chapter 8 - ties that bind

We had a quiet evening listening to some music on the radio while Babby wrote postcards. I wonder she has anything to impart having been here all of three hours, but she tossed off several before willing to call it a night. She’s amazing. I’m hearing her faint accent anew – that weird combination of Danish, Russian and Canadian. I guess she comes by it honestly. I remember her mother, just barely, as I must have been four when she died. She only learned the rudiments of the English language. I never met my great-grandfather but I know he never learned a word of English, a fatal omission as it happened.

It must have been some life. Setting up home in the flat plains of a new country, a fisherman who had to learn how to be a farmer, providing for a family of nine children. Babby was the youngest but one. There was also a cook and a ‘girl who did’. Babby once told me how each child had been instructed to save a particular family treasure in case of fire. Hers was an enormous samovar, an object as tall as she and twice as heavy. Thankfully her strength was never put to the test. What a thing to put on a child!

They never had money, but after the eldest sons grew old enough to taste a bit of the outside world and earn, they got a horse to make life easier for the father who had always pulled the plough himself. Three days later, still not used to my great grandfather’s touch, the horse bolted, reins tangled up in arms and legs. Every command the middle aged man could muster was shouted as he was dragged over the fields for miles, his body becoming a bloody and then a silent mass, but the horse would not heed. Of course not. Canadian horses do not understand Russian.