Old Country

My grandparents, Reg and Ethel Drew, called this place "The Old Country". They spoke of it constantly. It took me a very long time to realize that this meant that they longed for it, always.

I went to Devon when I was 39. Sometime, I will post pictures of my friends and I walking toward Paignton from the West. We are drifting, wandering "little people" in those pics. I have stones from the seashore. "She sells seashells ..."

We drank warm, brown beer at a pub on the undercliff. Played darts a little drunk.

Walked your ground; breathed your air.

I hope I can find the photo of the Monkey Puzzle Tree with me sitting beneath it. As you always hoped I would.

Ethel May Scoble Drew

That's my grandmother, up there in the hills. You can't see her? I can.

Grand she was. Today is her birthday. If she were alive, she would be 105. She died when she was 93, but for me, years before. That makes the loss greater.

That's the Devon countryside in which she was born, but from which she wandered.

She sailed from Southampton on the Queen Mary when she was 22. Alone. A young woman who had never travelled far from her home in Paignton, set out for the new world, to meet her husband in Toronto.

The Queen docked in Montreal and she took the train from there. She told me that she looked out into that treed and sometimes watery landscape, terrified. The distance. The darkness. The forests. Fear of Indian attack.

I wonder, now, if she infected me with that fear. For a time when I was quite young, she lived next door to me, with Grandad and Uncle Tom, in the place by the Great Lake. When my mother ran out of any kind of food, I was sent next door to borrow it from Nana. I only remember the night trips. Dead of winter. The treed hill rose up behind the houses. I remember only the closeness of night. And the fear of an Indian raid. I always took those journeys on the run, loaves of bread squashed in my hands.

Ethel was the kindest person I ever knew. Have ever known.

I just realized how Margaret Atwood this all sounds.

Oh p.s. Nana, you also infected me with song.

Don't Call Me Ishmael

I wanted an anonymous place but I find it difficult to create that space. It seems appropriate. Somehow. Everything is vague. That's what it's like when you've wandered much too far from home.

This is the life I am supposed to be living. It's always been irregular. For years I wondered, "Was I born this way?"

Now, it doesn't matter. It's been going on for far too long.

Are nomads nomadic because of the desert environment, or did they find a desert environment that suited their need to wander? How long did they search, wandering as they sought what they needed? And did they ever understand what they were looking for?

I've been talking about "gaslighting" for years. I used to think the concept arose from the Alfred Hitchcock movie where Grace Kelly's husband is trying to kill her and, while he's at it, he feels the need to first make her believe she's crazy. I can't remember how, quite. But I do think the gaslighting had to do with the death-dealing.

I learned a few weeks ago, while googling something entirely different, that the concept actually came from a Victorian detective novel. Of course. It would. All those Londinium gaslights, flickering in the sickly fog. That would do it.

Funny what happens when you start in one place and just set about the business of moving.

Nights spent under the gaslights.

It's part of the adventure to do what comes, to write what comes, and just put it out into the night. It would be interesting if someone wrote back. But, as always with those who are too far from home, without address, it's not expected.