by Caelan Beard
Dear Ruth,
My parents live now just a few kilometres from where you grew up.
I’ve been past your childhood house with its piano you loved. The mill where your father, Albert, made the family’s livelihood sits across the street, hovering above the Saugeen. Straddling the river is the bridge you used to fish off, where you once accidentally got a fishing hook caught through your nose.
I can go past your house, your father’s mill, but I can’t go in. They’re owned by other people now. The bridge is closed, too, one of too many small bridges on small roads, crisscrossing the river, that the municipality can’t afford to keep up anymore.
It feels discordant to picture you in these places. I mostly knew you when you lived in Toronto – first the suburbs of North York, then in Greektown near the Danforth. Our trips to visit you each weekend stand out in my mind. En route, my oldest brother would be given dad’s cell phone to call ahead, giving you the 20-minute warning of our arrival. When we got there, you’d just be pulling fresh, warm oatmeal muffins out of the oven.
Like most grandmothers you loved to spoil us, loved to give us all the things we wanted: Diet Cokes, pizza, a stack of cartoons from the Star that you’d save for us to read through on visits. My parents were extremely careful with their money when I was growing up, and all my biggest presents came from you: a CD player, a bicycle, a sleeping bag from MEC, my blue iPod Nano.
Your husband, my grandpa, died from lung cancer in his 60’s, when I was very young. But if you were lonely or in pain, I never knew. You were a strong woman. My dad likes to tell me about how you drove at a time when most women didn’t drive, and worked at a time when most women didn’t work. You studied nursing at the Macdonald Institute in Guelph, Class of 1953. You continued to work as a nurse even after you got married and had two sons (abnormal in those days). Two generations later, when I was studying for my bachelor’s at the University of Guelph – which had since merged with the Macdonald Institute – I took a course on food and resource economics, mostly because the course room was in the former MI. I wanted to be in the same building you once were. Twice a week I’d walk through the oversized front doors and ascend two broad flights of wooden stairs to my classroom. Afterwards I’d wander the halls, peeking into former telephone rooms and looking at the historical photos displayed in glass cabinets, a part of me always searching for your face.
Your face, not so different from mine. I’m half-Dutch on my mom’s side, but I don’t look anything like my light-haired, light-eyed relatives. I take after your side of the family, with dark hair, strong features, and sharp green and hazel eyes.
I think I have some other McNally features, too. Determined (or stubborn) – I once watched you argue with your two grown sons, both firefighters, for twenty minutes about whether you should go to the hospital when your heart rate was scary high. Independent (maybe to a fault – I hate accepting help from anyone). Loving. Fun – when we were little, my brothers and I loved to play a game that involved us hiding walnuts all over your living room, that you and grandpa then had to go find. It was a little bizarre. You kept the baskets of walnuts handy for us for years.
You were, I think, exactly what a grandparent should have been: an extra person to love you, for no reason, by no measure. Every weekend we’d bound into your house, greet you with a hug, and sprawl on your floor to read comics. We’d spend the rest of the visit hanging out in your home, watching YouTube on your desktop computer, playing games in the basement, or banging on the piano if you asked us to play you something. You’d order us food and watch us and talk with our parents.
You were a safe place to be.
Those regular visits to see you in Toronto gave me a familiarity with the city, a comfort within its streets, even though I’ve never lived there.
And I’m growing more and more familiar with the part of the Ontario countryside where you grew up, too.
Your family had deep roots to this area – your father and his brother, Arthur, owned a valley to the north that they tried to unsuccessfully farm. Eventually, they sold it and your father switched to the mill instead; the valley is a famous golf course now, called “The Ferns”. One of your sisters, Velma, got married in this area and moved just a few kilometres away, raising six children in a large stone farmhouse. This is where you sent your sons on all of their school holidays because you had to work. Velma and her family welcomed them.
This is where you were born. This is where you grew up, with six brothers and sisters; you outlived every one of them, and died here, in the nearest town of Durham. After spending most of your adult life living away, you came back in your eighties, when you needed to be moved to a nursing home and all the Toronto waitlists were too long. You spend the last few years of your life in there. Other than a short venture to the garden outside, you stayed in your room.
But I still see you here. Around town, around the city. I think of you whenever I play on a wooden piano, whenever I’m in Toronto and end up on the Danforth, whenever I’m up visiting my parents and change my route to drive past the mill – just because. Just because I knew you as an older woman and it’s a joy to think of you here – walking two kilometres to school along country roads. Growing up with your large, close family beside the mill. Walking the twenty feet to the river. Sitting on that old bridge in a piece of summer sunshine coming through the cedars. Casting your line into the cool, deep pools below.
I think of you often. That’s all I wanted to say.
With love,
Your granddaughter.
Daffy
by Pia Quintano
Caelan Beard is a writer and journalist from Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in The London Free Press, This Magazine, Horse Sport, and more. She loves nature, travel, and books, and does all of her best thinking outdoors.
Pia Quintano is an NYC-based writer/artist who especially likes to work with animals. Her paintings were sold at the Frank J. Miele Contemporary American Folk Art Gallery in NYC until it closed.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 