Now I see that dream as a warning and a prophecy of an immensely troubled time in my life that lay ahead of me, although I had no idea then about it, except to see it as a nightmare, more powerful than any other nightmare I had ever had. This nightmare didn’t wake me at the point where I was to be killed so that I could dismiss it in daylight, but woke me only when I had overcome the danger, and was going on my way, slowly, home. That is why I am inclined to see it as a prophecy, or some serious statement about my life.
No wonder, then, that when the two owls appeared in the trees and behaved so strangely they loomed a good deal larger than they might have had Peter been standing beside me with his field glasses and the two of us with years ahead together. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t help but take their presence as meaningful: nature, once again and in the most final way, acknowledging that it was time for me to go from that place. A day or two later, when I was cutting meat to make a stew, I deliberated for a while on all of this, not wanting to make whatever it was I was so afraid of worse. In the end, having no pets left to feed the scraps to, I took the trimmings from the meat — fat and gristle, a little bone — found the tinfoil wrapping paper we sometimes used for meat in the freezer, placed them in it, took the package outside, and placed it on the graveled lane between the two trees where the giant owls sat watching me. Then I went back inside, worrying that perhaps it wasn’t wise to try to appease the world of dreams by a concrete action in the waking world. But now that it is 2015 and I am an older woman, the consideration of my passage through the world having become my very job, it seems to me a not unreasonable thing to have done.
When I went out to check some time later, the meat was gone, and so were the owls. In another day — the very next day — I too would be gone. When the time came, I drove away with no one to bid good-bye to; I drove away from no one at all, the tires of my SUV crackling on the gravel, trailing shadows, memories, sorrows too immense to be recognized or delineated. It was late October 2008, and I was now sixty-eight years old.
The night Sean, my son, now a grown man with a job in Calgary and a wife and two beloved children, brought down a truck that was to be filled with a few bits of furniture and remaining items, a married couple who were friends came to help me pack. When they arrived, I had in each room one or two half-filled, open cardboard boxes. The wife came and asked me, as I worked in a bedroom, if she should close and tape the open boxes, and I could not even answer her, didn’t know the answer, so without my response she went away, threw into the boxes the things she guessed I might want from each room, taped the boxes closed, and loaded them into the truck my son was filling with the small armchair Peter had given me for my birthday, a couple of lamps, a few basic kitchen items, some bedding, and some household tools. All this while I — did what? I’m not sure I did anything, although I was walking around looking at things without being able to make a single decision about so much as my toothbrush. I wonder now how on earth I thought I could manage the city. Perhaps by closing my eyes and leaping as I had done when, half a lifetime before, I left the city for my new life with Peter on the land.
I didn’t know where or how I wanted to live in the world. I somehow believed an anvil would come crashing down from the sky with the name of the place I was supposed to be still smoking on it. It seemed far too early to think of buying a house or a condo. Besides the uncertainty that I was even in the right city, I found I could not cope with the simplest demand. I who had been an active rancher’s wife and a busy writer and speaker seemed adrift. For two years, then, I lived in a rented dingy one-bedroom apartment not far from my son and his family, having arranged things so that all I had to do was to write one cheque each month; it was all I could manage. If I saw documents that required anything more, I started to shake; I had to put them down and go into another room. It might take me as long as three days before I could read and properly digest what was in them, much less act on them. I can say about this only that I was still in shock from the trauma of having to leave behind everything I had cared about; I often felt (not without some shame, given that it is so much worse for others) that I was like a refugee who, overnight, has to abandon her home and community for a strange country where she knows no one and does not even speak the language.
In our life together Peter had been in charge of just about everything but the kitchen, and I had acquiesced in this chiefly because I was not a rural person; I knew nothing about farming or ranching or domestic animals other than pets. The ranch and the hay farm were his; he handled the accounts and made all the decisions about them, and his obvious competence meant that I would not have thought of questioning him. I understood that his having married at forty-one, years earlier having settled comfortably into his role as owner and manager, meant that he would not be able to share with me the running of the operation. I had thought — because I was ignorant of that world, and in any case, did not want the responsibility — this was wise. After all, over the years, I had created my own world as a writer next to his, and he did not intervene in it.
With his death, I suddenly found myself in charge of everything. I did not even know which cheque-book to use or from which account to pay simple household bills, and I was plunged into managing the most intimate and important matters landowners and householders in Canada have to deal with. I suppose that what was wrong with me might have been diagnosed if I had sought out a grief counselor. But my pride would not allow it. I see now how foolish that was. A part of it was probably my subconscious but powerful resistance to being alone, my rage at having to care for myself entirely. But looking back, I believe I was also trying to create a safe place for myself in which to heal before I ventured out to make my new life.
