Aunt Marcia

This month, one year ago, my aunt came to visit. She’s since deceased. 

I felt like I was just starting to get to know my aunt Marcia. In my dad’s family, there were ten children. My dad was the third oldest and Marcia was the youngest. When I was born, she was only 11. Because my mom didn’t really care for her husband’s giant Irish family’s shenanigans, I didn’t see much of them growing up. When I was a teenager my dad took to sneaking visits with his family, and sworn to secrecy, we could join him on those lazy Sunday afternoons. He’d be my grandma’s handyman sometimes. Or he’d feel comfortable and fall asleep in the upholstered lazy boy in the living room corner of the city bungalow she shared with Marcia. But those sporadic visits, of which I’d only witnessed the beginning before leaving home, weren’t enough for me to get to know my aunt. 

My dad died in 2014 and so, when she accepted my invitation to Winnipeg last summer it felt like the chance for a more pleasant reunion. My interactions with my dad’s family were an inheritance; in many ways, I was merely benefitting from his mostly good relationships and one generation’s remove from the contentiousness. Nonetheless, time spent with Marcia over the course of a few days was tinged with familiar comfort. There were qualities, like thrift, or a kind of humour, that I could find in Marcia and she could find in me. There were mannerisms we had that were reminders of the person we missed in common. 

And there were ways that we were different. One of the Winnipeg attractions I advertised was a visit to Thermëa, a self-guided Nordic spa experience. We were at the front desk when something I did while taking out my wallet made me drop a tampon on the floor. Marcia laughed and so did I when I bent down to scoop it up. When I popped back up I excused myself to the receptionist, and then told Marcia, out of the woman’s earshot, that I didn’t want that woman to think we were laughing at her. Marcia’s answer was, “Who cares?” She might have been right; I’m agreeable to a fault. But it was her refrain. She would often say it. “Who cares!” I suspect, though, that she did care. That maybe the expression was just a wishful anthem against normal, human vulnerability. Because most of all, she cared about trustworthiness. If you betrayed it, her decision was categorical. Either way, it meant that she had spent some time thinking about it. If it was harsh, there always seemed to be a chance to salvage a spot on her good side. If her sincerity had a rough edge, gaining her friendship felt like a priviledge. 

While we had a nice time together that summer and were planning to see each other again the next, she died unexpectedly. Her death lead me to go through family albums with a kind of avidity. But photographs, for getting to know someone more, are unsatisfactory, even maddening. It’s like Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” The pictures with their subjects, their views as records, couldn’t give me any more of Marcia than a catalogue of things she thought worth photographing. 

Her funeral highlighted qualities that defined her life: the work ethic that drove her success as a retail manager and the dedication she had for her mother’s care. It felt fateful to me that she had just organized and celebrated her mother’s 90thbirthday. The Sunday before her own quiet death, nurses had gathered at her mother’s table decked with flowers in the nursing home dining room and sang as my white-haired Grandma smiled and Marcia recorded. That was most of what she recorded: her mother and nature scenes. There wasn’t much art to it. Then again, “to photograph is to confer importance.” (Susan Sontag)  

Literature allows us to imagine that people are full of complexity. When I think of my dad, a person I knew quite well, I see how that applies. If I were to talk about him, if I were to try to describe him to you, I might cut the effort short. I want to preserve him in all completeness. But it’s not the same with my aunt. My aunt, because of the nature of our short relationship, can live in my memory within a very neat container. 

A writer named Jonas Hassen Khemiri once talked about a death in his family. He explained how people’s memories of the deceased were a way of defending a version of the person they knew. My version entails the goodness of her care, the respectability of her work, and the surprise of her death. 

Wherein I get to drive a swather

On a warm Sunday afternoon, the day after my cousin’s wedding, I decided to visit the McAvoy family farm near Rosetown, now run by my uncle Michael. Thanks to my brother John I got to spend a few hours pretending to be helpful.

I hadn’t been to Rosetown since I was a little girl. I remember a giant wood swing and my dad explaining the finer points of playing Anti-I-Over with his siblings; a game that involved throwing a ball over the barn. I stayed with my grandma when my brother was born and I remember her great burgundy couch that she called a chesterfield. I remember the illustrations from the story of the Little Match Girl that she read to me and that she found pleasingly sad. More than the room I stayed in, I remember being surrounded by thick darkness and giant silence. I also remember attending the summer parade where people on floats threw candy on to the street.

