On a hot spring afternoon, my mother brought my sister and me to visit our grandmother. The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table with our only living grandparent. Such a beautiful afternoon it was, with the sun shining through the windows and onto the clean floor, the Rocky Mountains in the distance, and the hills close by. Surely I couldn’t have asked the Creator for a better day to hear my grandma’s story.
She had been making berry soup from Saskatoon berries that she had frozen from the past summer. We all had already been telling stories of the past. As my sister and I were talking about living in the city, laughing and having fun with the time we were sharing with our grandma, I asked her, “Mom, what was it like when you were a child?” I call my grandma “Mom” because of how much she is like my own mother.
“Well, my son. It was a difficult time,” she said. Immediately I knew she was talking about when she had to leave home to attend boarding school. “What kind of difficult time, Grandma?” asked my sister, who had no idea of the troubling time of colonization and boarding school. “When I and my brothers and sisters had to move away from our family to attend residential school,” Grandma replied. Looking a bit uneasy, she got up from her chair to tend to her soup. “But I won’t bore you with my old depressing past,” Grandma said.
