I love road trips, even short ones. I love the close quarters of the car and the lack of electronic distraction. Even the drive between my daughter’s house and mine is long enough to get into the groove of a road trip. We take a country road which runs between our house and hers – country in the fashion of hobby farms and green houses. We pass well kept horses, a small herd of goats and a dairy farm en route. It’s a pretty drive. The ditches lining the road are always bursting with the garnish of the season – dandelions, daisies, buttercups – wild and weedy.
I was taking this drive with one of my granddaughters on an afternoon this past spring – she was staring out the window and watching the scenery drift by. Fronds of yellow broom were blooming in the ditches and the sun was shining. ‘I like those flowers,’ she said. ‘Did somebody plant them?’
This is the magic of a road trip – questions spark stories.
We talked about weeds and wildflowers. I began to tell her about my childhood on the prairie – stories about the hill at the top of our street turning purple when the wild crocuses bloomed. I watched her face in the rear view mirror as she tried to image the scene. We talked about the waves of prairie grass rippling in the breeze, the smell of wet dust during a prairie rain storm. She seemed enthralled.
“Will you take me there one day Gramma?”
I thought for a moment and swallowed the lump in my throat. I suddenly felt very old. “It’s not there anymore.”
My prairie lives only in my memory now. The hill of my childhood is paved. The acres of wild prairie now ripple with canola and wheat, they haven’t seen a wild crocus in years. There is no virgin prairie anymore.
This is not the first time I have become sentimental about the vanished prairie. I wrote an essay about my childhood in Alberta years ago – it won a prize in a contest in 2001. I thought I would post it here in case you’d like to take a trip down memory lane with me.
You Can Never Go Home
I found our old house with surprising ease given the fact we moved away from Calgary when I was ten years old – thirty seven years ago. I had hoped to come home, to show my three children the ‘place’ of the stories I tell.
We’d followed the new freeway running through the gully – the forbidden canyon which ate my sister’s tricycle many years ago. I found myself wondering what they did with the rusty little bike as steam rollers smoothed hot asphalt and workers in hard hats spit on the road. The prairie has disappeared, covered now in vinyl sided suburbia, the crocuses of my youth squashed beneath foundations and driveways. The spindly little birch tree we left staked in the front yard now shades all of the lawn and half of the neighboring house. The little bungalow has probably seen several coats of paint – it is currently grey and white. My mind’s eye peers through layers of latex and enamel and imagines the yellow and brown house that my father painted one summer while ‘Mac the Knife’ boomed on the record player and a warm prairie breeze danced with the dining room curtains.
The wrought iron railing lining the steps is still the same, although someone has changed its color from black to white.
Black and white… all the photographs of us kids are in black and white. We have several snapshots of children sitting on that bottom step – my brother’s pompadour Brylcreemed to perfection, my two sisters and I with hair braided so tightly our scalps ached when we combed it out at night.
“Are we there yet?” My daughter asks from the back seat.
When we lived here ours was the second last house to the prairie, the cement of Hilton Avenue breaking into a hard packed dirt trail which meandered up the hill and disappeared over the horizon. Today the city crawls to the top of the hill.
“This is it,” I sigh with something that makes my heart ache.
“Where’s the prairie?” My son had been anxious to follow the dirt trail into my childhood adventures.
My voice catches in my throat, “gone.” When I was a child the entire hill was our playground. In the winter the trail was buried beneath a thick blanket of snow. My mother bundled us in handed down snow suits and homemade mittens, using Dad’s itchy wool socks pinned together with diaper pins as scarfs around our skinny white necks, and ushered us out to play. My childhood is rich with memories, it has never occurred to me that we were not.
When Chinooks blew and the snow melted our playground was transformed into acres of brittle brown grass. We awaited spring like children promised ice cream for dessert.
Announced by a change in the wind, the season followed giant tumble weeds bouncing off the hill. The wind stirred loose dirt and tiny rocks from crevasses thawed on the prairie and whipped stinging particles into pale bare legs. We would march home from school, our sweaters pulled tightly around cotton dresses, the air thick with the aroma of dust and hope.
I close my eyes and imagine an afternoon forty years ago, when my sister and I rounded the corner at the foot of the street, arms laden with optimistic futures. The hill was tinted mauve with the furry faces of crocus opening to bathe in the early springtime sun.
