To Live and Die in Groningen (The Netherlands,

Saturday, October 17, 2015: We flew the hour to Amsterdam from Berlin [you've already read the report of our week in Berlin, haven't you?], before catching a two-hour train to Groningen, where Christine's friend (and bookbinder) Natasha Herman lives. She, and Netherlandic husband and two sons, lived in Ottawa a couple of years back, and we even house-sat for them when they lived on Sunnyside Avenue, in Old Ottawa South (the square house with all the windows: if you know the street, you already know the house).

After a two-hour train, Rose was really losing her patience. "I no want ride train anymore," she repeated, after a small series of meltdowns, before she finally crashed out cold, some fifteen minutes before we landed in Groningen. Natasha was good enough to pick us up at the train station, so we didn't have to (yet) learn where anything was, in a strange city with sleeping toddler and too many bags.

And at the train station: more bicycles than I could even understand. I saw a three-storey bike stand filled with bicycles, and that might have been only a third of what I saw once we landed.

After all the rest went to bed, Natasha and I stayed up late discussing politics, education and Canadian history, and how not nearly enough is taught in schools.

Sunday, October 18, 2015: A quiet day. Our hosts' youngest, Casey, turned five, so we sat in on his birthday party, which involved about eight or nine children tearing through the house, while a couple of the adults drank wine (a-hem).

Christine drank tea, obviously.

Despite the howls of multiple children, napping Rose was out cold for nearly two hours.

They have a trampoline outside, and once the older children became bored with it, we set Rose loose into the yard. After an hour of taking turns watching her bounce around, we finally had to drag her back into the house (outside was cold, rainy, etc) kicking and screaming. No, she screeched, more yard! But boy, she slept well.

After all else went to bed, Natasha and I stayed up late and later, discussing music (bluegrass, etc), and taking turns plucking at ukulele and guitar. Of course, I introduced her to the Elvis Costello ukulele track I like, and Nellie McKay's ukulele Ted Talk.

Monday, October 19, 2015: A day in which we attempted an outing. Did we? Postcards, a couple of groceries, and a walk to the park. A park which ended up being a school playground; apparently the Netherlands in the midst of their week-long fall break, which meant the school closed, and Rose could run around the otherwise-school equipment (she likes to slide down backwards, upon her belly).

Found postcards. Mailed a package of things, including Touch the Donkey, over to Megan M. Garr in Amsterdam; she runs Versal, a magazine I've appeared in (but not for some time; I should really send some more work at some point). If only we'd had more time in Amsterdam. The benefit of staying with friends is the possibility of a few quiet days, which I think we've required, but it also means I haven't seen a thing in the Netherlands. Oh, but for the bicycles. So many bicycles.

After all else went to bed, Natasha and I stayed up less late, and she played Gillian Welch's lovely song "Tennessee" on guitar (a piece I wasn't familiar with). We discussed mutual friend Anik See, who lives in Amsterdam (why didn't I attempt to plan to visit? ugh). I attempted to remain up to catch a glimpse of Canadian election news, but the polls weren't even going to start reporting from Newfoundland until midnight or so where I was sitting. Ugh.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015: Woke up to a red wave across Canada; our dawn coming in at just around 1am Ottawa time. Relief.

Rose insisted on starting the day in the yard, upon trampoline.

Today we travelled from Groningen to Utrecht, where Christine was doing her talk through an organization Natasha is a part of. Apparently Christine's talk the first in a new series they're starting on such. We trained the two hours to Utrecht with Natasha, before figuring out our wee Bed and Breakfast. Christine and Natasha then wandered off to meet another bookbinder (so Christine could meet, and also see their studio), and Rose and I wandered the street immediate to our Bed and Breakfast.

Utrecht is a delightfully quaint city, and one I know absolutely nothing about. Cobblestones, old buildings and bridges over a winding canal. Rose and I picked up postcards, a music box and other tourist charms. We visited an antiquarian bookseller, and saw a Dutch edition of an Anne Carson title. We looked at statues, and followed the paths of birds. We picked up ginger cookies, which Rose enjoyed before passing out cold in the stroller.

There are so many bicycles. Ottawa, are you listening? Although, as Natasha reminds, the Netherlands is flat (Ottawa is not). The same thing Donna Stonecipher said about Berlin.

We met up again for a quick dinner, before Christine and Natasha ran off to the lecture, leaving Rose and I finishing up in the pub. She made a mess with Christine's soup and spoon (although she ate quite a bit). I had another drink (Rose was in no hurry to finish eating).

Rose and I eventually retired up to our room. I stripped her down, and co-showered (the soup required it). And it took some time (and some convincing), but she eventually slept. It was a quiet evening, after a short sequence of (required) quiet evenings.

