I forget how much I miss this place, the unique smell of your waters
and the way you shine
and flow and ripple in time
even when you are hidden deep below a layer of sharp stinging ice.
We walked the dock and you said, “that is the life!” as your head turned towards an elderly couple sitting in green lawn chairs, saran wrapped sandwiches balanced on worn laps and I remembered a different couple, brown hair wrapped carefully in curlers at night, cold cream smeared over the wrinkles carved out of the wind and sun. I tell you stories of your ancestors and how generations, myself included, were born by the lake our souls drifting about like white washed wood embedded in tiny granules of sand.
I tell you about floods and large pawed wolves howling across a sandy-covered jackpine-filled blueberry patch. I remind you of the time we wanted to go for a swim but landed ourselves face to face with the inquisitive eye of a brown bear cub as my heart filled with dread knowing momma bear was not far off and I shielded your body and carried you to safety. I tell you the stories told to me as I sat in a yellow warm kitchen of baked bread and melted butter, chocolate chip cookies and the biggest jar of magical buttons filled with colour and life.
I tell you how I took it all for granted and even as my heart wandered about free spirited, I focused on the discontent I felt, the burning desire to escape the suffocating small town noise that felt stifling to my growth. You let the water fly about in the sunshine as you shake your head and you tell me how much you love it here, how the city feels suffocating sometimes and I smile and nod as you talk about the wide open spaces of freedom.
And I feel the thought inside me with a prick of a teardrop. I want to return home even as I know that the home I want to return to is gone, evaporated into the cycle of death, returned to the earth, the sand and becoming a part of a different story carved out of a piece of driftwood. I romanticize waking up each morning face turned towards the wild wind of your lake shore, cheeks reddened, hands scrapped up against the splintered fishing pole of my appetite even while I know that the gossip of a word would wear me down.
I walk along the white sand beach, toes curling into too many memories clamoring for my attention and I let them continue to float on by as the spray of a wave catches me by surprise.
Photo Credits
“slave lake” © Darlene J Kreutzer
beautiful! As a child, my parents purchased property from my grandparents so I was raised right up the hill from them. Summers were spent in the garden, shelling peas with my parents on our doorstep, swinging wildly from the weeping willow tree which stood tall next to the outhouse that I would never let anyone tear down. My grandmother’s great great grandparents built the house in the 1800’s and my family has lived there ever since. And now it is my home. I watch my boys run up the hill to my mom’s just to give her a hug. I think of the many times my grandmother would watch me run back up the hill after a visit filled with hugs as warm and inviting as the pies she always had freshly baked waiting for the next visitor. I watch my boys playing hide and seek with each other and joyfully share with them all the best hiding spots I used when I was their age. This is home to me. The small rural “village” that surrounds our 8 acres has changed drastically from the old black and white scenes of the early 1900’s that stand behind my grandmother as a child, but it will always be home to me, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
oh tawyna, that sounds so amazingly wonderful and my heart smiles to know that your home is a constant beauty. love!
Poignant;beautifully written.
Totally agree!
ohhhhh … thank you so much!!
It seems it always has been and and always will be the way we come to know the place of our birth. We leave or reject it but the leaving brings us closer somehow.
A piece of my heart sincerely wants to return to Drumheller to roam those sand filled, fossil encrusted dry hills. I can still smell the sweet smell of sagebrush and feel the intense heat of the sun on my bare shoulders.
beautiful, heart filled memory Dar,
xo
i so love drumheller and though i grew up on the other side of the province, we spend many summers there wandering the hills. hmmm. now thinking i would like to do a drive up with the boys before my vacation is over 😉
Oh, how I love your writing friend! beautiful. I can feel myself there.
my youth is made up of neighborhood blocks that i pedaled through on my pink banana seat bike going back and forth to friends houses…not staying too long at mine. Riding my bike blocks and blocks to the local pool, buying 50 cent ice cream cones that would melt right down my arm with no cares in world. Sneaking out through my window at night to meet up in the dark with friends who also loved the quiet of the midnight moon. We would wander through streets, parks, avoiding cars headlights. Boys became part of the story early on, maybe too early on. Friends were the most important thing in my life and making sure I wasn’t “home” between those 4 walls for more than minutes at a time. My wanting out came on early and the never ending quest to get as far away as possible.
I often go back and feel the comfort of what once was and how the knowing it inside and out was refreshing. The small town looks different through the eyes of an adult but I still leave as quickly as I can to not get sucked back into something that I knew I had to get away from.
xo
thank you for giving me this opportunity to think about “then”
i love that you had a pink banana seat and also how much your memories echo pieces of my own … thank you for sharing your beauty here.
A very thoughtful meditation on home. I understand well the feeling of home slipping away. My own roots are in Ontario–a place I was desperate to escape. I don’t miss the city I came from but I do miss my family and the sense of home as concrete, unmoving thing. Home seems more fluid now as I live in a rented apartment and struggle to redefine Family in my life on the West Coast. I would suggest that home doesn’t always “evaporate into the cycle of death” but becomes incorporated into our personal definitions of what home is. The place I came from in Ontario is now a shard of a complex, multifaceted vision of home–not gone, but transformed, merged into something new.
Thanks for the great article!
i love this … “it becomes incorporated into our personal definitions of what home is” … so very true, thank you for sharing, xo