Out to the Fields

A return, a goodbye

The feeling of déjà vu the morning after the memorial: the desk chair moved to the opposite wall, the TV remote, the cup of coffee, the bedside lamp. I knew that this would be the ending, that this was where I’d land, sitting in this motel near the airport in Saskatoon with the need to write this down, with the feeling that there’s language at this threshold, or just across it. I dreamt this day, these words on the page, this ending that is a beginning, or at least that’s what the brain’s chemicals are telling me.

Pyrohy on menus, and borshch, and holubchi. A Western heat and dryness. More ominous now. The elm-lined sidewalks. The well-appointed homes near the university. The folks sleeping rough in the river valley. The apartment buildings across the water, rising above the fringe of trees. The geometry of the bridges. A pelican comes in for a landing, the wide shawl of its wings. For me who never sees them, this solitary bird is a miracle, a gift. Back in a quadrant of the continent where the things of my memory, the strata of my knowing, are familiar and shared. Memories of sandhill cranes. A preponderance of dill.

But I left Edmonton before I knew anything. I left during Ralph Klein. I fled. “Took off,” as Mom put it once not too long ago. And she’s right.

Bard: storyteller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian, genealogist. Of the Irish.

The profound effort of getting everyone out of the city and into town, getting everyone fed, making it to the school gymnasium on time. No pauses. Untenable, impossible. But the land was there, quiet, frantic, lonely, plowed. Certain family went off to look at other plots, visit other relatives. A way of life, a period of settlement, laid to rest.

An old acquaintance of hers telling me, as we set out the plastic trays of sandwiches, of the deer walking through the cemetery earlier in the day. The photographs out on the table, the trove of our collective memories. Black-and-white photos of babies in laps, women gathered together. Photos of a house on a truck bed, a tractor on a truck bed. A binder, a thresher. A barn going up.

The hole dug for the urn wasn’t the right size at first. Needed to go wider, more square. A spade and a helper, mosquito coils leant from a woman in town. A square of plywood wrapped in astroturf to cover the dug hole. The small pile of dirt beside it. The asymmetry created by the presence of her ashes there. Husband and wife, Together Forever, and daughter off to the side. They wouldn’t have ever refused her.

I wish I could properly recount what the wind was doing that day, the way it sang. The wind and the birds. The mosquito chorus, thin and sharp. The train just rolls through town now, it doesn’t stop. We rumble loudly, we shamble through our lives. Where will we come to rest?

Touring around with a child’s memory: the wooden sculpture, the playground, the old pool through the chainlink fence. The alley behind the ice cream shop, behind the gas station. But most deeply I felt, knew, the broadness, the blanket of raincloud passing over in full view. Seeing all the weather at once. Seeing the spots in the cloud where the rain is falling, where the cloud tries to dip down, join with earth, pulled to it. I am past the nostalgia of canola fields. All I see now is industry’s skein over land. Power lines, highways, dugouts, the thin and thinning swaths of interruption at the ditches. A wet June, a good year for berries. The farmer’s wisdom: Good year for saskatoons, bad year for crops.

I find the parkland, the little parcels held away. I stare as long as I can at the wind through the grasses before the mosquitos overwhelm me. I look up the English names for things, the names I should have learned long ago. The thinness of grass blades helps them exist in the dryness. And how they sing in greens when there’s moisture. How the sage perfumes the air. How my body, my being knows this, wordlessly, and misses this, always trying to use words to find its way back. Learning the names of the grasses, meeting the grasses, meeting the trees. Being, for a short while, where we tried to root.