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O Canada, Take Me Back
A story for Canadians by a wannabe
Okay, so maybe Canada is not my home and native land, but it should be. My grandfather, Adelard, was raised there on a working farm near Maniwaki in Quebec. He was one of eleven kids. I went to visit his family home when I was a child, after he died. I can only remember mountains of kittens, hay, and my relatives who spoke only French.
There were too many mouths to feed at my Grandpa’s, so when he was fifteen, he came down to the Adirondacks for logging, eventually met a nice Irish gal, my grandma Colleen, and settled down in New York. Because of his age, I think he might have immigrated here illegally. So what does that make me?
I didn’t grow up in the Adirondacks, because my parents went to college, had me, moved to Boston, then Atlanta, then Toronto, back to Atlanta, and finally to Baltimore, where I lived from seventh grade through twelfth. I started kindergarten in a brick building with an ice skating pond, in North York, Ontario.
I remember walking to school, on my own, at only six years old. Now that I have my own six-year-olds, I remarked to my mother that I couldn’t believe she let me do that! She told me she hated it, but had no choice because of the hyperemesis and her pregnancy with my sister. It was only a few blocks, after all.