For two long years in the city, I stumbled around trying to make a life for myself, living in that small, dark apartment so that friends (the same friends who had helped me pack, or rather, who had packed for me) would say in dismay when they visited, “You should be living in a better place than this.” Eventually, fate intervened. Well into my second winter in Calgary, there was an invasion of mice that even two different exterminators couldn’t rid me of. I like to think now that Peter sent them, knowing as he did that if neither earthquake, avalanche, nor six-alarm fire, nor the drugged-out man I stepped over one morning to get into the parking garage could make me move again, a horde of mice could.
Or perhaps I was, at last, healing. With my son’s constant help in showing me how to navigate the traffic, where certain stores were, and how urban people did things, I was getting used to the way people live in cities, and I was less frightened of my new environment. And as time passed, my grief mercifully started to lessen. Time can be a gift; it can blunt the worst of trauma and provide the sufferer some emotional distance from it. Somewhere around the time I moved into the sunny, two-bedroom condo I now live in as owner, I re-considered that ten-years-left notion. I’d been counting down the years ever since Peter died, watching without alarm but with disbelief as each one went by, and I was around the seven-years-left mark when one morning I woke and a voice said in my head, Not ten years left; you have twenty left. It sounded so authoritative that I didn’t even think to dispute it. Besides, I knew the statistics by then. I was in good health; I probably would live about another fifteen to seventeen years.
Seventeen years! What a long time that is, I thought, so long that one can’t really quite imagine it, and all my horizons deepened and dissolved into a fine mauve-coloured mist, as if I were thirteen again and had uncountable time before me. But with the possibility of a renewed life came the notion that it was too long, too much time. I didn’t know how I would fill it beyond lunching with friends; going to movies, concerts, and plays. Worse, in the middle of a sleepless night it occurred to me that with so much time ahead of me I would live another life, a different life, that those thirty-three profound, sometimes magical years would be displaced. When I thought of that, I was aghast. And yet, as a writer I was quite able to imagine all sorts of twi
sts and turns in the lives of my characters. Why should I be any different?
Nevertheless, until I was well into the writing that preceded the actual creation of this book, I was unable to remember a puzzling thing my mother once said to me. She died three days before her seventy-seventh birthday, when I was forty-six, of breast cancer, her second round with it, the whole business taking four years from the beginning when in the shower she found a lump in one breast while visiting her younger sister Jessie in Florida — she who had never had the chance to travel — telling no one, deciding it could wait until she got home a month later, to the end.
This was in the week before she drew her last breath as she lay in bed at the house of one of my sisters in Saskatoon, and the day before she fell into the three-day coma that would end with her death. I must have been wanting to have that last mother-daughter conversation that would explain everything to me about my life, her life, our family’s life, and knowing she would soon be gone and that I could never again ask her a question, I leaned over her, waiting for her to open her eyes. Private mother-daughter conversations are scarce in a family of five girls; there was too much competition for her time and she had had so little of it when we were all at home driving her crazy with all our demands and needs. Everybody else was for the moment downstairs, washing dishes, getting a breath of fresh air, crying quietly in the bathroom. It was my moment.
I don’t know where the question came from. I know I had not framed it exactly, although I will acknowledge that I wanted to ask her something about her life, or what she thought about life in general now, at this decisive moment. Perhaps I wanted some word from her that would change my own life.
“Mom,” I said, as gently as I could, and softly, so as not to startle her, “when was the best time?” I meant the best period of her life, knowing that she had always made us think of our family’s beginnings in the bush wilderness of northeast Saskatchewan as the worst possible time, and knowing also that she had already had her great life dream, the one that is viewed by those who work with the dying as a significant marker of impending death — an idyllic picture of herself on horseback galloping across a flower-dappled, sunshine-bathed green meadow. The image came out of her girlhood on the Manitoba prairie, where she had been born; I remembered her telling us when we were little girls, her eyes distant, her face glowing, “There is nothing like galloping on a horse, your hair streaming out behind, things rushing by you, the power of the horse under you. . . .” Maybe she was going to repeat that story again. Or maybe it would be, “When you were all little girls around me and your father and I . . .” (Our father, who had died at only sixty-seven, had been dead for fourteen years.) Or maybe her teen years in the 1920s, when she appeared in the small black-and-white photos of the time to have a ton of girlfriends, all laughing together and acting silly. Or maybe in mid-life, when we were gone from home and she got a job and had her own money and was out in the adult world again.
Moistening her lips with her tongue, her jaw moving for just a second before she could make a sound, startling me by lifting a thin hand — what small, beautiful hands our mother had — to point shakily down toward her chest, in a voice I had to lean closer to hear, she said, as emphatically as she could manage, “Now!”