Christine returned with reports of a successful lecture. Natasha wandered the two hours back to Groningen.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015: We woke, and enjoyed the second 'B' in the 'B&B' label. Small items: bread, meat, jams. A delightful breakfast before we wandered over to the Dom Tower, built on the site where Utrecht was invented some two thousand years ago (why do I know nothing about this country? We have a Tulip Festival thanks to their Princess born in Ottawa during the War...).

And then, of course, our noonish train back into Amsterdam, and our flight to Berlin.

At our hotel by the airport, what was most likely the worst hotel in all of Berlin. We were amazed there were no bugs (that we could see).

Thursday, October 22, 2015: An early, early, early-morning flight from Berlin to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Toronto, from Toronto to Ottawa. Home mid-afternoon. I'm exhausted even thinking about it. Alarm for 4:15am for a 4:45am cab pick-up for our flight back to Frankfurt, where we would pick up our flight to Toronto, and another to Ottawa.

Of course, our Toronto flight delayed, which meant we had to take a slightly later flight to Ottawa. Home in our house by 5pm Ottawa time, thanks to a pick-up by our incredible house/cat-sitter, Carmel Purkis (we owe her much, we have decided). Exhausted, we opened our mail, threw laundry into machines, and crashed. And slept twelve hours.

Another (short) weekend in old Glengarry,

We spent another fraction of the August long weekend at the Glengarry homestead, Christine and myself driving out to help celebrate my sister’s wedding anniversary and her husband Corey’s birthday. We were unable to make the Highland Games this time around (we’re aiming for next year), and instead spent a day at my sister’s house for their annual bbq, with Carmel Purkis in tow [we did the same last year, actually], and even Marilyn Irwin showed up for a good part of the day, from her mother’s house in nearby Vankleek Hill. Unfortunately, Kate had to work, so she wasn’t able to make our annual jaunt, less and less as she gets older. She works two jobs, currently. But I worry: how many more years might we have the farm, now that he’s seventy-one? Less of a long weekend than I would have preferred, we arrived Sunday around noon for the barbecue, and headed back after a final dip in the pool late Monday afternoon, just in time to crash in our little apartment, arriving home to our petulant cat, Lemonade. How could you leave me?

On Sunday, a day half outside swimming or poolside drinks, and half in the house (again or still, with drinks) during hard-hitting rain. The hundred bees attracted to the water from their above ground pool, a dozen or so children wandering in, around and through. My sister’s small house filled up quickly, and once the food finished, our father disappeared back to the farm. It was raining too hard, and he figured enough were already inside the house. At least all was dry enough for the eventual bonfire, and the small group that remained.

We drank wine, and breathed. Seamless breaths, as opposed to our more-recent jagged. There has been much going on.

Thanks to my current project of preparing my literary archive for the University of Calgary, I even started removing boxes from my former bedroom, boxes my father has been hoping I’d remove for some twenty-odd years now. Might anyone actually care about my notebooks from 1987 or 1993? I haven’t a clue. The same morning, my father showed Christine the update on the flowers he’d planted for us, as eventual decoration for our late September wedding.

We spent the holiday Monday in my sister’s borrowed van, including her children in the informal Glengarry tour I had planned for Christine and Carmel. The kids in the van – eight year old Emma, six year old Rory and four year old Duncan, who apparently has the bladder the size of a squirrel’s. Every five minutes or so.

We drove south along Highway 138 to Simon Fraser’s grave at St. Andrew’s West, straight west from there to the ruins of St. Raphael’s Church, and then further west and south into Lancaster for poutine at the infamous Restaurant Bordeau/Lancaster Perch. After lunch, I took them to see the hidden Church in the Wildwood [see the post I wrote on such previously, here], where they walked the labyrinth. Carmel took photos, and Christine walked the path in silence, as my sister’s trio trailed behind. From there, we went back into Lancaster South to the docks, where we looked out over the St. Lawrence River, saw a small group of kids with fishing poles, a series of lighthouses, boats, and small flocks of monarch butterflies a-flit through the fauna. A small island just past the docks, with a cairn for those local men lost in the War of 1812.

Had we more time, we might have hit the Nor’Westers Museum and Thompson-Bethune House in Williamstown (where I have yet to find the location of the McKay family cabin where poet Don McKay retreats to write), or the Glengarry Pioneers Museum in Dunvegan (right near where Gary Geddes once invented Cormorant Books). For the sake of the children, we began to wind down the day with a visit back north into Alexandria, and the park, where they ran and they ran and they ran (Duncan fell asleep twice in the van between sites), finally ending up at the Dairy Queen, where nearly all my home-visits end (if not begin and middle also). How much writing have I done there over the years? How many times have Kate and I sat playing cards, drawing or trading tales?

