sink into one’s heart and soul that every turn in the road is like a little homecoming.

I have loved a place that much—the only place in my adult life that ever really felt totally like my home, in any deep sense of the word.  Those of you who have known me a long time know I am referring to my house in Lake Arrowhead,  in the San Bernardino Mountains.  For years, every time I drove up the mountain road, my grin  got too big for my face, and my heart sang at the sight of every familiar landmark.  It never got old, not even a little.  Perhaps I will have another chapter like that, perhaps not.  But for now, I can say that I have felt very much at peace already on this beautiful island, helped along by the knowledge that peace starts with being at home wherever you are.

It’s not exactly a war.  It’s not even a battle.  It’s more competing whispers, one in each ear.  One says “I am perfectly happy by myself, making decisions based only on what works for me in the moment.” Skip lunch and have dinner at 4:30? Have ice cream or a bakery treat at 4 and nothing resembling a real dinner at all?  Go out for the morning at 9? 10? 1?  Come back at 11:30?  3? 5? No one to call, no one else to consider.  Walks are solitary, at my pace, for exactly my duration.  I have spent many years of my adult life on my own in this fashion, and it’s been good for me, then and now.

The bliss factor of solitude is hard to beat, but it does have its down side. The voice in the other ear reminds me how nice it would be to share these experiences with someone, and I briefly think “what have I done?” This is exacerbated by the fact that no one can hop on a plane or get in their car and come visit.  Not that they would, necessarily, but it’s different when they can’t.

I’ve had a noteworthy reaction to these moments when I realize how cut off I am from the important people in my life.  Whereas I used to try to pinpoint what I was feeling—Lonely? Isolated? Melancholic?—I find now I just “sit with it,” as my friend Jane calls this state. Acknowledge without judgment, accept, let it play through and then move on. Though the writer in me doesn’t like wordlessness, I am understanding for the first time this aspect of mindfulness, and I like it.

I have spent close to zero time contemplating the fact that I pulled up roots so utterly.  It feels comfortable, as if my life is now so filled with potential rather than matter.  Even my meager remaining possessions need more winnowing, as I learn more about the person I am now rather than continue to carry around the remnants of someone I used to be, on the assumption I may go back to being her some day.

I’m starting to understand that the most lasting legacy of the years I spent cruising, in addition to the phenomenal experiences I’ve had around the world, may be that it shook me loose from the feeling that I need a base.  Do I need to surround myself with  my belongings? To have  routines provide structure for my life? To know where everything is within a fifty-mile radius? Apparently not.

I got so used to living out of a suitcase over my cruising years that I began to see my stateroom as an equally comfortable home base.  Now it looks as if that was just practice. What do I have now that keeps me from floating away? A car, some books, some supplies. Even my beloved jewelry is starting to seem like relics from another time, another me.

It’s interesting that people seem to think I must be looking around for a place to settle here.  I am not interested in that at all.  I think I would like to spend a month or two here and there, not just on Vancouver Island, but elsewhere in Canada and the world.  I’m “porous with travel fever,” as Joni Mitchell once beautifully put it.  Cruise Director Vicki van Tassel says her home is a storage locker in New Jersey.  I guess mine is now a little unit on Quadra Street in Victoria.

Will I get tired of this?  Probably.  I’ve outgrown pretty much everything in my life.  But you know what? I don’t give a damn what I might feel next year. I‘ll find out when I get there.  For now, I am not settling, in any sense of the word.  Let it be.  Let it all be.

In keeping with my vow I posted about yesterday, to be more the person I want to be than the person I usually am, this morning I set off again for another hike, this time around Thetis Lake, near Victoria (see photo below)

It was such a radically different experience in my head than yesterday.  When I got to a short but steep downward stretch of the path, the little fun buster in my head reminded me I would have to go back up if I went down, but it didn’t work, even for a second.  “So what?” I said, and plunged down the path.  When I got to an equally steep upward stretch, all I thought was “I can do this!”

Amazing how much experience matters.  In this case I have both one day of experience (yesterday) and seventy years of it to go on, and both of them tell me I’ve got this—whatever “this” is.

I noticed the turnoff for Elk Lake on my way this morning and thought maybe I would stop there on the way back.  The me I usually  am nixed the idea, saying one lake was enough and there was always another day.  The me I want to be chimed in as I was driving back, asking why I was in such a rush to get back.  “What are you going to do, go back to your room and sit on your bed?”

I want the new, improved me to win these showdowns, so I went to Elk Lake.  Turns out it is the home of the Canadian rowing team and a popular getaway for people in the area. There was a trail around that lake as well, but the legs were in open revolt at the idea of a second hike, so that will have to wait. Only so much self-reinvention can fit in one day!

