The Rain May 27, 2011

I wasn’t able to stop my blood,

from waging war against my kidneys

no matter how many false forecasts

I announced on the morning radio;

how many times I resisted the

questions of teachers in hallways

and doctors with clipboards.

“I’m fine,” when I wasn’t.

 

I hid under store awnings and newspapers:

behind sullen faces with defiant gestures,

slipping on raincoats that

turned out to only be water resistant;

I didn’t read the fine print when I

bought my solutions off the

sale rack last spring:

cheap fixes never work

in the long term.

The pill bottles kept

piling up on kitchen counters.

 

In the end, I had to face it:

one can’t hide forever.

Walking outside and watching

the rivulets form on the pavement,

sending hot summer days

down the overflow drains

I cried my tears into the arms of

my sisters and my mother.

I learned strength and resilience

and the kindness of friends.

 

Listen to the rain’s repetitive beat,

like the words of a sermon.

There’s a moral somewhere.

 

Trapped in the green chairs

of hospital waiting rooms with

bits of dreams left behind like

chewing gum,

I thought of the people who

stood up for me and of the

inner understanding

only hard times can bring:

my ability to withstand

the force of the winds

bad weather brings.

 

I eventually came to accept

that the rain is like the tide:

it comes in and clears away

the footprints to make way for

new ones, uncovering beach glass

and pennies the metal detector

never found.

 

Grandma Marion May 26, 2011

This is another narrative written for my English class. I realize I haven’t written a lot of bloggy posts, but hopefully some of those are coming too.

My black dress doesn’t fit right, sitting low on my narrow eleven-year old shoulders. Adults in dark clothes with somber faces mill around me in the wide beige hall. The coat racks are full and dusted with Winnipeg snow, like the memories drifting back to people’s minds today, melting between conversations. It’s my grandmother’s memorial.

I never saw a lot of Grandma Marion, living in different cities a plane ride apart. It was forever a point of regret for me, to hear how my friends spent afternoons baking cookies or going downtown with their grandparents. My father made little effort to return to Winnipeg. “Swarms of mosquitos invade in summer and it’s negative forty degrees in winter.” Yet, once a year, my grandmother hauled her bags through the swinging doors of Vancouver’s airport arrivals section.

Her skin was loose from smoking and her hair was aged to a glossy white, but she always had energy left for me. When she came to visit, we flopped onto the ragged carpet of the living room for games of triple solitaire, her hands carefully guiding mine into proper plays. Grandma Marion showed me how to make fried eggs. Seasoning lunch with her love, she helped me melt just enough butter onto the bottom of the iron skillet before sliding in the cracked egg. As a goodbye gift, she would leave individual jars of delicious homemade raspberry jam preserved from her sprawling garden patch. I masking-taped my name to my jar and thought of her every time I spread it onto my bread or waffles. She made me feel valued and cared about.

Now she is gone. Her spirit is evaporated into the atmosphere, but these memories of her left inside me are as solid as the ashes from her cremation. Though I didn’t spend much time with Grandma Marion, those little moments of care and love: the games of solitaire, the jars of homemade jam, the lessons in cooking eggs made all the difference. She taught me how much giving a genuine piece of yourself can mean, no matter how seemingly small or infrequent.

Examining the still frames of Grandma Marion projected in cycles on the wall, I vow to take an extra moment, to think of her and write a personal message on birthday cards, to make homemade gifts for my family, or to sit down to a game of Monopoly with my cousins. It is the thought and time that matter most.

First Impressions May 24, 2011

I spent last summer in Quebec working at a nature centre. It was the same time that the Frozen Tic Tacs got started. So when I wrote this narrative for my English class set during that period, I decided to share it. 

The air, heavy with humid heat, has chased all our customers to the overcrowded public pools, away from canoeing on the reflected glare of the lake. I yank my lunch out of the small fridge and slide down the grimy wall to settle beside Renée. My usual work friends are sick or on vacation.

“Hi Renée.” Skinny and small for sixteen, her eyes pop with brilliant blue contacts and her bleached hair blends into her pale skin. Two snakebite piercings protrude from her lip, still slightly swollen from the procedure. She rarely talks to the rest of us, preferring her ipod and her Rob Zombie music. She’s the type of person I normally leave a wide berth around, unable to comprehend the desire to defy society so physically.

“Hey,” she answers stiffly, tugging out an earbud. The conversation begins haltingly. We discuss a heavy metal concert, an irritating group of summer camp kids, her obsession with anime. I lament getting lost downtown. We both find we actually have a lot to share. Over the next few hours, my perception of her slowly shifts.

It is surprisingly easy to dig past the tough exterior she preserves against the influence of others. Facts slip out. Her parents ended their marriage in a nasty divorce and she now lives with her dysfunctional mother who is diagnosed with a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her father won’t take custody of her. At fourteen, she struggled with alcoholism. She still does. Underneath, I discover some of the reasons for her hard face and defiant dress. Maybe she is trying to compensate for her vulnerability.

As the afternoon sinks low on the horizon, I can see that she needed to talk, somebody to listen. I feel badly about my initial dismissal of her. I suppose it’s only natural to categorize in a matter of seconds.  We do this every day: selecting fruit at grocery stores, finding a friendly face to ask for directions at bus stops and scanning for interesting books in libraries. But appearances are only a tiny smudge of information. They don’t depict the layers of personality within or what might cause somebody to behave the way they do. That takes time and effort.

