The End Is The Beginning
“Now he was here on an airplane feeling clumsy as he struggled to fill in the immigration card they had just given to him. What was the flight number again? He searched through the carry on bag to try and find the ticket. The entire trip had left him feeling nervous for several weeks beforehand. What was he thinking? Why was he doing this?” Lawyer and podcaster Steven Moe tells a story of finding home.
By Steven Moe
Photo: Kyle Cleveland/Unsplash
John walked slowly with his hands in his pockets, picking his way down the path from his Grandmother’s house towards the Arahura River. He could hear the sound of it in the distance, an angry rushing after the heavy rainfall last night, echoing how he felt inside. He still remembered the first time he had come here, seven years ago. What a horrible time that had been, with his parents deciding to go their separate ways. Somehow he had ended up here with his Grandmother for extended periods of time. Now he was almost 15 years old. Because of the storm that had come through the night before the rocks were all darker than normal, each one painted individually by the rain. A tree had uprooted on the other side of the bank and its branches now reached down to drape its fingers in the swirling muddy water.
He remembered coming down to this river those first times with his grandmother. Something had changed on the banks here for both of them and he still remembered how from that time on they began to talk and share. She seemed to accept him as he was but still always pushing him to become something more. It seemed strange now to think of the changes that were coming. He was so used to having her around. He sighed, and threw rocks over at the half fallen tree, missing most of the time.
Back in the house he knew his Mother was cleaning. Sorting as she went and putting things in piles, as if there was a deadline that had to be met. What did doctors really know, anyway? That is what he told himself, through tears, as they drove back each day from visiting her. But he knew it was true himself. He could see the changes. She had lost the strength that she had before and just seemed tired. The long walks they used to take beside the river dwindled and she became more accustomed to the kitchen with its view down towards the river.
John often went out on his own anyway on the weekends when he would come to stay. He found little treasures, like part of a birds egg, a tree branch in the shape of a letter, an unusual shaped stone. He always brought her a stone back because he knew that made her happy.
She would tell him stories about stones and show him books about others. He liked the square sort of ones that looked like miniature houses and she kept those over on the window ledge. The collection slowly grew.
“So, what have you found today?”, she would ask with a smile as he pushed open the screen door from outside. Always a laugh for something he had found, greeting each new discovery with joy as if that would make them feel welcome into her home. Sometimes his Mother would stay for the weekend with him and other times she would just drop him off. Other times his Grandmother would come in to town and pick him up instead. Either way he spent many of those weekends with her, getting used to not having a television to watch, over time absorbing information about her life and what she thought of things.
What seemed to keep his Grandmother busiest at the desk in the kitchen these last few years was paper. Letters came in from far off places - nearly all from America or Norway. He wasn’t sure exactly what they were because she didn’t talk about it much. When she was done for the day they would all be packed up into a yellow and green apple box and slid back under the coffee table in the lounge.
Today as they had driven up to the house after visiting her in the hospital his Mother had finally said it, glancing at him sideways as she finished slipping up the muddy road and turning into the driveway.
“She won’t be able to come back here, you know”. He knew.
“Maybe she will get better?” He said, without conviction.
“Yes, maybe she will”, his Mother said.
That was all. There was silence as they got out of the car and went into the house The conversation seemed to be enough permission to start the process of cleaning out the house. His Mother had started almost the moment she walked in the door. Now John was down by the river, throwing rocks at the fallen over tree that clung to the river bank. He trudged back up towards the house reluctantly when he had enough of that. This was not how the story was supposed to go. He wanted her to be there for a lot longer yet.
When he entered the kitchen he was unprepared for how quickly his Mother had worked. She seemed to have moved everything around already and he felt saddened that she was purposefully breaking the hold of his Grandmother on the house. His Grandmother had lived there for, what, 50 years? And now in one afternoon the entire place was being moved and jostled and pushed around like the new kid at school. It just wasn’t right and he fell heavily into the chair at the kitchen table.
He watched his mother move back and forth between the rooms and after a few minutes he slowly began to see an order in her movements. There was a small pile here in the kitchen on the table which had a few dishes, crockery, candlesticks. The kind of things which would easily find a place in another home. Then in the lounge there was a growing pile that was much larger and which had started on the couch and now spilled over onto the floor. It contained unique items which no doubt had a story and which most people would not have bought in the first place. John had a feeling he knew where that pile of items was destined to end up.