The farm is on a gravel road off from the paved one straddled by grain elevators and a Co-Op that runs through the town. Gravel roads are everywhere between giant fields, straight and dusty, and the big city intricacies are useless here where the scale explodes into miles instead of blocks and where the intuitive sense of cardinal points takes the place of street names. A rise in the landscape shows field gradations and the seams in between. It’s a minimalist beauty against the constant blue sky. The space feels boundless and distance is its own boundary. John and Michael both describe the land they work in sections or pieces of sections. Every section runs a mile long and a mile wide but it still feels vague even though I see it cut out in front of me.

It’s mid-September and the durum is ready to be swathed. The swather looks like a rust-red crab, pincers in air. I get to drive it perched in a cabin with a window slanted down to my feet and a clear view of the comb-like reel, the cutterbar, and the conveyor belts that gather and drop everything into a row behind me. I feel clumsy driving it. Operating a swather doesn’t take a licence and there are no pedals, only levers: the throttle, the speed (pushed forward from lowest to seven), and two buttons for adjusting the height of the cutterbar from the ground and the height of the reel from the cutterbar. The buttons are switch-activated and a yellow cap protects the switch.

It’s called “opening a field” when the swather cuts a few rows at the top and bottom widths of the field – and that’s what we do. Because one of the blades is broken, a skinny line of durum stalks remain standing and so John takes out a dusty plastic container of triangular blades, tools are gathered, a piece of guard is unbolted and screws are loosened. The swather sits like a patient at the dentist’s. I take pictures, rescue my purse from the dusty cabin, and admire the pretty swath with small bright green grasshoppers and large brown ones, eyeing me, deciding whether to take off or not as I try to zoom in. John had used the swather a few days before to gather Michael’s first field of lentils. Since they grow close to the ground, blades are easily broken if they hit a rock. It’s far more challenging to cut lentils than wheat, which makes my introduction to swathing seem like no big deal.

I cut a long row just before the sunset. Turning at the end of a row involves raising the reel and cutterbar and slowing down to realign the swather for a new row. The cutterbar is lowered to the right height, the reel follows automatically, and both are switched on. You’re not supposed to adjust the cutterbar while running at full throttle; I do this once, skipping a step in the procedure, and it makes John nervous. John and I look to one side as the swather cuts another slice. Sometimes I get distracted and a strand of wheat stalks stay standing.

There’s a feeling you get swathing a field, just before boredom, like a kind of fascination. The heads of wheat look so soft as they fall. I like the change in perspective, the reversal of what I’m used to. For a few hours, I’m the person in the field and not the driver on the road. When night falls and there is nothing but giant navy blue sky and the wheat the swather illuminates in a small semi-circle in front of us, it’s as if I can start to feel the land, as if I’m travelling across it like a meditation. Past generations spring up having done the same before; my dad, his dad… I’m flooded by feeling as my vision becomes limited to our little circle of light, the dust that billows around us, the night bugs that fly upward.  

I learn that the wheat changes when the sun goes down and the temperature drops. When John and I jump out of the swather to meet Michael standing at the end of the field, illuminated by our cabin lights, he takes me to the newly cut swath and grabs a handful of wheat and bends it. Stalks break, but not all of them, nor all at once, and this would be different during the day, under the sun. We look at the newly cut row and he shows me the stalks here and there that instead of being cut were merely bent downward, poorly shaved. The combine can’t pick up the swath anymore either, because the seeds no longer burst so easily from their shells and Michael tries to describe how the combine starts to labour and make noise. It’s the end of our work on the field. Michael grabs a bucket and collects a sample of grain from atop the grain truck. We climb into his diesel pickup and visit the yard, peering at it as far as the headlights will shine.

We stop at John’s house in town, where my car is parked, and Michael grabs the bucket of grain sample and lays a fistful on the counter. The grains aren’t all the same in appearance, which in spite of the good yield diminishes their quality. Quality is based on a grade system, one for best, seven for worst and Michael puts his crop at the low end. Some grains have bit of red from a fungus, others have a silvery white paper shell, a few are dark and hard, and the best ones are a pretty liquid honey colour. Singling out the pretty grains, he tells me that when his dad farmed, all the grain looked like that… it was always top grade. He says climate change has caused heavier dew on the fields in the morning and this affects the grain.