Idly eyeing Renée leaning against the plastic chair legs, I glimpse myself for a moment: the angry, scrawny middle school Saskia swallowing medications that bloated my face and missing a class a week for doctor’s appointments. I was once written off too. I pretended I didn’t care, scurrying to the library at lunch and demanding solo projects from teachers. But I gradually got better and fell into my skin, thanks to a few kind and dedicated people who stuck with me.

Renée is never going to be my best friend, but I can understand where she comes from and respect her. I can find an alcove beside the fridge and have a good conversation or two. She needs that, as I once did. If you give people a chance, you never know what you’ll find.

The Unexplainable May 11, 2011

I believe in the unexplainable

This summer, I found God 10 km up a dirt backpacking trail.

The sun set over the backdrop of jagged peaks, brushing a varnish of orange on every surface. I crouched on the rocks beside Floe Lake, my blistered feet left bare and chilly. I didn’t care because all I could focus on was the view before me, the power in its magnitude and violent beauty. Here was my church.

I tried religion when I was younger. Lying in bed, I closed my eyes and did my best to pray. On one family vacation, I even decided to read the bible tucked in the drawer of our motel room. I went to a Sunday school class when visiting my grandmother. The problem was, I just couldn’t accept its logic.

My grandmother’s prayer lists (I found them online once, much to my shock) didn’t cure my Lupus or my mother’s depression. They didn’t save my father from a fatal heart attack or my aunt from terminal cancer. What benevolent being could make any of those events part of “the plan?”

Instead of sitting in a pew listening to the words of a pastor when I felt angry or sad, I went outside. Bushwhacking up mossy slopes and curling up in the crook of fallen trees, I cried my tears into the dirt and flowers of the wild. I found solace in its unapologetic arms.

It’s not easy to accept unpredictability. People like order. Our city streets are patterned into a grid-work, our days are framed by schedules, and our habits are graphed by statistics. Life is treated as a math equation with inputs equaling outputs. There is a formula, a reason for everything. Surely God has a plan, even if we don’t understand it. No. That’s not true or satisfying. My God doesn’t let the world fall to ruin from a heavenly perch, leaving me forever searching for His ulterior motive.

These ideas didn’t fully materialize until that moment in the light of the fading sun. The mountain before me didn’t control its destiny. It was formed by some ancient earthquake and reshaped by erosion from wind and snow. In the sparse woods that braved the elevation, owls caught and killed mice, fires burned the hillside, and landslides felled nests. None of this happened for a greater purpose or as divine punishment. It simply was.

Life is random. Maybe I’ll die tomorrow. Maybe I won’t. But there’s no plan. I don’t sit and second-guess myself or the objectives behind events I can’t control. I don’t yell at or pray to a God that isn’t listening anyway. I stare at the forest and remind myself that life is wild and unexplainable, but in the end that’s part of its beauty and part of mine. I must accept and move on because there is no reason. This is what gives me peace of mind. This I believe.

En Québec July 20, 2010

This is week two of my stay in Quebec and it is beginning to feel more and more like home. Today, I waited for the bus in the rain: my raincoat hanging almost to the edge of my shorts. Once on board, I watched out the window as the bus passed the large brown river, the high stone-fenced jail, the little street of boutiques and finally the cement bridge. Each landmark was familiar and I descended automatically at my stop.

Once at work, I spent the day chatting with my co-workers in the Boutique by the lake where I rent canoes and kayaks to park visitors. Yet as the rain meant no customers, we tidied the jumbled office, patched the leaky kayaks with fibreglass, went for a walk around the park to see the farm, and watched The Office on a laptop. It was sometime then, staring at the small screen and eating lime-flavoured popcorn, that I realized how quickly I have sunk into my Quebec life.

In the end, Montreal is not so different from Vancouver. I sleep under a giant poster of Jacob from Twilight, listen to English music on the radio, live in a similarly styled box-like house, eat the same brands of foods, and have a host brother who plays Left for Dead and Team Fortress addictively. When I go out with other exchange students, it is either to the mall (with the same chain stores I visit in Vancouver) or to the cinema (with the same movies I read reviews for in The Vancouver Sun). With the presence of T.V., movies, advertisements, and multinational companies, the “pop culture” is virtually identical.

The differences beyond poutine and beaver tails are more subtle. Through conversations with my host family and discussion on the dock at work, I have observed a strong sense of Québécois identity, one much stronger than anything I felt in B.C. It is much as my sister described. I was explained by Amélie, a girl at my work, that being called a French-Canadian is an insult to the Québécois. Most are not separatists; they simply consider themselves to be a culture in and of themselves. And much of the struggle to preserve this identity is expressed through French. When renting out kayacks or canoes, sometimes the other employees refuse to speak in English to those Anglophone customers who don’t make an effort in French. Increases in anglophone schools is an inflamatory issue exploited by the newspapers. Certainly, tensions are present between the two halves of Montreal.

It is for these observations that I am glad I am living and working inside the culture. An all-inclusive hotel resort surrounded by other tourists does not teach one about the place one is in. It does not peel back those commercially canned universal layers. Living in the suburbs and working without other Anglophones, I am being immersed in Quebec. As I make my place here for these six weeks, I hope to learn not just about La Ronde and Cirque du Soleil (which where both very fun), but also about the Québécois. I think I am already starting to.