Returning through Maxville, the Games hangover and a quiet village, but for the Bothy Brew Pub, where their alarm was screaming. On the corner of Mechanicsville and Main Streets, in the early 70s, it was a general store run by an elderly couple, where we’d purchase our ice cream. Ten years later, it was a candy store run by the widow, who would only allow three or four neighbourhood kids in at a time. By the late 1990s, it was a pub my sister and I went to a couple of times, including the night Lady Diana Spencer died in a traffic accident. An evening of drinks, amusing myself by pushing coins into the jukebox for Christmas songs and German-language Beatles tunes, confusing the locals and upsetting my sister. Heh.

Between St. Andrew’s West and St. Raphael’s, we chanced upon dozens of cars parked along both sides of the road, and pulled into an estate sale. Whomever had lived in the red brick house had been there for generations, and here were a hundred people on the lawn, listening to auctioneer roll off item after item, spread out across the driveway and into the field. A woman there said that this was a small crowd for such an event, mainly because there was a huge auction happening the same time in Cornwall.

Christine was tempted to bid upon some of the items; the children climbed over chairs, and poured through a mixer dated 1933.

I find these events to be the saddest things imaginable, and felt the same a year earlier at an estate sale on Lewis Street, just behind Bank Street’s Staples. Imagine everything collected and kept throughout a life, and into multiple lives, now abandoned, all stripped of their meanings. New meanings will slowly attach to each item as it goes further out into the world with new owners, but sometimes the sheer weight of the sudden loss can overwhelm, can seem too much to bear. It reminds of a passage I read in a recent issue of The Believer (eighty-eighth issue, March/April 2012), Michael Atkinson discussing the term “nostalgia”:

If you know exactly what he means, you know this passion is not about preferring the past, as a conservative politician might, but simply not letting it get landfilled under a tarmac of now.

Another weekend in Old Glengarry;

Another August long weekend at the homestead, the first of my sister’s roasts since mum died, which felt strange. My father nearly a year in the house by himself. Who would yell at us for no reason? And also, who would make the devilled eggs? Christine and I were left to do such, making two dozen, and with sea salt, which apparently made all the difference. I suggested to my sister that we take turns yelling at each other, but then completely forgot.

Christine and I never actually made it to the Glengarry Highland Games on Saturday, but dad pulled us out to the backyard on Friday night, where we got a full view of the fireworks, five miles distant. An impressive display I didn’t know they even did, only over the past decade or so. An impressive display just after 10pm, which was fortunate, with the storm not coming through for another hour or so. Fireworks bursting over the horizon of trees, between the lights poking up from the radio tower, from MacEwen’s. An hour later, both Christine and I on two sides of the house saw blue sparks burst through the house during the massive thunderstorm. We immediately turned off the lights (and dad’s computer) and watched the windstorm rage rain through the yard, with the worst of the storm sitting directly over the house for a good twenty minutes. Hard to believe the house wasn’t hit. But now the automatic light in the garage won’t turn off. Odd.

We saw some deer on the road, and, every so often, caught glancing whiffs of the skunks that live somewhere in my sister's garden.

Saturday morning, at least, Christine and I managed to get over to the Avonmore Berry Farm (she had a coupon), and we picked up a pie for the roast. We even brought my sister’s eldest, Emma, along for the ride, and she played in the haymow. Later on, we ended up in Cornwall at the Cornwall Square, and Emma showed us the baby ducks by the water (we had to keep watch, as to not step in Canada Goose leavings); Water Street, looking out into the St. Lawrence River, in the shadow of the International Bridge and the industrial site formerly known as Domtar. Monday, before we left, we were able to do another outing to Casselman, where Christine, Carmel and I took Kathy’s middle child, Rory, out for ice cream (I took the youngest on an outing in March, so it only seemed fair).

Kate couldn’t make it to the roast this year, as she was working her new retail job, but our friend Carmel Purkis came by, her first time out at the farm. It was apparently exactly the stress release that she needed, and a new person for my dad to tell stories to, for me to point out all of our history, surrounding. Up at my sister’s house, already her three kids have more than made their new pool worth the price, and on Sunday, Christine and Carmel helped too. Not as many came to the roast as previous years, and unfortunately, none of our extended family, and even less of Kathy’s in-laws than are usually around, either. Where were all of their friends, even? Was it simply good weather that everyone left town?

Is there ever anything as nice as a day spent lounging in the yard on the clearest-blue of days (we’ve been rained on, never out, so many times before), and an evening of stars? As they came out one by one, three-year-old Duncan pointed them out, counting them, but only to four. In the twilight, a couple of photos of Christine by the edge of their lawn, just where the barley field begins. Behind the barley, the bush where my grandfather once kept a sugar shack, boiling up maple syrup, long before I was born.

And from the farm, Christine and I are spending a week at her mother’s cottage in St. Adele, Quebec, hopefully spending our days getting as much writing done as possible, before she goes back to work on August 8. Might we finally get that long-awaited collaboration begun?