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I shut off the auger, put the grain box down, turn off my truck. One more load of flax is in the bin. We are combining our last field and it is one of those perfect fall days – enough warmth in the air to heat a person, but still an aftertaste of the cold the night before.
As I head up to the house yard for a quick break, I feel relief. Yes, we are going to get through harvest. Yes, we are going to get our fall work done before more bad weather sets in. Yes, my aging father and I have managed to complete another farm season together. And yes, soon I can let the responsibility of harvest slip off my shoulders so I can focus on what’s uppermost in my mind: my impending divorce and how I can help my children through the unfamiliar terrain in which we have been mired.
Walking past the trimmed caragana hedge that delineates the division between house and barnyard, I glimpse my two-year-old son playing in the sandbox. Do you know how sometimes, when you want to see something clearer, you squint a little? Well, just then my heart squinted. For a moment, I am taken back 10 years and I am seeing my eldest son playing in just the same way in that same sandbox.
“Mom!” he calls to me, stepping carefully over the side of the box and then barrelling towards me as fast as his short legs can carry him – a master of the ungainly but with a surprisingly fast gait of an exuberant toddler. As he gets closer, I crouch down in a squat and open my arms. He propels his body right into my chest, never breaking stride, never for one instant doubting that I will catch him. As I hold onto him, the centre of my life, my marriage, my farm and my family, a feeling of deep contentment permeates through me. Here, in my arms, is the living embodiment of my happy life. My joy in holding him, pressing my face against his hair, breathing in the dusty, soapy smell of him is a reflection of how I feel towards my whole life – a life filled with love for my husband, my family and my farm.
“Look,” he says, and drags me towards the sandbox, proudly showing me his latest masterpiece of packed sand and muddy water.
I close my eyes then, and a wave of warm emotion washes over me, like a ray of sunshine reviving my body after months of dreary clouds. I savour this innocent, Garden of Eden happiness that has never been tainted by tragedy or loss. Like those warm summer days, it had been impossible not to take it for granted.
My heart blinks then, and my current life snaps back into focus. Gone is my contentment with my well-ordered life. My eldest son is dead, killed swiftly and surely by a brain tumour at 11 years of age. The child at the sandbox now is my youngest son, his little life marred by the tragedy of his brother’s death and the subsequent departure of his father from our home.
Yet the absolute wonder in my child is still there. The deep, deep love I feel for my children is even stronger than the love my younger self knew. In my former life, I had always felt the smallest whisper of incredulity. Did I really deserve to have such a good life? And answering myself quickly, so as not to let any doubt arise: yes, of course, because I’m a good person.
Now, there is a sense of surety in my happiness in my child. I feel the same love for my child, for all my children, as I always have, but now there is a sense of reality to it that was not there before. I love them, and I know that love is stronger than death. If I can wrestle some happiness out of this world I am living in now, then that happiness is mine to keep. I do not have to ask if I am worthy of it, because I know happiness is not something you earn, but something you create.
As I approach the sandbox, a little breeze stirs up and I feel the same unburdening that the right breeze on the right day has instilled in me all my life. It lifts a weight off my shoulders and I can feel it flowing away from me, my inner eye watching it go calmly and with a sense of rightness.
My son turns to me and says, “Hi, mom,” with that same cheekiness and those same twinkling eyes that greeted me 10 years ago.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I respond, and send a quick little thank you skywards, in the same direction as my earlier burdens had flown, for all that is good in my life.
Donna Cross lives in Kipling, Sask.