In The Cool of the Glen – An Urban Forest Encounter
Frida hesitates at the entrance to the lush green tunnel before us. The busy road at our back teems with morning rush hour traffic and stinking exhaust. I can’t wait to leave it behind, but a little pull on the leash tells me Frida would rather tromp through the sports fields behind the high school across the road. Her comfort zone is the open fields she is bred to hunt in. Besides, we once saw a coyote down by the river, so in her mind, this is the coyote’s yard now. But her coffee-and-cream eyes signal trust when I tell her I will protect her, and she consents to follow me down the path.
A few steps later, we are enveloped in another world––a rainforest of every imaginable shade of green, cool, and quiet but for the chorus of cardinals, robins, and goldfinches, accompanied by the soft hooting of mourning doves. My shoulders drop, and my breath deepens. Frida pads silently ahead of me, nose leading, cautiously curious.
The river smells of algae in the heat. And of something else. Frida is first to the dead carp; a shimmering sapphire cloud of bluebottle flies lifts as she approaches. I barely have time to call her off before she indulges in what, for her, would be a delicious roll. The flies settle back to work. By tomorrow, the carp will be gone.
As we contemplate the carp, a familiar thrum makes me look up to catch a flock of mute swans flying fast over the river toward the causeway. The rising sun paints their beating wings with splashes of lemon.
By the time I turn around, Frida is already intently pointing the way we are to go. She has had enough of the river, especially if she will not be allowed to enjoy the fish carcass.
As we slowly climb the path, a flat-ish rock moves slightly, and Frida jumps back. A common snapping turtle gazes inscrutably at us. It’s a big one, about a foot and a half long and a few hundred metres from the river.
I crouch down to chat. “Good morning, ma’am, where are you off to?” She stares and breathes. Likely older than me and wise beyond my ken, she owes me nothing.
Frida noses in again and quickly backs away, flummoxed by this odd creature. With the conversation over, we leave the turtle to its trek, but I look over my shoulder as we continue up the path back to the madding world, hoping she will stay in the cool safety of the glen.
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The Path(os) of Totality
Today, I witnessed a total solar eclipse in Kingston, Ontario. This was not my first. That had been in Sault Ste. Marie on February 26, 1979. I was fifteen and in grade 10 at Sault Collegiate––a nerd desperately pretending to be cool. My little brother was still at Ben R. McMullin Elementary, but in grade 8, he ruled the school.
There was minimal hype––it’s funny how subdued things seemed in a time before internet social media. Only via newspapers, radio and television did we even know the eclipse was happening. There were no warnings to brace for an influx of thousands of viewers and no eclipse parties, not in the dead of a Northern Ontario winter anyway.
My Geography teacher, excited as a little kid, led our class outside. He had made his own pinhole viewing box, but we had no NASA-approved sunglasses, only stern warnings. The Sault Star was direct, “You could be blinded…. There is no foolproof way of looking directly at the eclipse. No tinted or opaque glass protects the eye from damage. No glance, however brief, is safe. No ‘trick’ view, like screwing up the eyes or looking through a pinhole, is safe.” I was too scared, ahem, cool to try.
So, I looked down and around, not up. The eclipse peaked around lunchtime. I remember worrying about my brother, who cared less about danger and obeying orders than I did. I remember brief, weird darkness, then light again. And it was cold, so I hurried back inside. When I got home, my brother was on his second box of Kraft dinner and babbled about how cool the eclipse was. I scoffed and retreated to do my homework.
Forty-five years later, the hype for this total eclipse started early and reached a fever pitch by mid-March. I was focused on other things, coping with the loss of my brother, who, on the day after New Year, broke through lake ice while skating and drowned. I was careening between fury and grief. Overlaying that was a crust of editing work. On top of that was a book deal; I needed to ramp up my writing. I was again looking down, not up.
Eventually, I warmed up to the importance of this cosmic event. The high school kid who was too cool to care now ordered NASA-approved sunglasses well in advance. As the hype intensified, we were warned: Kingston, with a population of around 140,000, anticipated 70,000 to 500,000 visitors.
“Don’t settle for 99%,” said the astronomer on CBC. “It’s just not the same. You must get yourself somewhere into the path of totality.”
The path of totality? That’s a new one, I thought. And he’s trying to get even more people to descend upon our small town. We were told to fuel our cars, stock up on groceries, and expect disruption to our (already dismal) cellular service.
