Like I am time, I fit my palms into the face of the canola, fingers sweeping softly around the surface of its structures. Primary. Secondary. Tertiary. Quaternary. Seed head and harvest. Each stage is a measure in steady unfolding. A sundial of the season. Stalks climb and reach as long as the light will take them. A landscape stretching farther than the length of a laundry line. Hot clouds twine as the crops billow in the heady summer air. These winds. This endless prairie. All unfurls without barrier, spurred on by unburdened skies. It cradles and whistles and calls to carry on. I stand at the edge of my inland, smitten and hollowed. An eager rush. A rainless baptism.
You stare in kinship across the borders of your ocean. It’s 1939 where you live. There is no fear of landlock where shorelines bellow and creak. Foam flies free from the underbelly as you glance once more, over the tops of your shoulders. Your thumbs tap a recurrent beat against the grains of this vessel. All steam. All shout. An evacuee. An exile. I am merely a speck on the pages of my father, but you are waiting for one to shepherd across the Atlantic. A wish to be born again, out of the hum of war and the lows of impoverished places. Your hands will one day be my hands, their ticking the signature of my inheritance. In the final glint of your girlish and roving eye, there is an end, and there is a beginning.
What dream could be older than the flush of the tides? Steadier than the roadways? Fairer than the pavements grey? Perhaps it is neither known through untamed visions nor by a fire stirring inside the belly, but by a word which pulls in two directions. Home. That swollen sound where joy is both birthed and lost, moving always forwards and backwards in tandem. The fumbling incompleteness and swirling longing of its nature, always—and somehow—leaving and arriving full circle. An eternal flux of bending out and leaning in as it solidifies its before from its after.
From England and Ireland, Scotland and Holland they came—my mother’s mother, my father’s father, and their mothers and fathers before them—searching for safer landings than those they had known. Singing, steadily, the anthem of tethering places found and lost, and lost and found. Tailors and shipwrights, plantsmen and piano makers. Sailboats and steamships, trains, barges and oxcarts. A long and winnowing journey, trading what was familiar to remain.
Like I am time, still and moving swiftly along the drift and sway of the bluestem. One foot planted in the heritage of the heavy gumbo, one swallowed fully by the emerging beauty of black and chernozemic horizons. Great-great-granddaughter of the Red River Valley. Learning. Unlearning. Becoming. The seed of formative cities passed down line by line, their radicles and rhizomes now tended by the vastness of basins and watersheds. Rogue cotyledons unidentified in the succession of the wilderlands. Then named—and once named, known—through the harrowing of hectares. It is a weathering and a change shaped by glacier and till, granite and shale, limestone and loam. A richness and colour earned in hummock and humus. A constant suspension between Drought’s harsh crusting and Flood’s inadequate drainage. It is a darkness and a density unique, clayey and fertile.
Amidst the swaths of cool and warm season grasses are the breaths of storms and hymns and bird sounds. Fescue and Rye, Blue Grama and Switchgrass. Tall, thick and tick heavy. Eleven foot swells that once towered above sod houses. This, a forever acknowledgement of roaming and lostness, unpromised tomorrows and obscured views. There are no evenings of linnet wings, no lakes lapping night and day, no purple glow at noon.
Yet, there is growing peace here in this time, however slow the passage may seem. It is its own bee-loud glade, a pleasure to hold. Clover flocks the perimeter. Wheat bows before the doorstep. Veils span the morning before cricket and spider and dew drop. And although the bold brightness of the sun begs for squinting before passing through the eye of its needle, it adds lustre to the flight of every dragonfly. It backdrops the break of dawn, and glimmers along ripples of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Beneath the burnish and flecks that pepper my gardener skin, are moorings and unmoorings past. They are the heart’s deepest currents, the movements that draw nearer and deeper and wider. The resplendence of that sacred word that stands in betweens until it is called onward and again by its rightful and ever-unfolding name.
Home.
Holes and roads. Paths and rows. Chapters to build. Pages to fill.