This Land

This house, I know is ours. We’ve paid for every piece that’s gone into it. We’ve built so much of it ourselves. But this land we set our house on, i have a complicated relationship to our land. How can we own this —This expanse of prairie. This strip of clear air with a window to the stars. This wedge of moonlight. This meadow of snow drifts. This stand of trees, and that one. This wood pecker destroying this old wooden hydro pole. How can a human own nature ? Isn’t that God’s thing ?

The incongruity of my name on the title of land taken away from other people doesn’t escape me. There’s a real irony about me as a Mennonite woman owning this land in this country. This land has been fought over at great cost to the original inhabitants. My people had their lifestyle upended and were chased out of  Europe right around the time the First Nations people were having similar but more horrific experiences in Canada. Did my ancestors understand that their displacement displaced others ? Did they realize the irony in them being chased from their homes in Europe straight into the homes others had been recently chased from in Canada ? I do know that their stance against war, fighting and government involvement will have kept them from being an active part in chasing the First Nations people from their lands. I do not know how much they knew of what was going on in Canada before they arrived. This was several generations ago; there’s no one left to ask.  I only see from the benefit of over hundred years of hindsight and Canada’s true history finally coming to light that my ancestors inadvertently benefited from others’ misfortunes. Generational Guilt.

Land ownership, especially in this country is full of ambiguity. Until we owned land ourselves I didn’t think much about this. Now I can’t unthink it. I often wonder about the people who lived here a couple hundred years ago. Did they have a fire ring near the place where mine is today ? Did they hunt deer, moose grazing in same meadow they graze in today ? Did their babies grow up under this same patch of stars ? What did their life look like before roads and cars and ugly Europeans? Did they feel as secure and happy as I do ? What things did the women of that day worry about? Did a tiny human learning to stagger from one parent to another bring them the same delight it brings me ? How did it get to be me raising my child on this peaceful beautiful bit of land ?

Mary and Me

Fully a month after Christmas and here’s me still thinking about Mary, a major character in the Christmas story. I think it’s because we had one final Christmas gathering last weekend and my dad read the Christmas story. The phrase about Mary pondering all the things really caught my attention. I thought I had a momentous year with the birth of my baby boy and so many other more minor but still major events and happenings. Compared to the year Mary had when her first child was born, however, my life seems very manageable.

Mary’s life, the year Jesus was born:

 -an engagement (to Joseph of course. They’d been friends for years; but still the proposal had been a surprise.) 
-then something stranger: an angel visitor with an unbelievable message that took her days, months, a lifetime to process. 
-ostracized by all the people who didn’t believe her unbelievable story about where her baby was coming from (those weeks when Joseph was considering breaking off their engagement were especially torturous.)  
-then one day the first strange and miraculous movement of a super human baby insider her and everything started to feel more real and doable
-a long trip with her fiancé and his family to their home village (so many distant family members she had to meet when all she wanted to do was sleep. In a real bed. Not. A. Pile. Of. Hay.) 
-the trauma of giving birth in a barn 
-then finally meeting the newborn that immediately changed the whole world, not just her world. (She had to share her baby with everyone from the very beginning. How hard must that have been for her protective first time mom heart?!)

Mary kept these things and pondered them in her heart. Everyone else was talking about them: the neighbours were gossiping about her and Joseph, the shepherds were telling everyone they met about this Baby, the Saviour, and the angels and their amazing song. The wisemen asked so many people where to find this Little King that they accidentally alerted a jealous murderer to the birth of this baby King. Old people were waiting in the temple to meet the Baby.

 It must have felt to Mary like was talking about her and her baby, and no one understood what she was going through. She had no choice but to quietly process everything internally, to ponder these things in her heart on top of second guessing how to mother a Holy Child, how to share Him with everyone in the world, how to cherish every single smile, giggle, silly game before He grows up……………………

Disclaimers. I took a lot of poetic license with the Christmas story and humanized it to the point where it is relatable for me.  No irreverence is intended. 

 

Janvier Hurts

Janvier hurts. While I spend the whole day giggling with my 8 month old or if we’re not giggling he’s being clever or cuddly, January hurts. 

For little things: it’s post holidays, post all the parties, what do we cook now that we don’t cook Christmas food. It’s the air stings my face when I go outside and the snowy fields don’t hold the magic of angels singing I could easily imagine 2 weeks ago. It’s day 5 of fog, and, yes, the heavy layer of frost on everything is beautiful, but give me clear skies already. It’s unexciting planning meetings for all the winter responsibilities we could do without -crafts with the kids and Bible study for the whole congregation.

It’s bigger things. It’s Sissy going back to BC when we all are so used to her being here. She says families are meant to spread out, but we kind of disagree. It’s all the brothers drama all the time that we want to avoid, but also spectate on because it keeps life interesting.

There’s scary things. The man on drugs who really could’ve frozen in his vehicle just down the road from our house but amazingly didn’t. It’s Gun shots fired in the night near where we were winching a car out of the ditch at Keeseekoose, the popo coming to find out if we’d seen the “guy with the gun, wearing a plaid jacket.”  Although he must’ve been nearby, we didn’t see him. 24 hours later we’re still saying dramatically to each other “what if.” And then 48 hours later I finally think to think, “what hurt made this human want to hurt other humans to this extent?”

There’s so many hard things happening around us, more than to us right at this minute. There’s hurting people, hurting children. There’s so much hurt this Janvier, every Janvier, every month, every day, every year.