The recollection of perspective

The squeal of the steel gate splits my ears and concentration,
breaking my brief enjoyment of a half-petalled hydrangea's head.

How did I become this - all metal gates and distraction -
when once I was unfenced wilderness, big sky?

Was I ever that? Or did I fear it?
Is this London garden gate the dead end of my defences,
the prison to which I fled?

The sky turns, and so do I, tiny on the planet's edge.
Vast midnight waits - but here and there, a star.

Grandma R.

When she went - suffocated, finally, by the miracle of modern medicine, she left behind: $25 unpaid credit (not late, you know, just not yet paid); a complicated lifting chair; and so much unsaid.

(Not said by her and  not said to her: "I remember it differently, that time - you don't remember because you weren't there." Why did she go, what did she feel? Now no one can remind her where she was, where the children were or with whom. Not that they ever did remind her; fairly or unfairly they blamed her but outwardly held their peace. We are all English, after all.)

There was also the small matter of her body - and it was a good deal smaller by the time they finished cutting her up in surgery, looking for the tumour and all its many children. Her body ended up in a cemetary in Prince George, BC, the same place her mother lies, unmarked, unvisited, beneath the grass. We're not cemetary visitors, us - something to do with with religiously despising the material body, or just an inability to confront death.

Her children sorted through her things - her books, her clothes, the vast numbers of cheap and useful household things she could not resist buying, from the Clapper to a screwdriver with every type of head invented. I was given a book of Tennyson's poems, barely held together with plastic tape on its leather cover and inscribed to my biological Grandfather from his mother. That was how I learned his given name - Gilbert - which I had never heard before. I still don't know his mother's name and I all I know about him are contradictory stories - he's either the abandoned ex-husband of a wandering woman or the indifferent or perhaps even cruel but certainly absent husband whose involvement with his children ended with conception. I treasure the book (in storage) as a connection to the past, whatever it was. Grandma thought the book was important enough to drag over from England and keep until her death - maybe she planned to give it back some day?

She left my parents the clock they despised. They are the generation that turns the hated key, hearing in the grinding of complex innards:

Ask not for whom they toll
(those blasted chimes -
those noisome, trite, Big Ben imitations
their incessant, infernal ringing, day and night,
but particularly at night)
their ringing, it is for thee...

She came from England (west midlands, small towns, birmingham, WWII, marriage, children, ballroom dance, romance, divorce court, gretna green, RAF mechanic, her father's name, her husband's name, her second husband's name - the one that stuck though he did not - parental forgiveness and a return to their religion, deaths of husbands, feuds with siblings, children moved abroad, children fervent with apocalyptic prophecy and children married young, a child divorced, a child abroad, a family abroad, a child in jail, and all the children breeding a host of grandchildren, a child fostered and adopted and a mother shrunken with age, senility turning her into a child...) to Canada, fleeing Thatcher and the winds of change in the motherland.

The whole family came (jumpers and sweets, beano and dandy, even dampness and distrust crossed the pond) and finally buried her in a hole in Pince Goerge, B.C. next to her mother (her mother, who came but might not have known where she was) (her mother, who raised her children for a while) (her mother, who was the convert and enforcer of the family's conversion).

And what I thought at the time she died was what a pity to end up there, where I started, the place I fled, the last place I'd want to end up - but then maybe she was fleeing the mirror of the familiar, as I have.