Is this the age at which it happens?
That we start remembering our earliest childhood?
This weekend in Niagara on the Lake was filled with triggers and flashbacks and moments filled with some of my first joys -- and first terrors.
But mostly the joys.
Tonight I find myself suddenly remembering my grandfather, his white skin, strong hands, his beautiful smile and the way he had to stoop to pass through doorways.
He was tall and straight and white, even after his second stroke, even after he lost his speech, even after so many terrors befell him.
He used to lift me to the skies, urging me to fly.
And he had such great, beautiful, hands.
This weekend I found my fairytales again, and with them so many of my ogres and heroes. I have a first line. A beginning.
This weekend so much other magic happened, and somehow we've been invited back to house-sit this nearly two-hundred year old house, to keep the cats company, cuddle amidst feather blankets and white lace canopies, surrounded by vinyards and...
and heroes.
Len and Suzanne were amongst the amazing of the people I've met, filled with humour and passion and creativity. I watched the sun rise across stark treetops, and then wandered into the Great Warm of their kitchen and tried to wrestle them into letting me help with breakfast.
Somehow I get the feeling that we all left the weekend awash with wonder, arms laden with irish wool sweaters (in white, no less), surprising wine from a tiny vinyard that hasn't made it into the stores yet, ears still ringing from the chill wind over the lake as it struck at us beneath our blankets on a whitewashed horse-drawn carriage, we went climbing and went to the theatre and I remembered enough of a book that I read ten years ago to catch where they ran off with the story, and forgive them for it.
And on the ride home, something, perhaps Gandalf's great brilliant whiteness, perhaps more flashes from this weekend, the first time my father beat me, the old stone hearth in Poland and the way all the men (except my father) had to step carefully down two steps to stoop through the front door.
And right now, I am anxious, waiting for my life to change with Cristal's imminent arrival, and I am thinking of my grandfather
and his brilliant white face, and his beautiful hands.
He died on my tenth birthday, not long after the world had already begun ending.
He had such beautiful hands.