Rerouting

A perfect Saskatchewan September Sunday afternoon in 1981, chauffeuring my mom and dad east from my place in Saskatoon to Muenster, then north to the Pathlow cutoff, a 2 ½-hour trip to visit my Aunt Dorothy (Mom’s sister) and Uncle Wilbur on their farm. This was a trip back through the countryside of their childhood and youth. Mom and Dad had been born and raised in this province, but had lived away from here, first on the coast, then in Alberta, since a few months before I was born—or when I was “on the way,” as Mom used to phrase it—over thirty-three years earlier. They’d moved away in 1948 for the same reason I moved in in 1973: to find work. And in their case to start and raise family, a commitment my wife at the time was in no mood to consider, an attitude I was beginning to resent as a mark of our own failure to grow up.

I had no way of knowing that five years later, neither she and I, nor my parents, would still be together, but would be separated, on our ways to the complete set of divorces that ended all the marriages of our seemingly model 1950s nuclear family—parents and five children all unable to sustain a relationship of wedded bliss, for a whole variety of reasons.

From the front passenger seat, Mom took in the scene. Frowned. “Where’s the lake?”

“What lake?”

“Lenore. The road used to go for miles along the lake when we went from St. Brieux to Humboldt.” 

           “The lake’s a few miles that way,” I gestured casually towards the west, out the  driver’s window.  “There’s still a road there, but you wanted to see the Imhoffs at St. Peter’s,” I reminded, referring to the ceiling paintings on the church at Muenster. “And besides, this road’s the better highway these days and it’s quicker this way.” My authority for such a pronouncement, given my total ignorance of the other route (a route I had never driven), is the symbolism of a line on a highway map.

“Oh.” Silence.

From the back seat a few minutes later, another frown, this one in my rear-view mirror, and a bemused rumble in my ear. “Where’s the lake? The road used to go for miles along the lake when we’d go down to Humboldt from Melfort to a dance.” Conversations with Mom and Dad were often like this—same page, different time zones. It seemed funny at the time.

“Lake Lenore?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s over that way a few miles. This is the main connecting road now. But maybe Uncle Wilbur can take that route when he brings you back next week.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

Another frown from Mom.

“Look at that. He’s out combining on a Sunday. Your Great Uncle Peter never worked on a Sunday. On Sunday he rested, and his horses rested.”  “Yeah.”  Same page at the same time with this one. Such togetherness. This one really matters.

“Combines don’t need rest, I guess,” I toss off, completely missing the point.

I look west as the combine passes behind us, and shrug off the scene the way they prefer to remember it: A field of mature wheat, glowing golden, biding its time in the soft autumn sunlight on a cloudless Lord’s Day afternoon.

And weary beasts of burden: a team of horses (Clydes? Belgians? Percherons? I don’t bother asking, so they never tell me—a family detail now lost from the record) and my Great Uncle Peter, all absent, absorbing the pleasures of a divinely ordained afternoon of R and R.

That was, in the eleven years I lived in Saskatoon, the only time I made that trip to visit the relatives who lived the closest by. But that evening, uncharacteristically curious, and in the area anyway because Mom and Aunt Dorothy had wanted to drive over to St. Brieux to see their mother's old homestead, as the four of them drove back to the farm, I drove the old route back south, down along the lake for a surprisingly few miles for a place and route so central to their memories, before turning west at Humboldt, towards home. 

 It was pretty, all right. But I was in too much of a different generation, in too much of a hurry, really to appreciate that fire in the sky, reflecting off a smallish, narrow prairie lake. That was part of their story, and like so many they told me over the years, I failed at the time to connect it with mine, only to regret the now forever gone chance the hear them tell it to me again, when time has slowed me down to a pace where I could maybe find reason to appreciate it from their point of view.

Now, my own son from a second marriage that has for 25 years survived the fact that I and my impatience are in it, lives four hours by air to the east, on the shores of the St. Lawrence (a place an impossibly long geography and history away when I was his age) and I have all my stories to tell him, and he has his own life to build, and his own stories to acquire. Will any of mine have any place in his, later? Will we get our Sunday in the September sun, one day? Will we make a better job of it?