LETTING ADA GO |
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As my grandma lets go her grip on the present, she leaves me grasping for the past.
SHE MOVES TO SUNNYSIDE in the early years of the Great Depression, eighteen and driven by a dream. Money, in her words, is scarce as hen’s teeth but a neighboring farmer lends her two hundred dollars so she can go to Calgary and train as a teacher. It is what she has wanted since she was in fourth grade. She arrives in a city of bread lines; in Victoria Park the largest soup kitchen in the British Empire feeds two thousand people a day. She shares a fifteen-dollar apartment near the river and each morning climbs the steep escarpment to the imposing red brick and sandstone building perched on a bluff overlooking downtown. For the eight months it takes to finish teacher training she lives on oatmeal and longs for the wide-open spaces of home. By summer she is back in the rolling hills and that fall takes a job at the same three-room school she attended as a child. Sixty years later, I move into a creaky house with a sloping porch just off Memorial Drive and am talking on the phone with my grandma, telling her about my new home when she says, “Oh yes, I know Sunnyside. I lived there when I was at Normal School.” I can see Grandma in her kitchen on the farm, phone pressed to her ear, eyes turned to the mountain view, the house smelling faintly of hay. The thought of her in the inner-city comes as a shock. My neighborhood looks different. On my daily walks, I peer at old trees and houses, trying to find a trace of her presence, wondering what she thought and felt when she lived here. The red brick building that once housed Calgary’s Normal School is now part of SAIT. I have never paid it much attention but now the long climb from Riley Park to those sandstone steps feels like a wormhole to the past. -- She and her twin sister turn eighty that year. Ada and Ida, both of them smiling and gracious and still ambulatory. The party is announced on the local TV station. I drive to southern Alberta and spend the afternoon shaking hands with people who look familiar but whose names and exact relations to me I can never remember even though I have been meeting them every few years at events like this as long as I’ve been alive. While my grip on the past is shaky, Grandma is losing her grip on the present. My aunts talk about it, first in whispers and then more openly. They get past the sting of having their mother ask them who they are and are grateful for those days when she greets them as if nothing has changed. They worry about her leaving things on the stove. It happens a few times and they start bringing over meals for her to microwave. My sisters tell of visiting Grandma and being called by my name instead of their own. Eight years after their eightieth birthday, Ida breaks her hip and her health unravels. It is only a matter of weeks before one of my aunts is rushing Grandma to the hospital room where her twin lies dying. Grandma is in good form. She shares a tender moment with Ida and is still there, her bright strong self, when Ida passes away. The next morning my aunt calls with the news. Of all of Grandma’s many brothers and sisters, Ida is the one I never have any trouble remembering. My grandmother’s twin. It is just before eight in the morning and when I call Grandma, I catch her without her hearing aid. “So sorry about Ida,” I yell, and she replies in her most reassuring voice that she visited Ida at the hospital last night and her twin is recovering nicely. The truth catches in my throat and will not come out. I ask about the weather instead, say I love you, say it again, hang up and take the dog for a walk. There is a message when I come back. Grandma’s voice is unsteady now. She says she messed up, that Ida passed away last night. She went peacefully. -- The midwife has never lost a baby and with hundreds of births behind her has no intention of starting now. She dresses warmly for the ride to the two-room cabin beside the dirt track running between Beazer and Leavitt. Best to go now because in the dead of winter the weather can turn on a dime. The mountains are close enough that two hours on a fast horse will take you to their rocky feet. Yesterday, the family in the little cabin rang in the new year of 1915. Today they welcome twin girls. Ida arrives first. Ada follows fifteen minutes later, the youngest of eleven. The family already has twin boys, Floyd and Lloyd. With Ida and Ada, they become famous in these parts for their twins. To the west stands Old Chief, the square-faced mountain that holds the eye and twines itself into the sinew of those who live in its shadow. Many winters have passed since the family parked their covered wagon here in the southwest corner of what is now Alberta but was then the Last Best West, touted as such by Ottawa politicians seeking settlers to blanket the land where the whiskey trade had recently run its unruly course, to hem in the Blood and the Peigan, to plow and plant, build towns and pay taxes. Charlie came from Utah to try his hand raising sheep. He paid ten dollars for a quarter section of rolling foothills and a whole lot of hope, then watched from under the brim of a black Stetson as a bad winter killed most of his flock. He did a bit of everything to make ends meet, sheared sheep for farmers from the US border to the Cochrane Ranche, and was known by housewives for miles because of the Watkins products he sold door to door, nutmeg and vanilla delivered through all sorts of weather in a horse-drawn