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for information about birth control discovered a description
of “calendar-based contraception” in a book on homeopathic
medicine.
Dominy van der Marel appears regularly in my mother’s
stories about her father’s love of intense, intellectual discus-
sion and his disdain for the theologically rigid, socially tepid
ideas he encountered in the churches he’d stopped attending.
Pake considered Reverend van der Marel—a relatively young
but learned man from Amsterdam—a welcome exception
to the mediocre clergymen typically sent to provincial vil-
lages like Nijemardum. It was likely Reverend van der Marel
and his wife whom ten-year-old Geeske was defending when
they made the unconventional decision to announce their
daughter’s birth as a gift of spring. According to the stories,
the discerning young pastor enjoyed his lively, undoubtedly
smoke-laced conversations with my grandfather as much as
my grandfather did.
But they disagreed on birth control. Reverend van der
Marel was staunchly in favour—I don’t know on what theo-
logical grounds—while Pake was vehemently opposed on
a predictably patriarchal set of reasonings. At least once in
anticipation of van der Marel’s arrival, my grandmother—
who took an active part in the visits when she had time—
suggested to my grandfather that they raise the question of
“family planning,” a suggestion Pake vetoed furiously. Beppe
was out of patience, though, with the veto and alluded to the
subject sufficiently clearly that van der Marel’s assurance has
become a part of family lore.
In the middle of rural, conservative 1940s Netherlands,
that is, van der Marel was prepared to assert that it was not
God’s will that children should be born, one after the other,
year after year, without taking considerations of health—the
mother’s, the child’s, the other children’s—and financial
welfare into account. My mother used to remember that on
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one occasion at least, the topic prompted such fiery disagree-
ment that van der Marel either left of his own, perhaps angry,
accord, or Pake tossed him out on his metaphorical ear. If my
mother were in her right mind now, I’d ask much more about
these stories and the relative time frames. How old was Mom
when these conversations took place? Did Pake and the good
pastor patch up their disagreement, and how? At what point,
if ever, did Pake acquiesce to the prohibitions on sexual activ-
ity that the homeopathic manual described?
My mother’s two younger brothers were born in quick suc-
cession, sixteen and thirty months after her, Lieuwe (Louie)
in May 1937, with World War II still a somber impossibility,
and Hendrik (Henry) in June 1938, amid rising international
tensions. During the almost four-and-a-half-year reprieve
before the three youngest daughters arrived, Beppe suffered
a miscarriage, possibly her second. This is the time frame
within which my mother was being abused, so it’s possible
that, though I’ll never know whether, Beppe was pregnant
when she wrestled Pake away from the boy who’d been abus-
ing little Geeske. My youngest aunt Gerta remembers Beppe
describing the pleasure she felt at finally being slim again and
engaging easily with the physical work of mothering seven
children (ages four to thirteen, Geeske in the corner scrib-
bling in her siblings’ notebooks), keeping house, and running
the store (since it never did well under Pake’s management).
“Be careful,” Mark Twain allegedly once quipped, “about
reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” Funny
enough, till somebody loses an “I”—till somebody loses
her self. It’s not at all clear, you see, at what point my grand-
mother discovered that misprints in the homeopathic manual
had been advocating a precisely incorrect understanding of
the fertile and non-fertile days of a woman’s menstrual cycle.
My Aunt Jessie (Jikke) was born prematurely in November
1942, two and a half years into the German occupation of the
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Netherlands; Eta (Itte) was born in June 1946, a year after the
end of World War II; and little Gerta (Gepharda) arrived half-
way through 1949 and would celebrate her third birthday on
a sticky July day, two months after immigrating to Winnipeg,
Canada.
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n e w m e a d o w 2 21
new meadow (4)
When I arrive on 11 January 2008, eager to record my first
official conversation with Mom, she wants to tell me what she
remembers about her father’s death thirty-six years earlier,
having been reminded of it by something on the radio. Mom’s
account emphasizes the peacefulness of Pake’s passing and I
can’t resist asking if she’s afraid of dying. Mom can learn and
forget a name between breaths by now, but she is more than
capable of sustained engagement with subtle ideas: for the
next twenty minutes we meander pleasurably across a range
of existential issues: our fear, or not, of dying, which leads us
to the perplexing Christian theology of resurrection, which
prompts my mother to ponder the purpose of our life on earth,
given her relative certainty that if we are resurrected, we’ll be resurrected without a memory of this existence. “What’s the
point of the whole thing, if we can’t remember anyway?” she
muses and adds, “Since most of it is eating!” and the recording
crackles with our laughter.
