But then, there are the choices.
My son Chris and his family had come to visit at the end of October and into the first week of November. I had made the decision to give up my life in Cuenca just before they came.
Obviously, the furniture and household goods, generally, were staying in Cuenca one way or another.
The paintings were already taken care of.
I would be taking one suitcase with me when I started my homeless travels. In addition to some clothes, I packed a good knife, a knife sharpener, a jar opener, a wine stopper and corkscrew, an ice cube tray, some needlepoint kits and a few other things which, I have found from experience, are useful when housesitting.
There was no question but that John’s tuque would come with me.
I also tucked away a pair of tiny wooden cats my closest friend in Cuenca had given to me when she was diagnosed with a serious illness.
Chris and co. had packed lightly and he was willing to take one of my big suitcases back with him as his extra baggage allowance, when they returned to Canada.
Chris and his son Myles came over, folded my favourite kilim rug into one of the biggest suitcases I had, and packed a lot of small art and artifacts among the folds to take back on the plane with them.
They also folded up my favourite Persian carpet into as small a bundle as possible (Myles jumped on it several times to help that process), wrapped it up and we took it to DHL to be shipped to Canada.
The big things were the easy part. Throughout this period, I was constantly faced with choices on small things. Send back to Canada with Chris, take with me, or leave behind?
In sorting through the files and papers I had left, I came across some letters I had written to John in 1968 and 1969, while he was at university and I was still in high school. When we left Canada in 2018, we had found all the letters we had written to each other, carefully preserved. After some discussion, we had decided to destroy them. I don’t know how or why these few had survived.
In addition to blow by blow accounts of family, school and town drama, I referred to the birth of John’s first nephew, the son of his brother Bill and his wife Diane.
Peter John, as the baby was named, just turned 56 this week.
I kept coming across things I hadn’t thought about until I was faced with destroying them, like the paper copies of recipes I had carefully complied before we left Canada in 2018. On the face of it, not a big deal. Most, if not all of the recipes could probably be found online. And anything else, I could take photos of and store digitally.
Same with the letters really.
But there is something about the artifacts themselves, isn’t there? A recipe for a banana walnut cake with cream cheese icing that was handwritten by a friend in the choir of St. Aiden’s church forty years ago.
Notations in my own hand, to reduce this quantity, or add to that one, or add additional herbs or spices. One was for a white chocolate banana cake that I made every Thanksgiving when we had as many as 30 members of my family come to the stone house in the country. I’ve written “Allow four hours to make this”.
In the earliest days of our marriage, we had been in the habit of keeping a notebook where we recorded all our expenses. We stopped doing that when we started earning enough money that we didn’t have to literally count every penny. But we started again when we came to Cuenca, because we were interested in knowing what our cost of living there was going to be.
Here is an excerpt from my journal from around the time I was packing up: “Up and crying. Destroying the notebooks from when we first came here, and in the aftermath of John’s death and beyond. Aside from his handwriting, references to cats and cat food. All gone now. His notes for our proposed journey to Ireland just days before he died. Other things – the detritus of my life. Again. Dido sitting amongst the ruins of Carthage. I feel like I am losing him again, or experiencing it for the first time again….. But this is good, right? Leave all these things for yesterday. Hope to try a new way of living where I am not always reminded of what I have lost.”
I took a photo and threw them all out, but it was painful. The DNA of those experiences, the ‘thinginess’, was gone forever.
One thing I did not decide. John’s remains are in a vault in a cemetery in the hills above Cuenca.
Should they remain? Should I join him there when the time comes? Should his ashes go back to Canada, and if so, where should they reside? Is there any place in Canada that is as significant to our lives as Cuenca? Since John died, I have had the thought that some descendant of ours might become dig into family history and find it interesting to discover that his however many great great ancestors ran off to Ecuador and are buried there.
The debate about that will likely not be resolved until I join him. Then the boys can decide to take us home together, wherever that is.
The last and hardest questions – where is home now? What makes a place home? Lots of people have written about this. Home is where the heart is. Home is the place where you feel safe, loved. Home is the place you long for when you are troubled, distressed, exhausted. No, home is not a place at all; it is a feeling.
Frost declared that “Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That always seemed very cold to me.
A place where, even when you are not there, it stays and waits for you. The place where you are rooted. My father always referred to the area where he grew up, as ‘down home’.
Home was what I tried to make in Cuenca, but with no success. Every time I came back, it was just, the place I had to be. As soon as I decided that it was not, in fact, my home, it was as if I had permission to fall in love with it, as if for the first time.
Doris Lessing wrote: “Once I was making a mental list of all the places I had lived in, having moved about so much, and soon concluded that the commonsense or factual approach leads to nothing but error…You may live in a place for months, even years, and it does not touch you, but a weekend or a night in another, and you feel as if your whole being has been sprayed with the equivalent of a cosmic wind.”
Sometimes you find a place and it just feels so familiar, so comfortable, so warm, it’s like you always knew that place was there. Waiting for you. Ireland is that place for me.
The feeling is encapsulated in Yeats’ poetry:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
John was home for me, and peace and security, and I for him, so it didn’t matter where we lived. And that probably explains why I was so fearless about leaving him in Prescott and traveling the world on my own for years after we retired. He was there, my home.
And now? I suspect that I will never feel completely at home again, anywhere. That is okay. I know now that this is the price I pay for the immeasurably great gift I was given. Travel will be my way of being. And in being with my dearest family and friends, and making new ones; in finding unexpected new places that resonate in my deep heart’s core, I will find, at least, a temporary home.
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