My boyfriend summed the craziness up succinctly: “It’s the apoceclipse!”
The evening before the eclipse, I was straining to remember the events of 1979 when it struck me that my brother would certainly have driven from the Sault to Kingston to spend the eclipse with me in the path of totality. We were both children of the moon landing era, but my brother was particularly fascinated by the moon. Just before he died, he had gotten into moon photography and was taking stunning photographs. There was no way he would have missed this.
We also both revered Pink Floyd. Tears filled my eyes as I contemplated us sitting on the porch, drinking beer, listening to The Dark Side of the Moon, and catching up. How excited he would be as the eclipse unfolded.
Now, I had to go all in. For both of us.
The day arrived with a sketchy forecast: thickening cloud in the afternoon. Ardent eclipse chasers bypassed Kingston and headed to Cornwall or all the way to the Quebec townships, literally racing the clouds. Facebook exploded with gripes. The people who earlier had kvetched about the hordes coming to Kingston and clogging the roads now lamented their absence. “So sad for our downtown businesses,” wrote one poster. The eclipse was losing its shine before it had begun.
As the sun played hide-and-seek with the clouds, I felt anxious and wondered if the eclipse could possibly live up to all the hype. My boyfriend was not as invested in the eclipse as I was, but he cheerfully hung in for the day with me. We decided to stay put and spend the morning working at our computers as normal. At 2 p.m., we moved the porch loveseat onto the front lawn and installed ourselves with our glasses and drinks. Some neighbours had gathered on their respective front lawns as well. I played The Dark Side of the Moon on my speaker to set the mood and summon my brother.
As the clouds danced teasingly around and across the sun, we could still see it through our eclipse glasses. The moon slowly crept across the sun from the bottom right corner. The temperature dropped markedly as it grew darker. The light was like shadows but, eerily, not. Even with only the barest sliver of it visible, the sun was still too powerful to view bare-eyed. Then like a giant cosmic lightbulb had been switched off, it went dark. The streetlamps flicked on. The birds fell silent, cut off in mid-song. On my street, there was a collective gasp, then cheers.
Now that it was safe, I tore off the eclipse glasses and grabbed a small scope for a closer look. As I gazed, slack-jawed, for that precious minute and a half, I saw things I never thought I would see. There was the corona, looking like delicate wisps from where I stood, but these were gasses shooting from the surface at 2 million degrees Celsius, 500 times hotter than the photosphere, the next layer toward the core. Science can’t yet tell us why that is. Massive solar prominences, each several times larger than Earth, pirouetted from the black edges. I finally vividly understood that the golden ball that keeps everything on Earth alive is a massive nuclear fusion reactor.
My heart caught in my throat as I thrust the scope at my boyfriend, “You gotta see this.” He peered through the scope, not saying a word. I gave him ten seconds, then made him give it back so I could keep gawking, memorizing sights I might never see again.
Suddenly, a tiny shred of light beamed on the upper left. The sun was “rising” over craggy mountains on the moon. Spellbound, I lowered my gaze just in time for the sun to re-assert its power. I sat back, stunned.
After a moment or two, the clouds re-asserted their power, and that was it for the show. We sat leaning into each other. It took a few minutes to find the words to share what we had witnessed. My heart exploded with wonder, awe, humility, and astonishment at our insignificance. My eyes filled again.
“Wish you were here,” I whispered.
I’m sure I heard my brother chuckle and answer, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
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Mutti’s Advent Gift
It is the 27th of November, the first Sunday of advent. My children grown and flown, I am alone in my living room to light the first candle. In its soft glow, I sit listening to Christmas carols when “Silent Night, Holy Night” comes on. The moment pulls my heartstrings back like a bow and launches me into the memory of my first advent Sunday away from home.
28 November 1982. I was nineteen and in my first year at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston Ontario. Cadets had decorated their dorm doors to look like Christmas presents and the kitchen staff had put up decorations in the dining hall, but I could not get into the spirit. I was not enjoying RMC. The stress of recruit term had given way to the crush of final exams and assignments. Tanking in chemistry and calculus, I was experiencing failure for the first time. I was humbled and afraid, yet oddly comforted by the thought of flunking as an exit strategy. I was slumped at a study carrel in Massey Library on a grey Sunday afternoon, procrastinating. Glancing out the window, I saw that it had begun to snow.