I know so little about farming my enthusiasm might be annoying. But today, I get to take a little piece of the farm experience with me, a convenient pocketsize piece, detached from the business, the worry, and the weather. I get to dip it in a family past and claim it for myself. I hope my kids will get pieces of their own someday. 

Miscarriages, I've had a few

For the longest time I didn’t know what to say about miscarriage because I would either dismiss the subject or try to make a joke. Even now, as I write, I’m tempted to leave them as a footnote instead. But if I gather together the four failed pregnancies and the three months they each took, the miscarriages were a year in our marriage. It’s an ever diminishing year as time moves on but this is the reflexion I owe it.

The first miscarriage I had was into our second year as newlyweds in the month of February. We were excited to become parents and savoured the feeling. The three month ultrasound showed a seven week foetus, quiet, a circle of white in a little sea of black, suspended there with perfect little human indentations that could have later stretched out into little arms and legs, the beautiful spinal curve, the head still tucked in. We were still uncertain of the joys a child could bring. 

I’ve always liked being a reasonable patient. I knew miscarriages were common, I didn’t feel like crying when the doctor came in to confirm it offering me Kleenex, explaining the options for its removal. Dilation and curettage is a simple operation where the cervix is dilated and the uterus is swept clean. The procedure was new to me and with Christian I followed the steps with mild curiosity. I was a secretary at the time and my supervisor insisted I take the next day off. I went to a small jeweller in Saint-Boniface and bought myself a necklace to commemorate this first failed pregnancy and the being that might live on somewhere above me, somehow linked to us, his or her would-have-been parents. I tried to feel sadness and searched for tears but couldn’t find any. The necklace had a curved silver piece that swept around a blue stone and I imparted it with maternal symbolism. 

The second pregnancy resulted in a tiny little girl and so when I had a second miscarriage, Christian and I hoped we were following a pattern. Soon after I fell pregnant again a fourth time. It was to be the third miscarriage. 

This third miscarriage hurt. Christian and I started to question our feelings, our little bit of grief like the restlessness you feel when it’s another cloudy day. I started to look for a meaning. This little bit of pain suddenly morphed into something that, if you were to pull at it, would cause an unravelling. What was a miscarriage? Was this aborted project a real, whole human, with a soul, a purpose, a beginning, a mission, and an end? Or was it just the very beginnings of a life, yet to be infused with a soul, yet to grow into a purpose, yet to know an end? And we began to question our grief. Why did this third miscarriage hurt? Had we suffused this pregnancy with more expectation than the other two? And if we had, the grief we felt was it not perhaps more indicative of our thwarted intention than it was of knowing a life had ended? What were we grieving? Was it a project or a being? I had to decide to stop thinking about it, to accept the event that highlighted our imperfect knowledge and our limited understanding. 

My gynaecologist ordered tests and I discovered an inherited Robertsonian Translocation. One in one thousand three hundred people are carriers of this genetic imperfection. Christian and I found ourselves in the enviable position of knowing why we had miscarriages. When I had a fourth a year later I went to the hospital and bought magazines to while away the time. It was September. My mind was placid if impatient. 

After that September Christian and I had two boys in surprising quick succession. The miscarriages are now in the realm of faded experiences. Awhile ago they consumed all our thoughts. I used to track my symptoms and attempt to calibrate them against a successful pregnancy. Christian and I would imagine superstitions for ourselves sometimes announcing the pregnancy or keeping it a secret. For three months I would try to develop an inner ear to match that of those women, who, like witches with magical divination, were so attuned to their body they could know if it was bearing life or not. I would think of names. Sometimes I’d talk to this mass of burgeoning cells, thinking of it as a baby, sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes it was too painful to decide whether talking to it was helpful or not. It didn’t matter but I would catch myself wishing it did. The wear of it would depress me. I would waver between exercise and distraction. Regardless of the outcome, pregnancy was fatiguing. 

There is no advice I can give about living a miscarriage but I don’t think that the experience is lost. I think that as I went through four of them, clumsily even, I had the chance of growing in grace, of cultivating patience and empathy, of practicing kindness even while selfishly wanting to hoard it all for myself. Even if I don’t have anything tangible and can barely grasp at the words to express the sensation, these four miscarriages are part of me, part of our couple, part of our family. I’m trying to learn to be grateful for them.