Matt and I got ready for a race this weekend, Return of the Jedi in the Siskiyou Mountains in Southern Oregon. We needed camping gear, race gear and food for two days for us and the three kids. No problem. But it was, and then we had to put the bikes on. We were a little tired from staying up on Friday night and indulging in a Sherlock Holmes Episode. It took a half an hour and perhaps a few of my tears to get all four bikes on the back of the car, and I was not the one loading them. We did make it into the car, all packed up missing only a few essentials and had an amazing weekend. But boy the loading of the car, cleaning the house, rounding up the three kids did feel...hard.
But lets talk about hard. When I am whining like my children about loading up our car and doing a super fun race with my awesome husband, sweet kids and good friends, it serves me well to take a minute and reflect on my grandmother. Elsie Kinsmen just turned 93 last week. My mom told me many stories about my grandmother as I was growing up, and I can honestly say that even as a child, I recognized the goodness of my life relative to the harshness of my grandmothers.
Elsie was born on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, outside of the small town of Chester. Nova Scotia's south shore is both beautiful and harsh. It is the first part of mainland Canada that the Atlantic Ocean meets after leaving England. The summers are pleasant enough, not too hot or too cold. But the late fall, winter and early spring can be quite horrid. The Atlantic ocean is so large that it can hold onto the summers heat and release it slowly over the winter months. Therefore instead of the rain mercifully turning into snow, it often warms up just enough to come down as a slush like substance only slightly warmer than freezing. It can creep through your skin and sneak into your bones making you a kind of cold that is hard to shake. It is like winter and spring are locked in a continual battle, a seasonal war zone that doesn't end for months at a time. It is in this environment Elsie spent her childhood.
Elsie was one of six children that my great grandmother and great grandfather were raising on a farm. The farm house was heated by a wood stove and all the wood needed to be cut, dried, loaded onto a cart and drawn by horse to the house. This was usually done in the winter in Nova Scotia since there was less farm work at this time of year and it gave the wood almost a year to dry. My grandfather was pulling a load of wood back to the house over the ice when a horse went through. Horses were very valuable - they were the cars and the major worker on the farm. He had no choice but to get that horse out of the freezing water even if it meant him getting into it. He was able to free the horse and get back to the farm house, but his health began declining from that day on. Pneumonia eventually set in. This simple accident ended up costing him his life.
Now that left my Great Grandmother with six children to provide for through the winter. It was not long before she got very sick as well and all but the oldest of her children were sent to live with different families in Chester. My Grandmother was sent to live with a very nice and well to do family in town. She was quite happy. They wanted her to be a teacher or a nurse. She was given beautiful clothes and a warm jacket. She lived happily with these people for many months and loved them, and they loved her. My great grandmother regained her health though and Elsie was sent back to the farm to help with the many jobs that needed doing. My great grandmother did end up remarrying and having three more children, a total of nine.
When my grandmother was fourteen she started working in the lobster cannery every summer. When she was sixteen she left home and moved to the Annapolis Valley. The Annapolis Valley is protected from the Bay of Fundy by the North Mountain and from the rest of Nova Scotia by the South Mountain. Its summers are warm and pleasant, the farm land is excellent. Elsie worked as a house keeper on various farms. She met my grandfather while working at a farm close to where he grew up. They soon had one, then two more babies and then my grandfather joined the Canadian Army and was shipped overseas to fight World War II for three years. This left my grandmother with three young babies to raise on her own in a house with a wood stove and no running water. The water had to be lugged from a pump across a large field. The diapers had to be washed by hand. The winters in the valley were snowier and colder than in Chester. The spring and summer was filled with mosquitoes, black flies and no see ems.
To be honest, I sometimes feel like three kids is a lot of work. I have to change diapers, do their laundry, take them to their schools, wake up early with them. Matt works a lot, earns a good wage I can stay at home with the kids and we live well. But sometimes I feel I could use a break. Then I think about my grandmother, washing diapers by hand, with water she had to carry back to the house, heat up the water on a wood stove to boil the diapers. This is before we even talk about food, growing it, canning it, preserving it, baking from scratch. I think of little things like - what did she do with the kids when she had to carry the water? It would be agonizing to carry a bucket of heavy water walking at a toddlers pace and carrying a baby. And this is not a weekend of camping, this is three years with no husband, with a very real possibility he would not be coming home at all.