Whoa, I thought. It’s the first Sunday of Advent. Homesickness hit me like a hammer. Home was Sault Ste. Marie. My parents immigrated there from Germany in 1951. It was just my mother, Mutti, now and the richest expression of her heritage bloomed during the Christmas season. The house would be infused with the scent of baking and balsam fir boughs that she tied up with red ribbon into a wreath, her Adventskranz. It was always my job to tromp through the forest near my home to find and cut the branches for her wreath. I wondered who had got them for her this year. She would light the first candle this evening and for the first time, I would not be with her to share the moment. I felt lightyears from home.
I trudged back to my dorm room in the waning afternoon light with a few books and a half-hearted resolve to start writing when I saw the brown paper package on my bunk. My name and address were neatly printed in my Mutti’s unmistakable hand. My heart jumped.
I could hear her voice now, “Stay until Christmas, Helga. We can talk about quitting when you come home.” That had been in late August when I snuck down to the forbidden payphone at midnight to call her, my self-confidence shattered by the harassment and head games of recruit term. I begged to come home. Her voice had been gentle but firm: she would hear no more talk of quitting, for now.
I sat on my bunk, melting snow puddling on the tiles beneath my boots, and opened the package. Mutti’s letter was on top. She wrote how much she missed me, and her hope that her small gifts would bring me a little bit of home. There was a bag of Lebkuchen Herzen, soft gingerbread heart-shaped cookies covered with dark chocolate, my favourite. I ripped open the bag and took a bite of one of the spicy-sweet treasures, recalling the excitement of tearing open the annual parcel from an aunt who worked at a cookie factory in Wiesbaden. I then unwrapped a small metal candle holder and four candles. It was nothing like Mutti’s heirloom Adventstande, but now, in my bare military college dorm room, I too could mark the Sundays leading to Christmas.
I almost missed the last item, nestled in crinkled tissue paper at the bottom of the box. It was a cassette tape. Mutti had carefully written “Festliche Weihnacht” (Festive Christmas) on the label. I chuckled. My mother had made me a mixtape; a selection of Weihnachtslieder (carols). My brother must have helped our tech-challenged mother. I could imagine them sitting at the dining room table, my brother repeatedly explaining how to record, Mutti fumbling the buttons until my brother waved her away with an exasperated sigh and did it himself.
I popped the tape into the cassette player and hit play. The first track was “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht,” sung by a boys’ choir. Tears filled my eyes. This tender German carol embraced my most precious Christmas memories. We would come home from Zion Lutheran German Christmas Eve service to find the tree miraculously lit and Weihnachtslieder playing on the stereo, proof that Santa had visited while we were at church. We could see the presents under the tree from the dining room; but Mutti, determined to teach us discipline and delayed gratification, would make us first sit down to a meal of Weisswurst, Sauerkraut, and Kaiserbrötchen (white sausage, sauerkraut, and kaiser rolls). We ate quickly, trying not to look at the tree, but it was torture until the moment she finally excused us from the dinner table to find our gifts. Mutti would sit on the couch and smile fondly as we joyfully tore into our presents.
After the gifts had been opened, Mutti would put on a record of pealing church bells recorded in the region where she grew up. She always cried. When I was twelve or so I asked her why she always played that record if it made her cry. Dabbing her eyes with a tissue, she said that one day I would understand.
The wind rattling the window brought me back to my dorm room. I sobbed as I listened to the rest of the tape, aching for Mutti and for home. Yet I knew I would soon be there. Kingston to The Soo was a long trip, but at least I could afford to fly home for Christmas. Mutti could not. At that moment, I finally understood why she played the recording of the bells every Christmas Eve. With a lump in my throat, I realized the enormity of her sacrifice, and the strength it had taken to leave her home behind to start a new life in Canada, the life that she had built for me.
As the cassette player clicked off, a new feeling of serene determination flowed through me. Mutti’s strength and my upbringing, especially those Christmas Eve lessons about sacrifice, discipline, and delayed gratification, were all part of the clay that formed me. It was enough. I was enough. I would get through RMC. There would be no more talk of quitting.
An older face smiles back from the hallway mirror in my own house. I wore out that cassette. These days I stream Weihnachtslieder, and Mutti, long passed on, still sings to me through them. I replaced that metal advent candle holder with a red-painted wood Adventstande like hers. I have learned to go easy on the Lebkuchen Herzen. But I will never forget how, through those simple Advent gifts, my mother’s strength, sacrifice, and love lifted me when I was ready to give up.
Danke, Mutti.