We reflect on the forms that consciousness and memory
might take after death, and when Mom repeats her wish to
“just melt away,” she immediately wonders, “If you have a
spirit, maybe that spirit stays?” In the discussion of spirits
and souls that follows, I ask Mom to point to the place in her
body where she locates her essential self. “I think here,” she
answers promptly, with a lovely but inadvertent double enten-
dre, touching the middle of her forehead: “In my mind; I live
in my mind. [. . .] I live in my body, but I also live in my mind.
[. . .] That’s a simultaneous process: while I’m in my body my
mind is—”
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And then she pauses and asks, “Is it in my body or is it
just around me. . .?” “How do you experience it?” I ask, and
her response is instantaneous: “I experience my self as being
in my body.” “And if it’s not in my body,” she quips, “then it
has maybe taken off for a little jaunt!” Mom is quiet then for
just a moment before she observes thoughtfully: “There is so
immensely much that we don’t know really, isn’t there?”
Dad interrupts to ask if we smell an intense smokiness
(something may be wrong with the wood stove), and our
conversation veers abruptly. When we refocus, it’s to consider
the Andy Warhol exhibit we visited the previous week and to
speculate on art’s capacity to critique commodification. Char-
acteristically, Mom both doubts her ability to say anything
meaningful about art and declares that it’s everyone’s human
right to have an opinion: “Because the painter himself throws
it out to the public and says, ‘What do you think of that?’!”
Our conversation shifts then to Barack Obama’s successful
bid for the Democratic leadership, and when we survey the
racist and misogynist attacks that Obama and Hillary Clin-
ton have weathered, Mom is eager to condemn entrenched
American racism. Wait, though, I caution, Canada is a racist
society too. Canadians, I propose, have only barely begun to
understand systemic racism here against Indigenous people.
Mom could not agree more. “Jah, jah, ” she emphasizes, “I
told you, eh, when we came to Canada? I said to Pake, ‘Yeah,
but Dad, there are also other people there, you know, who
already live there; what do they think of it that we’re going
there?’ But then Pake said, ‘ Jah, but you know, the govern-
ment, the Canadian government? They are letting us in.’”
Mom pauses. “Well,” she says next, more hesitantly, “we cer-
tainly didn’t, you know, peruse and see what all had happened
before—and after. We knew very little about that. But, jah.
They let us in.”
Ironically, I learn far more about my mother because she has
Alzheimer’s than I would if the disease had never encroached
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on our lives. Never mind that what I learn is often telegraphic,
truncated, partial, fragmented, and possibly untrue. My sis-
ter doubts Mom’s story about the schoolmaster who made a
special trip on his bicycle all the way to Nijemardum from the
M.U.L.O. in Balk to urge Beppe and Pake to find the money to
send gifted young Geeske for further education. I, for my part,
am skeptical about young Geeske’s intuition of the fraught
imbalances that have characterized Canada’s Indigenous–set-
tler history. But my skepticism is moot. This is one of several
stories that Mom will return to again and again. “I told you,
didn’t I,” she begins innumerable times, “how when I heard we
were moving to Canada, I said to my Dad, ‘But what about the
people who are already living there; do they want us to come?’”
On 11 January 2008, I ask Mom if she has any memories
of encountering Indigenous people when she was first in Can-
ada. “No, no,” she insists, agitated—talk about the immigra-
tion years typically prompts more than usual anxiety—“all I
can remember from those first early years, is, that, [. . .] how
terribly sea, uh, sea, uh, uh, homesick Mom was, and that I
had to stay with her for crying out loud, and [. . .] of course I
didn’t go to school, I didn’t go to school, at all in this country
you know.” We explore the dramatic shifts taking place these
days, as Indigenous Canadians are increasingly politically
active, increasingly shifting our collective sense of who we
are together—and then I maneuver the conversation back to
Mom’s first experiences here. “When you’re in the middle of,
you know,” she explains, “your mother is so ill that she’s going
to drown—, after the dr . . . dr . . . jump in the river and then
when she’s over that, then you’d just better get a job [. . .] and
what kinds of jobs they are, and you have to figure out where
to go and what to do, and—ah, I remember how nervous I
was. Fanke”—girl—“you can’t believe it . . .”
There wasn’t much about Canada that young Geeske liked.
