The ladybugs lying creviced between the tangled green carrot leaves, left an impression forever imprinted in my mind; as home. Home; the smell of fresh bread being pulled from the oven. Home; the sound of a guitar being strummed from downstairs. Mom had a knack for making things beautiful. She could pull pine cones from the front yard and frost them with golden spray paint. She would have them sitting in a green basket by the fire, looking as though they had been taken from a Martha Stuart magazine.
She was the cool hand that rested on my forehead at night, or the comforting smell that hung over me during our nap times when Stephanie was away at school and Paul was lying in his crib.
Mom was born in a small town called Taber, in Alberta. She grew up in a time, when her Grandpa owned the only Burger joint in town and she could go over with her friends for free ice cream. She ran among the hollyhocks and caught bumble bees in glass jars. On hot summer nights her and her friends would take turns on the swings outside, then scream as the bats would come out, flying round their heads. Independent and free-spirited mom took a road trip with her best friend Penny out to California when they were 16. She was married when she was 22, and had Stephanie at 24. She first discovered that she had cancer in 1989. She was 29 years old and had three children.
At that point I still clung to the ideal. The mother who was ready with a steaming cup of hot chocolate after I had come home from a winter walk with Papa. The one who’d pull out her guitar and sing late at night when I was lying in bed; the one who’d take out her paints and sit by the window, sketching patiently the robin’s nest in the tree, then carefully filling the sketching with colors from her pallet. She sketched me once when I was 4. I fidgeted and tapped my foot as she followed the long bangs that cut across over my eyes, the dinosaur shirt I’d always wear; the round cheeks.
Her mother, my Grandma had a lighthouse station on Vancouver Island when I was growing up. It was here I began to love the ocean. The phosphorescent lights dancing in schisms upon the tripping waves. The empty echo of the foghorn as it sounded among the crevices of hollow caves, etched with old sketches of the people who had lived within them years ago.
Grandma had my mom when she was 16 years old. She married her high school sweetheart, my Grandpa, but he left her to be a rock star in California, at least that was the plan. He wasn’t ready to grow up, but my Grandma didn’t have a choice. Still, the love that was present with the voices that sang around the piano was real, and each time we left a visit with my Grandma, my mom and her would be in tears.
Grandma: the scent of cigarette smoke, which somehow seemed comforting to me as I curled up and laid my head on her shoulder. The hands that would play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on our piano until I begged my mom to teach me the music. Grandma, laughing behind her video camera as she recorded us jumping up and down, pulling on moms arm, begging to be understood.
We’d go out onto the ocean in a boat, watch the waves lap up against the side; Stephanie would catch a starfish, Paul would catch a trout. We could watch the Orca whales raise their black, shiny bodies into the sunlight, then back down again into the dark depths of the mysterious waters, which I imagined would go down for miles and miles into complete darkness.
Oma came with us to the Lighthouse once, Oma, my dad’s mom. Oma: thick German accent, amber necklaces, would cuddle with me and tickle my arm, would jump up to the sound of music to dance, would laugh at our antics, would watch as we’d scrub the tiles in the bathroom, “not until they are perfectly clean!” and then she’d take us out for ice cream.
Oma was born in Berlin, Germany. She witnessed the atrocities of Hitler in World War 2. She shuddered in horror in the bunkers as Berlin was bombed out. She was not immune to the weakness and strength of the human spirit, she loved God despite her hard life. She was already married, with five children when she immigrated to Calgary, Alberta. Difficulties at home did not dispel a deep and transforming love for God and in all this ugly pain...beauty.
When I was a child she had a farm. We would take trips and spend vacations on this farm, where moonlight danced in the brook, and tadpoles whisked across our toes. Where the trees whispered their secrets, surrounding an old and forgotten barn. I’d stand at the mouth of this barn and shiver in delightful fear at what might come out of it! I fell in love with wide open spaces, with the dusk and with the cold, distant stars.
In the mornings Oma would sit at the window, sipping her coffee, seeped in warm bathing shoots of morning sun, I could tell she was not alone and so I’d tiptoe down the stairs, open the front door and go outside in my black rubber boots. Met with the sound of a thousand bird choruses, met with the singing of the cattle, met with the One who sat with Oma too.
There he was again, in the hospice as Mom lay there, looking at us through gleaming eyes. “I love you,” she said, “I am proud of you.” There he was again, surrounding us all, remembering us, holding us, asking us to trust. To trust what? To trust the heaviness, for he has held it up, to trust that after darkness comes light, to trust that in the garden, where the ladybugs slept and the bumblebees buzzed...that in the ocean, where the darkness hid large creatures that broke over the surface of the water to our delighted screams...that in the firelight that leaped from the burning logs on the farm, our voices being carried into the woods in the far corner, to trust, that He surrounds all these things.
These three women shaped my life. They are my legacy, they are beautiful beacons of light and hope. Thank you Mom, Oma and Grandma, for loving me, for shedding the light you’ve had, on me.