wagon. His youngest daughters, the twins, grow up roaming the hills. In spring they pick shooting stars and drown gophers. In winter they ride their sleighs shrieking to the bottom of the coulees. Always there are chores. Milk the cows, feed the chickens, pick the peas. There isn’t much money, but there is always food: cream, butter and eggs, home-baked bread, a freshly butchered sheep. On Sundays, neighbors come to visit, gather round the piano and sing. -- The summer after Ida’s death, I arrive at the farm and am surprised to find Grandma sitting on the front steps. I no longer live in Sunnyside nor even in Alberta. We have been talking about this visit for months but Grandma’s memory is as shaky as her balance. Last time I was came she thought I was my cousin but here she is waiting, calling me by name. My heart sings. In the middle of the stairs she wraps me in a tight hug that takes my breath with its force and also with the fear of us both tumbling down. In the kitchen, the same worn linoleum covers the floor. Old Chief is framed in the picture window. Grandma’s husband grew up in its shadow too and when they married and moved twenty minutes down the road, everyone driving cars by then, they built their house with a view of the mountain. They raised five children here, took on more than a few strays, sheltered both of their mothers through old age. Grandma lost her husband to open heart surgery when she was just shy of sixty. Grandchildren were plentiful by then and kept her house in motion when she wasn’t teaching her latest class of kindergarten kids. In her seventies she made quilts by the dozen and was always driving someone more elderly somewhere. Now, mid-way into her eighties, she spends much of her time in the yellow nagahide recliner in the living room and the TV has a new prominence. My visits have always been with siblings and cousins, a whirl of sound and bodies, turkey dinners, quilting bees. This time my voice, raised so Grandma can hear me, is the only sound competing with the tick of the clock. Before long conversation falters and in the silence Grandma reaches for one of the family history books stacked beside the recliner. The comings and goings of family is a passion for her. My whole life she has been telling me about distant aunts, long-dead ancestors, the children of second cousins once removed. I never manage to hang on to the names or keep the details straight. By the time I get home I won’t remember whether Betsy was her mother or her sister. My sense of extended family is impressionistic, full of sweep and emotion with plenty of confusion around the specifics of dates and names and who begat whom. In one of the books there is a badly reproduced photo of the homestead. I peer at the rough wood structure, ask Grandma again how many children there were in her family. She says eleven and names them as I consider the impossibly small house where, she assures me, they were happy, though of course the older boys slept in the barn. I ask about Grandpa and she tells a story I’ve never heard before. They met on her first morning as a full-fledged teacher. Nervous and only nineteen, she was standing in the school hallway when the new principal, handsome and ten years her senior, mistook her for a student and chided her for loitering. We cook supper together and afterwards Grandma spoils my dog with leftovers while the sun paints Old Chief extravagant shades of pink. In the morning, I find her at the stove frying eggs and making enough pancakes for a threshing crew. When my dog comes in and wags good morning to his new favorite human, she says she didn’t know I had a dog and what is his name? I introduce them again. The dog doesn’t mind and Grandma is delighted to meet such a well behaved pooch, but her forgetting throws me off kilter. I hesitate, uncertain how to navigate the changing terrain of our relationship. Unbidden, my voice becomes louder and slower. It sounds like I am talking to a child. It feels disrespectful and seems to make Grandma uncomfortable too. I suggest a drive to the homestead. I want a way of making the past more real, to fix these people and their stories in my mind so they won’t be gone when Grandma is no longer here to remember them for me. Of the eleven children, Floyd is the only other one left. Grandma isn’t sure she knows the way to the homestead anymore, so she calls Floyd who is ninety and almost blind and asks him to come along. Floyd says he wouldn’t be able to see anything. Grandma, with an acuity that hurts, says that at least he has his memory. The town of Leavitt hasn’t grown much since Grandma taught school here. Two dozen houses strung out along one road. We drive up the street. Grandma can’t decide which house is Floyd’s so we turn around and drive back down. A guy working on a pickup truck watches with a blank stare. I ask him which house is Floyd’s and he says in a flat tone that Floyd moved away twenty years ago. Hearing this, Grandma clucks a bit under her breath. Seeing her, the man breaks into a grin – everyone around here knows her – and he goes over to her window to say hello. She smiles that warm smile, clasps his hands, but never mentions his name, doesn’t ask, like she would have done a decade ago, about his mother’s surgery or his daughter’s wedding. It turns out he rents the field where the homestead used to stand so we follow his pickup down the same dirt track that the midwife traveled more than eighty years earlier. Half a dozen horses graze where the cabin once stood. I roll down the window, smell dry grass, feel hot