As I was working on my writing course this afternoon, I came across this letter I wrote to my mom on Valentine’s Day 2003. She wasn’t well. Dementia and strokes had taken their toll and I hoped to trigger good memories for her. In doing so, I triggered my own.

Though I end the letter by promising to come and see her that summer, it didn’t happen. She passed over on May 1, 2003, Beltaine, and so this ended up being a kind of farewell.

I do hope someone read it to her. We loved the same things, her and I. I hope she closed her eyes and traveled with me among the trees and flowers and bygone seasons. I hope for a moment she relived the beauteous times of her life on our farm in Pickering.

My Dearest Mom:

It is St. Valentine’s Day. My daughter is almost twenty, and you are in your ninetieth year. I float somewhere in between, still feeling like a young woman, but when I look into the department store mirror I see someone unrecognizable. I wonder if I will ever feel my age. This is a kind of limbo. I am beyond childbearing, yet I often feel like a child. And, of course, I am. I am your child and will always be. I find you in a country garden, in a warm jar of preserved peaches, in a well-worn novel, in a nonsense rhyme, and a giggle.

Do you know that I remember all the trees and flowers from our farm? On the roadside, a tangle of tiger lilies swelled each spring, and beside them hovered a chokecherry bush. Dixie Road was hidden by a hedge of cedars that grew into an impenetrable wooden wall over the years. At the front door snug against the blue cement steps was your rockery—a murmuring mass of blooms: purply blue delphiniums, giant hot pink peonies swarming with ants, crimson gladiolas, and fuzzy, buttery irises towered over the blossoming ground creepers.

In the backyard, a weeping willow tickled my rosy cheeks, the arm of an old apple tree held my makeshift steel trapeze, and Manitoba maples multiplied each year when the wind unleashed their keys. It was a topsy-turvy world, as I swung on my trapeze hanging by my knees, and sometimes by my ankles. Beside my playhouse and the old outhouse, the lilac garden marked the border into the vegetable fields. The north side was a hubbub of rhubarb, and the south side a soft plethora of yellow primroses, and deep blue Sweet William.  I remember them all. Do you?

The orchard was a place to lie and drift in the misty veils of clouds that shifted shapes and whispered words. I wrote poems there, beneath the old apricot tree where a Baltimore oriole had been seduced by the coral blossoms and built a silken nest that swayed like a stocking from its branches. A tiny cherry tree clung to life amidst several pear trees and my favourite apples, a half snow-half something that I’ve never been able to find again. 

Was spring your favourite season as it was mine? The first shoots burst through the mud and snow, creeks swelled their banks and called to me and my rubber boots. Bees raced to pollinate the blossoms like eager young boys darting this way and that throughout the gardens. Purple violets and lily of the valley burst through the emerald grass and all the earth awoke.

Summer was sewn up by rows of potatoes, peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, and carrots all demanding attention. A long row of raspberries enticed Bootsie who loved to nibble them off the branches. And what you did with that harvest.

One wall in the damp stony cellar was lined with shelves of preserves: jars of pinky red tomatoes, bright orange peaches, green chunky relishes, bread and butter pickles. How did you ever manage? And then it was pear-picking time and ladders were set up in the orchard so baskets of succulent green pears could be sent off to Richardson’s IGA in Pickering Village. It was a miraculous place to grow up, akin to the earth, listening to the winds, the insects, the birds, the trees and flowers. It lives in my memory. Can you remember it too?

Now there must be snow on the ground in Pickering, crusting the earth, and ice-encased branches tapping against the windows begging for release. I hated winter. I hated the cold, the trudging, the attempts at tobogganing in the back fields and skating at William’s pond by myself. I tried to like it. But I hated it. My frozen toes, numb in damp snow boots, would itch like crazy when I finally warmed them. The upper tips of my ears threatened to break off, and they too would itch when they finally thawed. The only things I really loved were the gigantic icicles that clung from roof corners, and the feathery paintings by Jack Frost on our living room windows. I hibernated, like the rest of the earth’s creatures, and came alive again in spring.

Winter was the reason I moved to B.C. Here, there is only a long, long autumn followed by a long, long spring. Here I am awake all year long, hiking in the rainforest and along the ocean. Here I do not freeze and itch for months at a time. 

I don’t miss Ontario, but I do miss you, Mom. And I wish that I could be with you, especially now that you’re not well.  You must remember to eat and drink as much as you can. Please. Water is our life force. So you must drink even when you don’t feel like it.

And in the summer I will come. I promise.

I love you … now and forever. Wendy