Seeking My Mother's Childhood

"That night I would lie in the little bed by the window in the girls' room, the bed that had been my mother's when this was her home. I would watch the headlights appear from the fog on the far side of the river, way down past the great church of my mother's childhood. . . I would wait for another car, and imagine that I was my mother growing up in this room, my five sisters around me." --Rachel in A Canoer of Shorelines

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"Stop!" I exclaim. "The Great Church! There!" I point, seizing my camera. "The house was right there."

That lumpy patch of snow-crusted hay, the trees and bushes thick around it-- that is the site of my grandparents' house, the house that held my mother's childhood. I know the spot, for the Great Church rises as it should, guarding the bend beyond the causeway.

We roll past; the snow is piled on the shoulder of the road and there is no place to pull over. "We need to come here this summer," my son says.

And I am glad he is the driver today, relieved that my injuries of Christmas Day have left me a little shaken, unable to fulfill my fantasy of driving my son and his partner along the shore, telling the stories, revealing his grandmother's life a little at a time. I am instead tucked in the passenger seat, gripped by an unbearable longing to be ten again, to drench my rappie pie with molasses, pick blueberries in the ditch, stare at the Great Church in the night. The need to to cry cuts through my chest, but no tears come.

This is the second moment. Before I share the first, let me set the scene. My mother grew up in Sainte Anne du Ruisseau, an Acadian girl whose father always stressed they were français de France, for his father had come from Le Havre, not the Acadian shore. My mother married an Anglophone farmer and we were raised as Anglophone children, who never, in spite of local legend to the contrary, spoke French at home or learned French Acadian ways. Sainte Anne du Ruisseau was her home, her heritage but never truly ours, one we visited one night each summer. Yet, it was the highpoint of my life.

My son had been very close to his father, an Inuk carpenter and hunter who taught him strong Inuit values, chief among these being love of family. Since his father's death the year before, my son has shown increasing interest in learning my personal heritage, something which I have experienced from the periphery but never truly known. I drew myself into my personal past when I wrote A Canoer of Shorelines, and was saddened by how much my upbringing had fostered a sense of isolation, a feeling that I was not truly part of any of my heritages, an anomaly with memories but no roots. My Acadian roots belonged to my mother; they were revealed for a moment each year and then hidden away like a fragile Christmas ornament, too delicate for my clumsy hands. My son thought we could discover some roots if we took a tour, so here we were on Boxing Day, my hand throbbing, my foot pulsing, my body snug in the passenger seat while he drove and his partner set up the navigation.

I remember every foot of the way, but it is nice to know where the gas bars and coffee places are in this new time.

The first moment is at the cemetery across from the huge wooden church of my mother's childhood. It has not shrunk with time, but is every bit as looming and flammable as it looked in 1975. Standing on a hillside, watching the fog roll up the river--I wrote that beside the grave after my grandfather's funeral and it helped me find it the other time. "Down here," I call, jogging along the slope. "Those two markers. There." There should not be two markers, but I hurry to them anyway. I halt beside them, and then I know. I swing my head to the right, and stare directly into my grandparents' names.

And now I am running, running, my son and his partner and the snow vanishing behind me, my little shoes pounding over the dry grass in Grammie's yard, up, up to the verandah where she stands, arms outstretched, creased face beaming, my Acadian grandmother, the summer sun shining on her face. My son and his partner are the echo of a future my ten year old soul does not notice, for they have not happened yet; this moment, this verandah and these wrinkled arms flabby with age, folding me -- here is where I am real. I stumble before the stone and I, universalist always but not a capital C Catholic anymore, feel my hand spasm and reach to touch my forehead, my chest, my right shoulder, my left. I hear the Hail Mary ripple from my mouth although I have long set aside a pantheon. 

I simply am. I am present in a summer Acadian moment, until the distant rumble of voices draws close and I return to being a mother of no culture standing beside my son who is all cultures. And his beautiful partner, bearing witness.

After that we go looking for the house, and it is my son who thinks of driving back, so I could sight along the great church. And it is all there. A brush-filled lot, a little clearing left, the afternoon sun scattering over the snow. This is the crucible that nestles my mother's past.

My son wants to try rappie pie, but his partner's research reveals that local restaurants, even in Yarmouth, are closed today. No matter, I say. We do not want tourist rappie pie; only a little restaurant like the one in Tusket would make our rappie pie. Rappie pie is best served in a grandmother's kitchen. So, being hungry, we eat at an A&W in Yarmouth, and discover Acadian people have the same idea. I guess we have an authentic Acadian eating experience after all.

We drive back the same way we came, for that is how we return from Grammie's house. That makes it real. 

And as we pass the clearing, I give a secret wave to the little girl racing for the verandah, blow a kiss to the hunched figure waiting at the top of the steps. In that moment I, a drifter of no culture, am forever a little Acadian girl, coming home.

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