His Mother walked briskly and efficiently, picking up items from here and there and depositing them in one of the two piles. He got up and walked over to the large pile in the living room and began to pick through what remained. He soon started his own pile - a blue vase, a painting of a river and trees, some rocks that were heavy, an artist’s sketch book that was blank except for his Grandmother’s name on the inside cover, an old necklace with an almost white shaded piece of pounamu greenstone on it. All saved from that larger pile which just kept growing.
John started moving the items around to see what else there was underneath and that is when he saw the old yellow and green apple box. It was there buried below everything else like a foundation and explained why the pile had risen in height so quickly. He wondered if his Mother had even opened it. He reached down and pulled it open and saw stacked papers inside. Some of it seemed to have an order but a lot of it was just thrown in. He spent 5 minutes sifting through it and saw lots of names and date and people referred to. It didn’t mean much to him. He found a family tree and looked from his name at the bottom up. He only recognized his Mother, Father and Grandmother. His Grandfather was there too, but he had disappeared down in Milford Sound many years before John was born.
John placed the papers back in the box and shut it. He knew they had been important to his Grandmother but he wasn’t sure if he felt strongly enough about keeping them to move them from the pile they were now in. He decided to go for another walk outside as he had begun to feel like a traitor to his Grandmother, simply watching this packing up of her life. The tree that had fallen down became the target of his aggression again but simply stood there absorbing his anger with the stones he threw bouncing off it into the river where they sank quickly below the surface.
They spent the night there in that hollowed out shell of a house. John’s Mother had moved on from the sorting to cleaning and the little spider webs in the corner, the grime above the oven and the dust on the shelves had all been efficiently removed. The sparkling windows suddenly seemed to let in more light than before, as if they were new eyes. By the afternoon of the next day the back seat of their small car had also been occupied by the contents of the kitchen table.
John’s pile had been taken over and become part of the very large accumulation of objects that had grown on the sofa. They would be leaving soon. John went back in the house and pulled out the things he wanted to take. The large box was still there, buried once again. He cleared it off and lifted it up, then balanced the other things on top and walked out to the car. His Mother glanced up from the back of the car where she was fitting things in.
She paused, both hands still full. “What’s all that, then?”, she asked him.
“It is what I’d like to keep, to remember her by,” he said.
She looked over what he had, then nodded at him. “You can keep it all but why don’t you put it into that box.”
“The box is already full”, he said. He had made his choice and decided to keep the papers.
“I already looked through that box - there is nothing much in there.” His Mother said to him, as she got back to her work.
“I think I can find room around the front here”, John replied, moving to the passenger side of the car and evading the implication of her comment. In the end it all fit in quite easily.
His Mother did not agree with his choice. In her eyes it was more clutter for their small house. “I bet that you won’t open that box once in the next 40 years”, she said, as she glanced at it when they pulled away and drove back down the road. John ignored her and swivelled in his chair to look back towards the house as they bumped down the road and the trees began to get in the way of his view.
***
John hadn’t known how accurate his Mother’s word would be. It could almost have been a prophecy because in fact more than 40 years passed by quickly and John was nearly 60 years old when he finally came across the box again covered with dust in an attic. He had found he was often thinking about those days cleaning out his Grandmother’s house by the river when he began the process of cleaning out his own Mother’s place in Hokitika.
His daughter Sarah had called out to him, “what’s this old box, Dad?”. She had agreed to come over this Saturday and devote a few hours to help him out. A reluctant addition was his granddaughter Jane who walked in and immediately turned the old TV on before taking over the chair in the lounge. John walked up the stairs to the attic and stooped down to get through the door and enter the small room.
Sarah sat at the far end underneath the window. A small amount of light from outside came in just that end of the room through the dusty windows. Sarah had dragged the box out of the corner into the light and a dust trail had clearly been scraped across the floor.
They spent the next hour crouched there together. They looked at the names, the old family tree, the foreign language that was so incomprehensible. At age 15 John had not appreciated what these papers were. Now he felt like they were clues that needed to be explored further. His granddaughter Jane was just 17 but she put it best when they finally decided to carry the box downstairs and described what they had found to her.