Besides, it was time for lunch.  I went to one of the most popular restaurants on the waterfront in Sidney, and sat outside surrounded by potted flowers and dappled sun.  I ordered vegan tacos (yams, avocado, corn, and lots of other little goodies) and when a plate of three enormous tacos arrived, the server said, “you know, if you can’t eat all that, we can wrap it to go.”

“I think I’ll need that,”  said diet-conscious  me. As I dug in,  some other creature who is also me said “Wow! These are delicious!” and I polished off all three.  I don’t know who that new voice is, but the me I want to be has little room to spare in these shorts, so I’d better talk back pretty forcefully at least most of the time. But as lunch dates go, that voice was just the one I needed today.

I got out of quarantine one week ago and I have been too preoccupied to think about much of anything except getting a driver’s license, registering and insuring my car, signing up for medical care and a SIN (the Canadian SSN), getting a small storage unit for when I am between rentals, setting up a bank account, applying for a Canadian credit card to start building a credit rating (my stellar numbers in the US don’t count here).  I also got a haircut and a brow wax!  All that remains now is gas and a car wash before I head into Victoria on Monday to start my two-month stay there. Quite a lot for one week, but the pace I set has now put me in a position to be on vacation for the next few days.

Today I began the real  transition into residency here,  now that the work is done.  This morning I went up to a regional park and hiked along this trail leading to a viewpoint overlooking the ocean.

Almost instantly the clutter in my head began to clear.  The silence reminded me of how long it had been since I had not been surrounded by noise.  The occasional bird song and the rustle of bushes caused by an unseen animal was all that broke into the barely perceptible hum that was my ears adjusting to hearing nothing.

One of my first thoughts was, “here I am, walking in a forest.” Metacognition of this sort is often the preamble to insight  for me, and today my thoughts went something like this. “I want to be the kind of person who walks in forests.  Most of the time I am a person who thinks about walking in forests, but doesn’t actually do it. But here I am, doing it.”  At the moment I was the person I want to be, rather than the person I very often am.

There is no reason, I thought, that I can’t  be more of the person I want to be.  It is entirely up to me. I can look at pictures of beautiful places and imagine myself there, or I can get up and go.  I have absolutely no excuse, now that I have set out on this new chapter in my life.  I am going to call myself out on all my old excuses—no time, no money, no transportation, nobody to go with.

As I hiked, the me I usually am tried to defeat the me I want to be.  The hike was farther and steeper than I expected, and I saw clearly the toll that  a closed gym, curtailed life, and quarantine have taken on my stamina and strength.  The complainer in the back of my mind said I could just turn around, but the me I want to be pressed on.

As viewpoints go, this one was relatively unspectacular, being more a peek through the trees than a wide-open panorama (see photo below), but really for me the larger point was the walk in the woods, and the bonus  of a walk through my own head. And so, there I was, a bit breathless, as I looked out on the reward I had earned by being the better version of myself. It is going to be so worth it to let her loose!

It’s 6:30 AM. I have rinsed out my coffee cup and am posting this just before I open the door of my hotel quarters and step into the hallway as a free woman. After I pack up my car (no easy feat), I will head for the ferry to take me to Sidney, where I will spend a few days looking around that part of Vancouver Island, and then take up residence for two months in Victoria before moving on to whatever seems good at that point. I can imagine the sea breeze on my face  as I cross the water, although the glorious weather I have only been able to observe through my window for most of the last two weeks will have turned to rain by mid-morning. Sun or rain— I don’t care. It will mean life for real, not on hold.

Quarantine has certainly not been my favorite experience, but a Canadian friend put it in perspective when she pointed out that when Covid broke out, Canadians stepped up and did what needed to be done. Their willingness  to sacrifice as a nation by quarantining  for several months and practicing universal social distancing  is what made Canada a safer place for me to come to.  Despite the fact that I took a similar level of care back in San Diego, overall my country did not, and like it or not, that reflects on me.

I kept to the letter of the quarantine, except for a quick, masked and socially distanced run to the closest pharmacy for a prescription—acceptable under the rules of the quarantine. I needed to prove something—not just that I wasn’t infected, but that I care about Canada, and that I want to do my part to keep it safe.

Now I can enjoy things my friends back in the US wonder how long they will have to wait to experience again, starting with a celebratory dinner in one of Sidney’s top restaurants tonight.  Covid has taught me new habits, though, about masks, distanciong, and sanitizing, and I plan to be cautious even beyond what is expected here.  I am sure I will go with the flow when I figure out what that is ( I haven’t been outside to know), but I guess I have been affected psychologically by the months of living in fear in San Diego, and I can’t quite believe that I am safer now and that others are safer from me.

Just because I have a birthright doesn’t mean I should expect everyone to welcome me with open arms during a pandemic. I don’t blame people who don’t. I want Canada to be better by one good citizen because I’m here.