wind on my face. Grandma, her voice light and happy, tells of summer days past when she and Ida ran over the hills to Ockey’s Hole to swim in the creek with the neighborhood kids. The same creek runs past the farmhouse that Grandma and her principal built. Once we’re back at the farm, in the heat of the afternoon, I take a walk to where the creek makes a sharp turn and runs deep. I strip to my underwear, the sun hot on my shoulders, wade in till the water reaches my thighs then duck under and come up shrieking. For one sun-and-water moment, I let myself believe I am at the swimming hole with those kids of eighty years ago. Grandma is asleep in her recliner when I get back, the TV on loud. We prepare a simple supper of salad and cottage cheese. She says peaches would be nice and sends me down the long steep basement stairs to find a tin. The pantry cupboards that once held rows of food are filled with stacks of newspapers, Mason jars with nothing in them. I can’t find any peaches. When I come up and tell Grandma, she heads for the stairs, ignores my protests, grasps the rails on either side with thin fingers, and starts down. Her descent is slow and her arms shake slightly. In the pantry, she bends to opens a door near the floor. A dozen tins of peaches sit on the shelf. She grins and says she was sure there were some left. We have them with cottage cheese, something I’ve never done before, and they are so good that I eat two bowls. -- In the spring of her ninety-third year she gets a cold and stops eating. Among the family there is a gathering sadness but one framed by inevitability and a readiness, a yearning, to finally mourn. My mom drafts the obituary. She phones me with tears in her voice. The back of my throat chokes up. We want these tears, this chance to cry together. We want to let her go, this mother of five, grandma to three dozen, great-grandma to ever more. We want to gather and grieve, hug, remember the woman who loved us so well. Instead, a few days later she starts to eat again. In early summer I make the drive to southern Alberta and find her in the exercise room, chin on her chest, eyes closed. I kneel before the wheelchair and yell hello. She raises her head but her eyes are empty, her mouth does not smile. She has no idea who I am. She looks down at the paper Dixie cup filled with small cubes of watermelon that she holds in her hand. Her fingers grasp a cube, put it in her mouth, reach back into the cup, grasp another and offer it to me. It has been a year since my last visit. Then we sat in the dining room where plate glass windows face the mountains, Old Chief among them. Grand View Lodge they call this place and it is true. My mom was there and so was my youngest sister and her baby girl. Grandma was delighted, held the wee one on her lap, smiled while I snapped a four-generations photo. She sat awhile at the piano, fingers dancing, eyes alert. Her ability to play by ear seemed nothing short of miraculous to me when I was a child. She could hear a song on the radio and find it again on the keys. She could play for hours without ever looking at a sheet of music. Several generations of kindergarten classes marched to her beat and on summer holidays, so did us grandkids. She was in good form that visit. She was not in possession of our names but she knew we were family, knew that she loved us. When my sister’s baby began to fuss, Grandma played How Much is that Doggy in the Window, the notes bright, not one out of place, and I wondered if the memory track for music was written in her fingers rather than her brain. Today I am pushing her out of the exercise room when those fingers grab the wheels and stop the chair. Every time I push, she grabs the wheels. There is a photo of the twins at nineteen, beautiful in floral dresses. Ida poses sweetly but Ada’s stance hints at mischief even as she looks straight into the camera, steel in her eyes. As a child, I met that steely determination in a Grandma who brooked no nonsense even as she was quick to pull us into a hug and always ready to pile everyone in the car and head for the mountains. Now that determination is focused on controlling this wheelchair. The only way I can get her to move is by walking beside her, bent over so she can see me, and pointing in the direction of her bedroom. Then her fingers grasp the wheels and make them turn. We take a break in the hallway. Uncertain if she can hear me, I pull out my notebook and try to start this encounter again. I write down who I am, who my mother is, that we both love her. Her eyes read the words but her expression stays distant. I show her a photo taken earlier in the week of my mom, her oldest child. Underneath I write that this is Rochelle. For the first time in half an hour she speaks. “We had a Rochelle,” she says, her voice a whisper. The haunted look on her face makes me question what I am doing here. The slow death of dementia has become commonplace, but that doesn’t mean we— In her bedroom, Grandma pushes the wheelchair forward until her feet bump the wall. She backs up slightly, goes forward again. Bump. Over and over until I manage to turn the chair around and, head on her chest, she closes her eyes and is still. I leave the room, stand in the hall, take measured breaths for awhile. When I walk back in she looks up. I put on a big smile and say Hello Grandma as if I have just arrived. Her eyes light up, the smile I have loved all my life colors her face. “How good to see you,” she says. It is the moment I came for.
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