He did come home though. He was shot in the arm and spent the rest of the war working in a greenhouse. I honestly think I would take the gunshot.
My mother was the next baby born and then there was Uncle John a number of years later. There was also the baby that didn't live. My grandmother told me about this last summer. Her mother in law was the midwife in the community. She took the baby and buried him in the backyard. That was what was done. No more and no less.
Miles did not come into this world easily. Anyone who was watched him on a bike knows he is a crasher. He learns, as I learn, by crashing first and doing it right the next time round. His birth was no different. His arm got stuck behind his back and though his got his head out, his shoulders were still trapped inside. I knew something was not right for hours as I would have happily left my body at any point during the six hours between midnight and 6 in the morning even if it meant dying. It took my midwife 3 minutes to figure out how to get him out, knowing full well he could not breath the whole time. Miles did not breath on his own for 5 minutes after we got him out and his arm was badly broken. He was completely blue and lifeless and when I held him I knew my life was going to be over if this did not change. My heart was breaking, and I needed this boy to be ok, if I was to be ok. He had a name already, I had know him for 9 months already, he had a life already as my son, Matt's son, Ava's little brother, Mom and Dad's first and only grandson. He was to born on the same day as Matt's father. Nothing was going to be alright if he did not make it.
Now I know my grandmother felt the same way after carrying her own baby for nine months and labouring for hours and loosing her baby. Her life was not the same after that. But it was not the same after loosing her father, or after loosing her nice family that would have given her a life very different from the one she was living. Yet she survived, and she kept going. She survived this harsh, harsh life to have my mother, and my mother had me, and I survived to have Miles. And every other person in my line survived to have every other person in my line. And this I realized two months after having Miles, is the miracle of generations. We have all survived. If you are reading this, you to are a member of this crazy line of survivors. Women and men so tough that they would pull a horse out of freezing water to bring you back firewood to keep you warm. So tough that they would carry water for years on end to cook your food and clean your clothes.
My grandmother went on to work 6 days a week in the Graves Pickle Plant while raising her five children. My grandfather also worked six days a week. By all accounts sometimes they would yell at the children for lack of manners, misbehavior or missing chores. They were perhaps not always the kindest parents one could imagine. But they loved their children enough to work themselves to levels of fatigue I can only imagine to keep their children alive and healthy. On Sundays they would even enjoy a Sunday drive to local swimming spots, the ocean, friends houses.
My grandmother was cared for in her home by all of her children until she was 91. My grandmother was still gardening, playing cards with her friends and cleaning her outside windows. She also is known to have killed the odd rabbit with a rock if it was eating her plants. Elsie is still surrounded by all her children in the nursing home. They take turns visiting her daily and though they feel terrible they could not keep her in her home, they are doing everything they can to keep her safe and as happy as possible. This is the sign of a deeply loved mother.
Last night I was tired. I tried to go on the local group road ride but when the pace picked up I had to drop off the back and knew I didn't have it in me to keep up. Not even close. Perhaps I don't have the stuff my grandmother was made out of, my easy life can still wear me out. But after the group disappeared over the horizon I began to enjoy the ease of my peddle strokes, the quiet of the outdoors, it was blissful. It is an ease my grandmother perhaps hardly ever enjoyed until after her children were fully grown. This is how I know her, a beautiful, thin older woman who lived quietly in a nice clean modern house that was built after the old house burnt down. She could sip her tea in piece, eat food that came both from her garden and from the grocery store as she pleased. She could simply flick a switch and a light and heat would come on. You got the feeling when you were around my grandmother there is nothing more she could ask for in the whole world. Once a week she would even go out with the family and have a meal out in the local tavern. I am sure it all felt a little like a miracle, the ease of modern life. But I see a miracle every time I see my grandmother.
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