She remembers the cold, and she remembers the barren look
of the place, the desperate lack of trees, the dearth of walking
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paths (so different from Nijemardum, or glorious biking
with Bertha through woods and villages to the M.U.L.O.),
the worry at home, first about Beppe and constantly about
finances, because some things didn’t change. Details of her
various factory and clerical jobs are obliterated by anxious
memories of constant distress. “Especially then when I, I went
into that place where you had to [. . .] they had a machine
where you posted all the incomes and, you know, what people
had bought, because it was a wholesale, and then you had to,
at the end of the month, I guess, you had to make sure that the
money was, you know, correct. Och ben,” Mom says. Oh kid.
“I was so nervous.”
“I hated Canada,” Mom declares. “I thought, ‘Why would
anyone live in this godforsaken place where there is nothing
beautiful.’” Until my Aunt Jessie came home from Grade 3
having learned a song about a linnet and her secret. That,
Mom remembers repeatedly, is when she began to believe that
if she could find this beautiful song in Canada, other beauty
might also emerge.7
By June 1988, Mom’s letters frequently reflect the loose ends
she’s at now, having finished the final courses for her university
degree in April. In July, however, there’s excitement when my
father’s sister Griet visits Canada with her husband and their
three children.
Letter #71 from Mom and Dad 18 July 1988
A cool morning, with the promise of a sunny, but not too hot
day. We arrived home from our camping trip yesterday with the
Holland relatives [. . .]. Considering the fact that they are not
very used to our distances and our heat, I feel justified in calling
it a considerable success. [. . .]
We took the Yellowhead up to Edmonton, camping twice
along the way. [. . .] By the time we got there, the kids were
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ready for a break so we visited the notorious, gloriously
gaudy, glitzy West Edmonton Mall. Can you believe Dad at
the West Edmonton Mall? Well, I must say he took it with
good grace [. . .]. Then we went to Red Deer and visited
Dad’s cousin, with kids approximately the same age as our
visitors, another piece of luck, all the more because they had
a computer.
Mom is hurrying because she wants to send this letter with
Frances’s parents, who are about to leave for their second trip
to Uganda.
Letter #71 from Mom and Dad [cont.]
I will just tell you about one of the campsites on our way
home and that we spent an evening with Henry in Calgary,
who took us to the Stampede [. . .]. We took the No. 1, which
leads through the most barren and bleak areas of Alberta
and Saskatchewan. But there is one area, the Cypress Hills,
a provincial park that is totally unlike its bleak and dry
surroundings. It is quite a bit higher than the surrounding
land, covered with fine trees mostly and a few lakes like an
oasis but larger than I’ve imagined an African oasis. There
is of course a scientific explanation for this phenomenon,
but I was convinced there must be also an Indian legend
connected with it, which has a more mystic and symbolic
meaning. It’s a beautiful area, now, of course, occupied with
several campsites although a protected area, and I couldn’t
help wondering if we were not perhaps insulting the Great
Spirit by desecrating the spot, with our cars, tents, noise,
and everything that goes with the conveniences of modern
civilization.
I should never doubt my mother’s intuition, though “mysti-
cal legend” isn’t quite right: archaeological evidence makes it
clear that for over seven thousand years, Indigenous people
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of the northwest plains of North America have wintered on
what are now called the Cypress Hills. The peculiar geography
of the place offers a range of resources, abundant game ani-
mals, protection from the prairie winds, and a powerful site
for spiritual ceremonies.
The day before Mom begins her Letter #71, thieves break into
the Reads’ former house and make off with all manner of
resaleable goods: door locks, door bolts, light sockets, electrical
outlets, and both the bathroom and the kitchen sinks. The day
after Mom begins her letter, Frances lets one of our passengers
off in the middle of a quiet intersection on the outskirts of
Kampala and a passing police officer charges her with “Being
Discourteous to Other Drivers.” We attend at the courthouse
that afternoon. As I write later to Cindy, “I went into Central
Police Station with Frances, thinking to play Dying Mission-
ary in aid of my pal The Criminal, but none of the uniformed
who’s-ems looked remotely interested in staying the charges.
Realizing the jig was up, we agreed I’d wait in the car. Court is
several hundred yards down a rutted alley, and while there isn’t
much point in driving, the walk, for me, would be equivalent
to two weeks’ worth of very painful exercise.”
Twenty minutes into my wait, gunfire erupts around the
