How do we end up where we are?

How do we end up where we are?  Is it our own choice, or is it something more mysterious?  The way we frame the story of our own life is critically important.

Once it was common for a woman to go wherever her man found work.  Some men followed their women, or (rarely) a couple decided together where to put down roots.  I was in the first category, and for years it worked on me, that I hadn’t moved to Canada by choice, but that my husband had moved us here.

He said it would only be for a year or less, but from the beginning he loved his job and never really considered working anywhere else.  Then we had children and they grew up Canadian, and gradually I understood we weren’t going anywhere.

Anti-Americanism, social reticence, and long cold winters were elements of life here that I found difficult.  Eventually I became a Canadian citizen—a dual citizen.  I recognized with deep gratitude the value of socialized medicine, the rich mix of people around me from all over the world, the fascinating history and beauty of the landscape in what is falsely believed to be one of Canada’s ugliest cities–Hamilton, Ontario.

Yet even as I built friendships and became part of a community I would now find very difficult to leave, I continued to feel that, had the choice been mine, I would not have settled here.

Then something happened that made me stop.  Stop regretting all those roads not taken.  Something that reminded me bigger elements are at work.

I’d met my husband in Indiana, where I was a graduate student in English and he was a post-doc in Biochemistry.  When we married, we knew he would have to leave the U.S., as he’d come from Ireland on a three-year Fulbright Scholarship. To live in the States, he would have to reapply from outside it.  So he came up to Hamilton’s McMaster University, and the rest is my history.

After my mother died my sisters and I went to close the house I grew up in.  It’s in a small Western Kentucky town, one I still get homesick for, though it has changed radically since I left.  The house had been ours for over sixty years and there were layers to excavate.

It was the labour of love so many people know—discovering thousands of family memories through mundane objects: Daddy’s prayer book and rosary; his toolbox; Mama’s rain cap in the Anderson’s Hairdressers’ envelope; her green-handled kitchen scissors.  We call it “breaking up housekeeping”, but it is also heartbreaking, to dispose properly of all this stuff made precious by those who handled it.

It took us weeks.  We all had our various lives and responsibilities to get back to.  In the end, to my deep satisfaction, I was the last person in the house.  The rooms, echoing and shining, were empty for the first time since 1940. Only a few things at the back of the hall closet were left to go through.

Under some coats and blankets, I found a small trunk, winkled it out into the hallway and opened it up.  Paper.  This was what threatened to bring us down during those weeks of cleaning–the piles of paper that had to be gotten through.  And here were more letters, bills, documents, notebooks, all from the decade before I was born, the 1940s.

After hours of reading, I reached down into the very bottom of the trunk and drew out the last object in the whole house to be sorted.  It was a paperback booklet and when I read the cover I felt one of those cosmic jolts that throw you from your horse.  I recognized the image before I could confirm it by the title:  Souvenir Booklet of the Cathedral of Christ the King, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1947.

For a moment I sat on the floor of the hall in utter disbelief, staring at it.  I know Hamilton’s Cathedral well. I’ve attended many services there; two of my children graduated from high school in it.  One Lent I went there to pray for one hour every day after work.  Now here it was, helping me close my family home 1,000 kilometers away.

In 1975, when I told my family I was moving to Hamilton, no one had said a word about any connection we had to such a foreign place.  No one said, “Oh yes—Hamilton.  We have a booklet on their cathedral.”  That might have made me feel less strange about going there.  I suppose they’d forgotten about the souvenir.

And yet, I understood how we had come to have it—our only Canadian connection.  My beloved Aunt Cil had attended St. Bernard’s Academy in Nashville, Tennessee in 1929.  It was an exclusive girls’ high school. (The story of why she went there for her senior year is too long for this blog, though it, too, is filled with serendipity.)

One of her friends there was Catherine Laurent, from St. Catharines, Ontario.  I knew Cil had visited her in the late ‘40s. Now I could piece it together that, being a devout Catholic, Cil must’ve made a side-trip to Hamilton’s then-new Cathedral of Christ the King.  She brought the booklet back to my parents as a keepsake.

A keepsake indeed.  It reconciled my heart to my second home, as I closed the first.

As my friend Jo (born in Wisconsin, living in British Columbia) often reminds me, “We are exactly where we are meant to be.”

—

Bernadette Rule‘s most recent poetry collection is The Literate Thief: Selected Poems (Larkspur Press, Monterey, Ky. 2007). She also edited the book Remember Me to Everybody: Letters From India, 1944 to 1949 by Frederick Gower Turnbull (West Meadow Press, 1997) and In the Wings: Stories of Forgotten Women (Seraphim Editions, 2012).  Rule teaches at Mohawk College and hosts the weekly arts-interview program, Art Waves (archive.org/details/artwaves).  A new poetry collection, Paper Doors, is forthcoming from Larkspur Press.

 

 

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Category: On Writing