Thank you, Canada, for taking me in.

I stand on guard for thee.

Tomorrow is my last full day in quarantine.  It is also my mother’s 101st birthday.  She didn’t live to see it, dying in 1986, three years younger than I am today.

My mother, Jean, is the reason I am here in Canada. She was the firstborn child of my English grandmother and her husband, my grandfather, an American chemist working for Miner Rubber Company in Granby, Quebec.

Jean and her younger sister Catherine, or Kitchie, as she was always known, spent their early childhood in 1920s Granby, where traveling in winter was done by sleigh, rivers were crossed by boat, and any further travel was done  by train.  No cars.  They rode their ponies to go get the mail in town.  They went to a small school where many of their classmates were First Nations children.

Jean is in back row, next to taller student standing to the right of the teacher. Her sister Kitchie is in front row, third from left.

When Jean was seven or eight, the family left Canada for Wausau, Wisconsin, where she graduated at the top of her high school class and went on to the University of Wisconsin to study Chemistry.  She ended up completing a Master’s degree in Chemistry, quite an accomplishment for a woman of her era.  She got a job at the Mayo Clinic working in the new field of electroencephalograms.

My mother at work in the Mayo Clinic

In college she met my father, Ivan Weeks, and they eventually married.  By the time I was born they were living with my two-year-old sister in Altadena, California, in the San Fernando Valley, where there were more orange and walnut trees than houses in an area that is now packed with suburbs and “Val Gals.”

Shortly after I was born she was diagnosed with ankyloid spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that, over time, can cause vertebrae to fuse. It is possible that her pregnancies may have triggered the disease, a fact I only learned recently and I don’t know if she ever knew. This fusing made her spine less flexible and she slowly froze in place from her waist to her skull, with her head and neck slightly askew. Her ribs were affected as well, making it necessary for her to breathe using muscles of her diaphragm because her ribs could not expand properly. This was aggravated in her case by asthma, which my aunt recalled began after a bout of whooping cough as a child.

Once she became a mother, and once she began dealing with the permanent double disability of the spinal fusion and impaired breathing, that was the end of any hope for a career.  Actually, even if she were in robust health, that just wasn’t in the cards for women with professional husbands  and young families in that era. I have written about this aspect of my mother before, and I encourage you to read my 2019 blog post, “Anniversaries,” here to learn more about growing up with this remarkable woman.

What amazes me most about my mother is that I never  for a moment saw her as disabled. I don’t think she saw herself that way either. There wasn’t much she couldn’t or didn’t do, although often in her own way.    She drove, but with the addition of big mirrors that stuck out from both sides of our car because she couldn’t look over her shoulder to see what was behind her. One thing she couldn’t do was ski.  While we were on the slopes, she sat in the lodge and read and knit all day because she couldn’t turn to catch a chair lift or see what was coming down the hill.  She was the best Girl Scout  leader in town, and I was always jealous because it was for my sister’s troop and I hated mine.  She became  skilled at many crafts, including mosaic and wood carving, and we feasted on vegetables and berries from her garden and fruit from our  small orchard in season, and on jams and canned fruit she made herself.

My mother did not become an American citizen until she was around forty,  I remember going to San Francisco for her to sign the naturalization papers, mostly because we went for sukiyaki on Fisherman’s Wharf afterwards, a family treat.  Apparently her main rationale for this change was that she had gotten tired of not being able to vote.

As she grew older her lung capacity decreased, and in her last years, it was at about 20 percent.  Catching a cold was potentially fatal because any congestion would make getting enough oxygen impossible.  Still, she went out and about with a breathing contraption in her car, and I rarely heard her turn down a chance to go do something fun because it would be too strenuous. We camped with my little boys, and visited the wonderful Native American sites around Los Alamos, where she moved with my father in the 1970s.  A doctor once told me he was astonished that someone with her lung condition wasn’t in a wheelchair. My mother never even used a walker.

With my son Ivan channeling the Lone Ranger in Los Alamos, New Mexico

She celebrated her  67th birthday with her sister, my Aunt Kitchie, on August 20, 1986, and apparently was not feeling well.  She had to take her temperature several times every day, because any rise could signal the onset of a cold, and she needed to get to a hospital immediately to save her life.  Kitchie found her the following morning dead at the breathing machine she kept in her bedroom.  She must have felt short of breath and gotten up to use it.  She took her temperature too—it was noted in her log.  One degree above what it had been that morning.

My mother died thirty-four years ago this Friday, the same day I leave quarantine. On that day,  I will receive from her a final  precious gift, the chance to start my new life in Canada as a citizen by descent.  I think she would be astonished and pleased that the little girl grinning in the school photo was already carrying that gift for me.