“A boxful of jigsaw pieces,” she said, before turning back to stare at the TV. John had to agree with her. He wasn’t sure how it all fit together but it certainly felt like it was a challenging puzzle. He decided to take the box out and load it into his car to take home with him. As he walked out he saw his daughter Sarah was looking at the TV and then back at her daughter, clearly debating whether she should say something. Loading the box in the back only took a minute. When he walked back up to the door of the house he caught the tail end of their conversation.
“... well, it’s certainly ‘better’ than hanging out with those ‘bad influences’, as you call them, isn’t it?” said Jane, without even looking over at her Mother, who had sat down at the kitchen table with a frown on her face. Uncertain what to say. Letting silence settle uncomfortably and perhaps clinging to a false hope that it was a bridge between them. John felt awkward even though he probably shouldn’t have. He stepped in to the house softly and crept back between them to make his way up the stairs to search for anything else buried in the decades of dust that might be left up in the attic.
***
John vividly remembered one of the final trips to the hospital those decades before to see his Grandmother. She lay a little propped up on the bed, brown skinned still among the white pillows and sheets that covered her body. He sat on the left side of the bed and her eyes were looking away from him out the window into the trees outside where the birds hopped from branch to branch. They didn’t talk much at those times, he just sat with her silently. On this visit he had reached out for her right hand and slipped something into her fingers, folding them over gently. She smiled as she turned to him.
“So, what have you brought me today, John?” She asked. She bent forward and opened her fingers to reveal the stone. He thought there was something wrong as she drew in her breath suddenly and he almost turned to call out for the nurse. Then she was reaching forward quickly with her left hand to trace the shape on the stone.
“Is this...”, she seemed unable to finish the sentence, or look at him.
She held it up higher into the light that streamed in from the window. The stone was perfectly round and smooth with a distinctive shape crossing over it. She looked at him.
“But we. We threw this one in, I mean, you threw this one in that first day, I searched for it. Through the bag. It wasn’t there”. The words tumbled out of her quickly.
He shrugged, “I guess it was so perfectly round I kept that one. Put it in my jacket pocket and took it home. I thought you might like it.” he had said.
She looked from him to the stone, and back again. She smiled.
“You know, this stone taught me a lot about priorities. I always wished that I could give it to you and now I am glad that you are the one who will have it.”
Then softly she said, almost to herself rather than to him, “you were always more important, I just needed to lose it to find that out.” She looked deep into his eyes. Smiled again.
“Keep it, until you know it is time”, she said. She folded his fingers over it.
***
When the sale of his Mother’s house had finally completed John was very surprised at the amount of money someone had been willing to pay for it. According to the estate agent it had “real character”. That must have been code for a house that was falling apart and needed a lot of work. He gave some of the money to his daughter Sarah, who was very appreciative.
Now he was here on an airplane feeling clumsy as he struggled to fill in the immigration card they had just given to him. What was the flight number again? He searched through the carry on bag to try and find the ticket. The entire trip had left him feeling nervous for several weeks beforehand. What was he thinking? Why was he doing this? He was very comfortable at home. There was nothing to prove and what else could he really find out by making this trip? Those were the questions he had pondered many times, lying awake at night.
And yet there was more to it than that. One thing, maybe the most important thing, was that Jane sat beside him. Yes, his granddaughter had agreed to come on this journey with him. The timing had worked out well - the money came in from the house sale, the holidays were on before University would start, her getting pulled over and given a warning and of course the drugs (that, in theory, he did not know anything about). It had not been John’s idea at all in fact but instead was his daughter’s. They were having a talk one evening and she had raised it. Talking with him about the family history and the research he had done the last few months online and the connection he had made back in Sonora.
“Maybe you should actually go.” Sarah had said.
He just grunted, “hmm”, not convinced.
“And take Jane too?”. She asked, looking away.
“Hmm”, he said.
But in reality he could see the logic behind that idea. He could see that Jane desperately needed a change of scene more than anything else. A chance for a different perspective. And that is what had won him over, in the end. So they had driven to Christchurch airport and started the journey and now here he was somewhere sailing high over the Pacific filling in a form with small writing about bio security risks and confirming he was carrying less than $10,000 in cash. He felt out of place.
