What we learned at Grandma's

The little plane from Newark spills us out into the arrivals level and down the stairs, past the waterfall and the cedar planks, into the immigration chute. Wandering happily through cutting sunlight, the passengers stop more to admire the rare, rain-free view than to adhere to red lines and borders, French, and English queues. From the Halifax airport the road doesn’t even suggest a city waits over the next hill, tucked against a harbour and looking out to sea.

After we’ve got lost once and found our way back to the horse-track turned highway by the Bedford basin, the stories start. Imagine this inlet bursting with troop ships and supply ships, destroyers and frigates, marshaled for the perilous journey across the North Atlantic in World War II. Imagine steel pouring in from Ontario, farm boys from Saskatchewan, salt cod from Newfoundland, starched uniforms and young loves packed away in trunks and waiting to be stowed aboard. Imagine a country at war with a distant enemy, helping a slightly less distant mother country that still watches from the flag and the face on the quarter. Nova Scotia has history. At least, history in the post-European sense, recorded in land titles and stone walls and poems about God’s country. A strange flag marks where, two hundred and fifty years ago, the French Acadians were hauled off their farms below sea-level that they had painstakingly turned from saltwater marsh into rich silt fields. In the cruel irony of history they ended up in Louisiana and became the Cajuns, to drain the salt from more swamps and play more music with spoons.

My father speaks of cousins as the road turns. On both sides towns fly by, Windsor, Grand Pré, Gaspereau and Wolfville, as the French and English battle for permanence. There was a time when there were only four names in the valley, he says. Marriage was like choosing a kind of fish from the dock. The better ones were only available every few years. One cousin married a Stirling, the other, a Joudry, he says. A decision that sounds as solid and sensible as building a house on the leeward side of the hill, near the apple trees, with a view of the ocean on a clear day when the tides are in.

The Stirling fruit market (now an Atlantic Canada institution) offers seven kinds of squash this time of year. The rest of the world has started to rediscover the North Shore, after passing over it on the plane from London to New York. Still, so far, there is only here, and the rest of the world. Within here, there are all sorts of important distinctions. One can go out home, down home, and up home, not so much directions as intentions – not to move away. But now, there is an ethnic food aisle in the supermarket, a fair trade coffee shop, and a world cultures market by the university. My grandfather, who left the civil service about the time when he would have had to learn French, points out “these are our exchange students from Vietnam” as if he were explaining the difference between a Gravenstein and a Honeycrisp.

Leaving the corporate incubator to learn family history is an exercise in slowness, in stories traced along streams now buried in storm sewers and in kitchen equipment holding up magazine racks. The paved roads have moved further up the valley, the post boxes have moved closed to the door. Canadian Living, November 1998, rests by the butter stamp my grandmother used after she’d churned the butter from the farm. My grandparents slide along old arguments like the smooth handle of a knife. “Did we call that traditional or old-fashioned, those apples?” Conversation turns to the troubles of homeownership and lost land surveys, two topics never to be heard in New York City. Also from a different time and place, “Do you want butter on that?” I nod, concerned, at the subsuming of concrete, and how long to wait to take in the garden hose before the first hard frost. It’s true, Grandma, it’s crazy what people will sue for these days. Eventually it turns to every grandchild’s favourite question: “Do you know how to play bridge?”