Through the woods to Grandma's house...

For the past two weeks I've been staring at my computer background, halfway between smiling and tearing up.

It's not your traditional computer backdrop. It's a photo from the Thanksgiving Monday and a sojourn to the north, two hours to be exact, to my grandmother's home town of Markdale. It's the home of Chapman's Ice Cream, Steven's BBQ and the quaintest town you've ever seen.

The main street hosts a few choice shops, my favourite "Peek Thru My Window," in existence for over 20 years and that is the last time I spent any time in the place. There's the old firehall, now an information centre, a Food Town where Gramma did all of her shopping and two churches just steps from each other, like there's hope that religious entities can co-exist in a small space.

It's also where my grandmother lived, my father's mother, and where my brother and I spent many happy a summer picking raspberries in the back garden and yelling down the heat grates from the bedroom upstairs to see what was on the breakfast menu. I know that tonka trucks and cars were also dropped down the grates, often narrowily missing the porridge pot on the stove.

I still have the memories but it's also the house that I miss, the insatiable need to slide down the bannister, complete with large wooden ball at the end. There's the country kitchen that seems so much smaller than I remember, the back bedroom where the daddy long legs always seemed to be in abundance.

I paid my respects to the house on this Monday, taking The Man and Boyo the Boxer to meet it. And, I was a little nervous to mount the front steps and introduce myself to the now-owners. The house was sold in the mid-80s, out of the family that had been its caretakers since the late 1800s. It had proven too much to maintain. The pipes always froze in the winter, the roof was needing replaced and it was too big for my diminutive grandmother who was starting to forget to eat, forget to throw out spoiled food and even how to cook her famous meals of salmon sandwiches, chili and roast beef. Porridge was almost never on the menu anymore.

The owners were really gracious, recognizing the last name that had been permanently etched a hundred times over in the brick wall of the side porch. My great uncle, grandfather, brother and a slew of other family members too long gone from memory. They're all still there, watching over the homestead.

I was very upset way back when my grandmother was considering selling the house. It was my home away from home, my place to yell down the heating grates that once had pipes running through from the wood burning stove in the kitchen.

My grandmother died in 1989 from emphysema, from years of smoking and bouts of asthma. She was 78. And it was back in 1989 that I had even stepped foot in the town where my grandmother lived. It was comforting to see that it hadn't changed that much - a few changes in businesses, new lines painted on the road but the same small town feel was intact. I felt instantly comforted. The fact that the new owners offered me a beer helped too.

What touched me the most as I walked up to the door with a whole bunch of Nervous Nellies floating around in my belly was that my grandmother's door knocker, full of brass and very lion-like was still there - a testament of who came before. The door had been given a new paint job, red with passion, and the old green indoor-outdoor carpet had given way to a concrete landing, but the door knocker remained.

I knocked on the door with that door knocker, a lion's share of memories still intact and I was instantly transported to my five-year-old self playing Nicky Nine Doors with my grandma. I only wish she would have answered the door.

** Photos finally posted. Procrastination strikes again!

Rememories...

When I was little I constantly mixed up memory and remember. Easy to do, isn't it? I thought so, and my parents thought it was ever-so cute that they still tell the story. "Remember when you used to say 'I have a really good rememory'?" And then they'd laugh, at their cleverness, at me, at my cuteness.

I no longer mix up the words but sometimes bring it out at opportune times to get a giggle from my dad. He'd then launch into another memory - about me, at 18 months old - wearing really, really big, pink sunglasses. I mean really big. Really. Or about my very first black eye. Okay, I've had only one, but the story is cute so he insists on telling it.

I had decided in my wise five-year-old brain that it was a brilliant idea to fashion a train out of two bikes joined together by a long skipping rope. What I hadn't taken into account was the physics of the task, with my oversized tryke and my friend's oh-so-cool but much squatter two-wheeler with training wheels. All was well until we went around the corner . She went one way, I went the other and landed face first on the pavement. And from high on my perch, it was quite a tumble.

But, I didn't cry, and I think that's what my dad was most proud of. Not one tear. Instead, I calmly walked back to my house, went inside to where my dad was reading in his bathroom library (I actually gave him a sign that read "This is a bathroom not a library," until he reminded me that I was afflicted with the same bathroom reading disease). I calmly asked if he could come out and look at something. He opened the door and I said in my five-year-old voice: "Daddy, is this black?" I explained what had happened and he handed me a cold face cloth and said "Don't tell your mother or you'll never be allowed back on that bike." I wondered then how he could be so intuitive. Well, I wondered how he could be so smart as I had yet to learn what "intuitive" meant.

I have a lot of rememories, from as far back as I can remember. Some are as clear as day and others are a little blurry from years of trying to remember particulars. Sometimes I still feel like that little girl who was inaugurated into the world of black eyes, who would run past doors in the basement for fear of hands reaching out to grab her, or would hide behind her father's legs when she was too shy to even say hello. I've outgrown my shyness to some extent, but in new situations I still wish I could fit behind my father's legs. I wish he could still swing me into a pool and cheer when I managed to swim up to the surface.

He's older now, approaching 80, but don't tell him. He'll just deny it. But I couldn't deny it about eight years ago when he went into the hospital to repair a bulge in his aorta. My mother was a basket case, which is a normal occurence, and I was going through the start of a messy separation and subsequent divorce. And here was my father, my hero, my slayer of dragons, the man who would tell me we were going to Timbuktu when we were driving only an hour north to visit my grandmother, hooked up to intravenous tubes, oxygen and a mess of EKG wires monitoring his huge, loving heart. His damaged heart.

I fainted. I felt so weak, like I did at four years old, scared of the monsters lurking beneath the stairs. But this time the monsters were real - a potentially fatal bulge and a threat of oncoming pneumonia - it was the first time, in my 30 years, that I was faced with my own father's mortality. It was close and I wanted to hold my breath until the monster went away.

The story has a happy ending. My father and I got a reprieve. The operation was a success, and while the recovery was a tough one - pneumonia did rear its ugly head - we fought the monster together and we've had almost nine more years of memories.

I've always thought my dad was cool. While I often romanticized my mother's Scottish upbringing, it was my father who held the cool card. A third-generation Canadian in Ontario farmland, my father grew up in the time between the Depression and World War II. He not only knew what a "teddy boy" was, he was one. He had a pet crow that would land on his head on his way home from school, he knew how to rollerskate, ride a bike and a horse and he could whistle any tune. When I was 12 and entering into my pre-teen world, my father offered to drop me off at the roller skating place - SkateCountry - and I was mortified when he announced that he would skate too. Until he put the skates on and did five laps around the rink -- he could kick my butt on rollerskates, blindfolded.

At 78 (or 80 as I often add two years on for good measure), Joe is still cool. He's Joe Cool, the epitome of cool, and though we may disagree on some key points, I know that he'll always offer me refuge behind his legs. I can always count on him for a quick joke and a teasing tone and a twinkle in his eye as he says he should have got another dog instead of having me. A quick wink and I know he's got his fingers crossed behind his back. Thank goodness for reprieves.