Even now I catch whiffs of that afternoon in an unknown fragrance that catapults me back through time, to where I am a little girl pulling heads of crocus on the Calgary hill. We filled our skirts with sticky, fuzzy flowers their sap hanging like strings of saliva as we snapped the tender stems with dirty fingernails. My mother floated the purple flowers in bowls of water, and placed them around the house where they stayed until they withered and sank to the bottom of the bowls, slippery with decay and heavy with the indulgence of drink.
My mother loved the prairie; loved the view of distant mountains, the wind, the never-ending blue sky; it seemed to make her strong. She had to be strong. My father moved us to Calgary in 1956 when he began is new career as a traveling salesman. We were plunked on the outskirts of an unknown city and promptly waved him goodbye. If Mom was lonely we certainly wouldn’t have noticed, our days filled to the brim with adventure on a grassy ocean.
Dad was on the road three weeks out of four, leaving us kids and Mom to our own devices. Mom made family out of neighbors, I suppose finding support and friendship among strangers.
One day the lady down the street, Peggy, chased the bread man’s truck up the road to in front of our house – memorable only because she was still in her pajamas. Apparently a craving for donuts had arrived after he’d made is stop at her house. Mom laughed and invited her in for coffee.
Peggy’s husband, George, was a pilot and took long treks away from home during the same. years that my father drove the highways around Alberta. Over time Mom and Peggy became good friends – both left alone and car-less on the edge of the prairie.
Peggy was loud; she laughed big and cried hard. As children we knew to stay out of the kitchen when the tears began to flow. Theirs were problems we couldn’t fathom anyway.
It’s only now, when looking at our tiny old house, that I find myself wondering what it was like for my mother. I feel a little guilty for not having considered this before.
Did she cry quiet tears in the recess of her bedroom, alone while dad worked the road? Did she ever curse the repetition of days and the fanciful flights of children too busy to take notice? I fight the urge to knock on the front door and ask for the opportunity to sit in the kitchen and listen to the walls.
I long to know what Peggy said, sitting in the kitchen dressed in her pajamas. Was that the day she clobbered George with the frying pan? I’d heard the story a hundred times in the years since we’d left Calgary. I strain for whispered words….
“Oh God, I can’t believe I did it — just whacked him on the head. Smack! Right on the bald spot he tries so hard to hide.” Peggy would laugh – hearty, loud.
“I can’t believe it either. Whatever possessed you?” Mom would be shocked.
“I dunno – just timing I suppose. He wasn’t expecting a thing.” Peggy and George fought with passion – I wonder if they made up with same emotion.
“Was he hurt?” Mom would ask.
“Well if he was he never let on. He just streaked into the bedroom and grabbed my false teeth.” She’d smile showing her vacant pink gums. “They’re probably five thousand feet above Winnipeg right now, safely tucked in George’s shirt pocket.”
The echo of my childhood calls from the buried prairie. Long summer afternoons with nothing to do but watch clouds shape across the horizon and suck the sweet nectar of long supple grass. Yet above the echo I hear something else.
“Are you finished Mom?” One of my children asks.
Finished? “Yes…. almost.”
I wonder if they know you can ‘smell’ hail. Or that a Chinook blows so warm you can feel the snow melt beneath your feet disappearing into slushy footprints as you walk. They’ve heard the stories but only I can see the place.
The sandstone retaining wall still props up the Chadwell’s yard, my father’s sweat dappling it like so many tears. Mrs. Chadwell was good to us in a grandmotherly way – stiff, but genuine – she scared me a little. When I was seven I spent several afternoons standing on a bench in her basement while she altered my mother’s beautiful camel-hair coat to fit me. I hated it – hated Mrs. Chadwell tugging at the hem of the coat, hated the coat and the fact I couldn’t have a new one like all my friends at school. I wonder if Mom hated the fact that her wonderful dress coat was unappreciated? I inherited her dress boots as well that year; laced leather, fur lined; my shoes flattened the soft fur inside that had once warmed her elegant feet.
“Mom?” the voice behind me is impatient. “We wanted to go to the zoo, remember?”
Remember? “Of course…. I’ll just be a second.” I swallow the lump in my throat.
I found this old house with surprising ease given the fact I moved away from here a lifetime ago. The little grey and White House whispers something that only I can hear, but it is not the laughter of children that falls on my ears.
“Mom?” Mom.
Comments (1)
Right there with you!!