The drive up from San Francisco was extremely tiring after the long flight from Auckland. They pulled into a small motel in a place called Jamestown. The next morning they followed South Fork Road until they came to the log cabin that was described in the message. They got out of the car and stretched, both feeling nervous. They walked under the shade of the tall pine trees and across the driveway and knocked. No one answered for a while and then they heard some sounds from inside and the door silently swung open.
A curious face looked out at them. Curious both because of the expression it wore and the character it clearly contained. John could only think of Julie his grandmother when he saw her. There were only hints there, as if an artist had sketched Julie from memory and so got it a bit wrong. Short white hair circled the face with blue eyes like the ocean coloured in. She beckoned them both inside.
This meeting had been planned for months and had been sparked by the content of that old box of Julie’s. John had spent many days sifting through it all and getting a better sense of who was who. The old letters had been a revelation, sent back and forth by Julie when her different cousins and aunts and uncles were still living. One of the first things he had done was to prepare a letter describing himself and where he fit in the family along with a family tree that he created. He sent that off to each of the addresses that Julie had received a letter from. It was a bit like a lottery and he wondered if there would be any responses at all. Then one day the letter had come with the California postmark and he had been filled with anticipation as he opened it.
The correspondence that started then had led to John sitting here on a couch with his granddaughter, nodding and smiling at this second cousin of his. The sun flowed in through the open window and in the distance he could hear a stream falling over rocks. Rainbows scattered around the room from a small glass ball that had many edges and sat proudly in the middle of the window ledge. This living connection to his grandmother was named Marian Odegaard and she was telling them now about her family.
“My great grandfather was named Peter Odegaard and he emigrated from Norway with his sister Sigrid around 1910 and they both ended up here in California. Peter died long before I was born but I remember Sigrid - we called her Auntie. She loved this house and walking down by the stream. She often would take me down there during the daytime and sometimes even at night. I do not remember actually meeting your Grandmother Julie, but I probably did. I knew that she had moved to New Zealand and we exchanged letters many years ago when I was much younger.” She looked over her cup at them. It was hard to tell how old she actually was. Perhaps 85 but, then again, she could be even older.
She reached over to the shelf and picked up the little sun catcher and then she held it out to Jane.
“Perhaps you can find a use for this,” she said.
Jane took it into her hands and turned it over.
Marian said, “I think Sigrid would like to know that her great great granddaughter had this, even if it will leave my room a little less colourful”. She smiled at Jane, who seemed overwhelmed and had simply mouthed back, “thank you”, before looking down at the small glass ball and holding it up to the light.
She turned to John. “And for you, I have this.” She held out a small envelope. John opened it and flipped through some old photos and letters. He recognized some of the writing but not all of it - there would be time later to read them. He stopped at one photo of a little girl and an old woman standing beside a stream. He pulled it out and showed it to Marian.
She took it and said, “Ah yes, Sigrid and Julie. I can tell that the photo was taken right down there at the stream - would you like to see where?”
And so they found themselves following behind Marian under the canopy of large oak trees and alders until they came to a small bridge. Around them blackberries grew in patches and the sun filtered through the trees and formed patterns on the small stream before them. John found himself breathing deeply, feeling the wind, the warmth of the sun and the sound of the birds and the stream and imagining his grandmother standing in this same spot. So much time had passed between his visit here and Julie’s and yet it almost felt like the thinnest of veils that he might just be able to find a way through if he concentrated hard enough. He was glad they had made the effort to come and felt a peace he had not had for a very long time.
***
Jane looked up from the stream in front of them and saw that her Grandfather’s eyes were half closed. Marian, the ancient old lady who had led them here, stood blinking at the light reflecting off of the water. On the trip over Jane had read some of the papers her Grandfather had brought with him and so now she picked her way down the steep bank to the waters edge and bent halfway down, shuffling forward and brushing hair in behind her ears, scanning the bank as she moved slowly along. She picked out a few pretty coloured rocks and put them in her left pocket (her right one had the glass ball she had been given). Finally she found a stone that was the right shape and picked it up. She held it up to Marian and John so they could see, then she raised it twice in the air and turned towards the water. It skipped three times before it sank. She searched for another while listening to Marian and John who were chatting and laughing together about that old family tradition. It felt good to be here, with no pressure, just being alive in that moment. There was no sudden point which she would later look back on as being the critical time when this trip would be cited as a turning point. It was almost like she was a tree that had been planted in dry soil and this experience was soaking through and letting roots have the chance to grow.
