Home and Hood and Old Love

I can barely keep up with the weather.  So changeable.  I think I took these photographs a day or two before Christmas...but I wanted to post them anyway, even on this first day of January.  The snow is gone now, and overall, winter seems rather absent.  We went back to Florenceville, Bristol, Hartland last week to tie up a few things.  Amazing how noticeably colder it is just a few hours north.  I miss the *real* winter, a little bit.  I think weather does affect the collective demeanour of a community.  It is just a little tiny bit harder to live in Carleton County, vs. Queens.  During our little trek north, we stopped in on Great Gramy Treva, whom we have missed, and who looked well.  She told us she had skyped with a relative the other day.  This prompted me to ask her about her childhood.  Big Treva grew up with no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, and transportation by horse and buggy.  When she was young, there were no dams along the Saint John River, and at Christmastime, she would cross the frozen river on foot, and then walk again for a couple of hours to reach the little store where they were allowed, once a year, to buy some candies for the holidays.  Her sister, Doreen, crossed the river ice in late winter one year, and swore she could hear the sound of running water.  She made it across late that night.  In the morning, the ice was gone, and the river was running in full force.  Doreen, like Treva, is still alive, but living in Toronto, having left for the big city at age 16.    

I called my grandpa the other day.  He is in the hospital.  He fell a year and a half ago, damaging his hip, and he has been confined to a wheelchair ever since, which still, seems so strange and wrong, and so unlike the Real Gramps.  This time, the day after Christmas he felt strange, and ill, and so my sister called the ambulance.  I miss him all the time.  I told him, over the phone, that he should bloody well do his physio exercises and he'd be as good as new, walking again and everything.  He said, "Yo, you're telling me this, you're mother is telling me this.  Do your exercises.  But you know what?  When it's my time to go, I'm going to go!  It doesn't bother me one bit.  It's going to happen.  It's going to happen pretty soon, Yo."  

No.  No no no no no.  But I had started to cry, and my voice got squeaky, and all I could say was "Ok Gramps.  We'll talk about it later.  I love you, Grandpa."  And that was all.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do if Gramps dies.  I might just not be ok.