If I was staggered by this, and I must have been, there was so much more to think about just then: the palliative nurse’s daily visit, questioning the doctor about this or that — medication, management, that sort of thing — our own memories, our own lives on hold for this terrible week, our own children coming and going, friends and relatives phoning. Strangely, I don’t remember thinking about what she said again until I decided years later to write this book. I was well into my research, reading books about aging, writing reams and reams that would all hit the paper shredder or the recycling bin, when suddenly I remembered.
With growing awe and surprise, I remembered that she had chosen her old age as the best time of her life, had chosen it even while she was about to die, when surely we at last encounter the truth, when we no longer have any reason to prevaricate. With our father dead, all of us grown and scattered across the western provinces, she was living alone in a small house in an older, tree-lined district of the city, growing beautiful flowers in her small backyard, reading huge amounts of not-too-demanding literature (she especially liked historical fiction). This very smart woman chose a simple existence, even turning down a marriage offer from an old family friend without seeming to give it the smallest consideration, as if she had had enough of real life, watching television, knitting and embroidering, visiting occasionally with friends, relatives from elsewhere dropping in as they passed through town, her social life reduced to family gatherings with her children, their spouses, and her grandchildren if they could be rounded up to attend. She was alone a lot, especially in winter, but she never complained. She was calm and exuded an air of peacefulness, no longer seemed discontented or angry, but ruminated about her past as she knitted or hooked a small rug. Gentleness had entered her demeanour, and most interesting of all was the way, over those last few years, she had become beautiful. I see this only now, from a perspective of twenty-seven years without her, but I think all of this might have been a kind of happiness.
How odd it was that I didn’t recall this moment. That such a time in her life might be the best was inconceivable to me then, and in a mixture of bafflement and disbelief, I filed her reply to my question somewhere deep, wishing she had never said it. I still wanted to believe that life — anybody’s life — held some kind of dramatic pay-off. But the older I get, the more I wonder at the way the human memory works: Everything is there, stored away, waiting for the right moment to come rushing back into consciousness. Now I was old and widowed myself, in a time when the inescapable realization that I would never again be young had arrived, when I was invisible on the street and in stores and cafés. I, who had spent my mid-life, well over thirty years, in the midst of vast acres of wild grass, was now living the truncated life of the urban condo dweller, alone. This, I thought, this was my mother’s best time of her life? When she was alone?
Stranded in the alien kingdom of the city, loneliness and fear alternating with exhilaration and hopefulness, I pondered this mystery.
THE LOW HORIZON
Sharon walking at the ranch circa 1995.
3
The Great Leap
I first saw the southwest in about 1974, and it felt to me as if I had come into another country and different, earlier century to live. I asked myself how I could have lived in Saskatchewan almost all my life and not even known this place existed. Although the area I’m writing about is bigger than the state of Vermont, there are few highways leading into or through it; no wide, swiftly flowing rivers; no majestic lakes or snow-capped purple mountains or even cities to attract visitors, nor is it a route to something exciting just over the border in the United States. Farms, ranches, graveled roads leading to small towns, villages, and hamlets are set in a vast (then) relatively untouched landscape. With the exception of the beautiful Cypress Hills and the interprovincial park that runs east–west across the bulk of the hills, there seemed to be no reason at all to go there.
When I first saw it, the entire region — excluding the small city of Swift Current — had a population of only about 10,000 people: Vermont’s population is about 700,000. Or, if you prefer, the smaller area I went to live in is about five times bigger than Prince Edward Island, which has a population of about 147,000. In fact, the region where the ranch is located went from having no stable, resident Euro-Canadian population in the 1880s to a slow influx of settlers until, in the twenties, it reached a population of about twenty per square mile (that is, there was either a single male or a family on nearly every quarter section), but by the time I arrived, in the seventies, this was reduced to about 1.5 persons per square mile. This meant that in practice there were many large areas on which nobody at all lived; for the most part, these areas are still unpopulated. The ranch when I firs
t arrived was then about twenty square miles — four miles by five miles — in size, but it was bordered on the west and north by a provincial pasture of about one hundred square miles in size. On these two pieces of land lived only the Butala family, and perhaps six miles away, the pasture manager and his family on the provincial government pasture. The other closest homes were each about four miles from the Butala house to the south, southeast, and east.
The particular area where the Butala ranch is located wasn’t opened for settlement until about 1910, when all the best land and land closest to established towns of some size and to the railway had already been taken. Those who adapted best were those who accepted that nobody could survive on a mere 160 acres, as the land wasn’t fertile enough; that at least 640 acres or a full section, one mile by one mile, was the basic amount needed; and further, given the quality of the soil, that ranching was probably a better plan than farming. The eventually more than 13,000 acres of the Butala ranch had at one time been the small holdings of something like eighteen families or single men; these people, one by one, had left, only a dozen or so actually acquiring title to their land before they gave up and moved elsewhere. Some parts of the ranch had never had a single settler on them.
Where I Live Now Page 4