When they returned to New Zealand Jane continued to spend a lot of time with her Grandfather John because she had begun studying at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. A few years before he had sold up his place on the West Coast and moved to Whitecliffs which was about 40 minutes away from Christchurch, heading into the mountains. The small cabin he had there was nestled in among the trees and you could hear the Selwyn River when you stood outside. It reminded her a lot of that place back in Sonora that they had visited and the stream that ran down through the valley by the cabin there.
On her visits she helped him scan in all the old documents about the family and order them into boxes that were all labelled and then stored under his bed. Out in the garden they planted apple trees, pear trees, lemons and feijoas and enjoyed the long summer evenings and the twilight that never seemed to fade. It was on one of those evenings that he had given her the stone. The perfectly round stone with the criss cross on it. She knew what it was of course, as he handed it to her. She almost did not want to take it because it felt like there was some prediction of the future and finality in it being passed on to her. In a way that is exactly what it was. John was gone a few years later while she was traveling in Europe. She was left feeling hollow, without anything else to say, as if the phone conversation she had started had the reception cut out and had left her talking into the air.
When she got home just a few weeks later she went out to the property at Whitecliffs. Her Mother was still over in Hokitika so it was her Aunt who had taken it on herself to tidy up. There wasn’t much left after that. She wondered if the boxes were lying in the dump being slowly saturated by rain. It made her ache inside to think of it. Now the fruit trees were producing for no one and the ripened spoils lay on the ground being eaten by the birds. She sat in the old couch looking out at them feasting and turned her gaze to the mountain range in the distance. She could hear the stream in the distance but all else was still and silent.
***
“Hello”, I say.
It has been at least 20 minutes on hold. Perhaps 30 minutes.
“Hello, can I help you” says the voice, finally, at the other end. An unusual accent.
I have prepared in my mind what to say and hope it will work out. I start to speak.
“Yes, yes, hello, my name is Jane and, look, this may be unusual, but I am trying to get access to something my Grandfather set up and it is not working. I know the username but not the password.” I say.
“Well, you can reset the password by hitting the ‘forgot login’ on the right hand side”, she says back, crisply and efficiently. There must be other calls to be answered.
“No, the problem is I cannot access the email that was used to set it up either - you see, my Grandfather died. Several years ago in fact. Is there any way you can help?”
And so it went on. The person on the other end of the line could not help, didn’t really want to. She was just answering another phone call, listening to another complaint. In the end she took my email address and said she would look into that. I was still talking to her when I was surprised to see a message appear online in my inbox which just said “sigridjuliejohn321” as its subject.
I say slowly, “Did you ...” to the lady on the line.
“Yes, these calls are recorded, so I am sure you understand ... “ her voice just trailed off.
And here I had thought she had no interest. I smile. “Yes, I do, thank you.” I say, and hung up.
With that final piece I log in and I saw them all there, the scans of the old documents, the letters, the photos. I felt a lightness and breathed a little easier.
I stood up from the computer and stretched, then walked out of the living room into the hallway. The sun was streaming in from the old stained glass window and it made the old wooden floor colourful at this time in the morning. Rainbows scattered this way and that from the small glass ball that Marian gave me those years before.
Over and over in my hands I folded the stone back and forth. It always feels smooth and cool to my touch. I glanced towards the half shut door at the end of the hallway and wondered how long my son will sleep for. The curtains were pulled tight in there to make it dark which might meant he would sleep for 2 hours. This was my quiet time, my rest in the day when I wasn’t on baby duty. I stood by his door and listened closely. Yes, little John would probably let me have some more time alone.
I walked back into the lounge room and put the rock onto the window sill, next to the small glass ball. Rainbows still filled the room as the shade from the trees outside had not interrupted the sun yet. In the kitchen I poured myself a cup of tea and then sat down in the most comfortable chair to sip it. I looked out the window at the birds that darted from branch to branch and listened to the sound of the stream in the distance.
Photo: Kyle Cleveland/Unsplash