July 1967
This photo was my father’s favourite. It is of my
mother in their backyard under a willow tree, with my daughter; her age was about
one year. My mother would have been 58. They are both about as beautiful as a
grandmother and her first grandchild can be, absorbed in love and play. Both
gone now, my mother to age and illness, my daughter to maturity.
I need to add here that I love my adult daughter very
much indeed. But I miss my baby, my little girl, a great deal from time to
time.
It is not a thing I thought about at all, when I had
the babies, the toddlers the very young girls. I don’t know how many mothers
would, working all hours of the day and night to keep them fed, clean, dressed,
taught, safe. Nothing was written on the wall to tell me that the adored ghost
of the baby stays in your memory, even as growth, achievements, and attachment
to the adult accumulate.
So, the photo. I snapped it with a Kodak, and I
suspect that the negative is still somewhere in this house. You got twenty photos
on a roll of Kodak film, and I can locate other photos from that day, but I
don’t remember the detail of that visit. We had driven from Ancaster, where we
lived then, to Windsor, where my parents lived, about a four hour trip. It was the
July 1st Canada Day weekend, 1967, and I was very, very pregnant. I
was so close to term, in fact, that my mother scolded me for the visit and, in
a phone call after we returned to Ancaster, she said that she had been relieved
to see us leave for home. (In fact, our second-born daughter arrived on July 11th.)
They look as if they are in a little world of their
own with shared laughter and love and this makes the photo a treasure for me.
My serious, driven mother, who spent most of her life and energy being as
perfect as she could be at everything she did, is as they say ‘in the moment’
and perfectly happy. What you do not see are the violets under her feet and the
warm breeze that has swayed the willow branches. What you do not hear is their soft
laughter.
This grandchild grew to be a lot like her grandmother
in many ways – in her slim physical perfection and in her work ethic and
intelligence, she was a joy to her grandmother and a point of pride.
I don’t miss the sheer hard work of those young parent days. I missed a lot of sleep and, with two children in fifteen months, I was pretty close to the maximum level of what I could handle. But there were a lot of good moments and a lot of love and fun then that I think only very small children can give. I miss snuggles and wet kisses and the complete trust of a small child asleep in my arms. I miss watching them run and watching them sleep and listening to them play.
An occasional little trip to the past is,
perhaps, allowable.
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| ED with her grandma, Christmas 1966 |
