Dear Canada (Robinson May)

Dear Canada,

I hope this letter finds you well. I’m truly sorry I haven’t visited lately. I suppose I’ve taken you for granted, though that was never my intention. How could I have known that everything would change?

We’ve always been in each other’s lives. You’re right there across the lake, after all. And while I’ve made many memorable trips to Ontario, my Dad’s birthplace of Nova Scotia is forever closest to my heart.

When I was a little girl, Mom, Dad, my older brother, and I would visit our grandparents in their modest home on Normandy Avenue in Truro, Nova Scotia, not far from Brookfield, where Grandpa spent his career working at the local creamery. The old lady next door chattered nonstop over the fence. Grandma held me on her lap as she played piano. Grandpa had a soft-spoken sense of humor and his blue eyes sparkled, just like Dad’s.

Eventually, my parents decided to look for a summer cottage in Nova Scotia. The small former army shack they chose had been transported to Brule Shore on the Northumberland Strait, where Dad announced we would enjoy “the warmest water north of the Carolinas!” thanks to the trajectory of the Gulf Stream. Grandma and Grandpa helped them find the place. Grandma died not long after, but Grandpa lived into his nineties. His blue eyes sparkled to the end.

I bought my first real baseball glove (lefty) at Canadian Tire in Truro. When my Dad’s younger brother and his family would come to the cottage from their home in Dartmouth, we’d play kids-versus-adults softball, and even sports-averse Dad was roped into the game. We celebrated family gatherings with lobster feasts on the deck. Time blurs by, and I’m with my husband and cousins among the adults, my two sons playing against us on the kids’ team. Canadian beer accompanies the lobster and Dad’s stuffed clams. We gaze at glorious sunsets over the water. They remind me of the song, “Canadian Sunset,” on the Mills Brothers record Dad used to play for me.

Last summer, I knew. Dad’s Lewy body dementia had advanced significantly. An early sign had been when he couldn’t locate the coffee maker in its usual spot in the cottage kitchen, several years earlier. At the time, we made nervous jokes and had whispered conversations, unprepared for the unforgiving journey to come. Travel was next to impossible for him now, but Mom was determined to bring him to Nova Scotia. Somehow, she did. My brother and his longtime girlfriend joined them. At the beginning of my teaching semester in August, I realized I had to go, if just for the weekend. This was it, our last chance to be together at the cottage. I flew to Halifax, rented a car, and drove to Brule. Home. Twilight supper on the deck. This time, the sunset brought me to tears.

And then, pandemic summer. I knew we’d lose Dad this year, ever since he’d suffered a broken hip and couldn’t follow the directions that might have helped him recover. I made a photo banner for his nursing home room, with views from the cottage, a picture of him on the deck, a picture of him with my sons showing them his childhood home - not the house on Normandy Avenue but the house he grew up in, just outside Victoria Park in Truro, the magnificent 3000-acre park that was his playground as a boy. I held Dad’s hand until I wasn’t allowed to visit anymore due to quarantine, and then when we could visit again because he was “actively dying” (what amounts to good news/bad news in this pandemic), I held his hand some more. I repeated words of comfort: “Think of the cottage, think of the garden.” He loved gardening. He loved my sons. His blue eyes sparkled to the end: June 22, 2020. Don’t ask me if he knew who I was. It doesn’t matter. Of course, he didn’t. Of course, he did.

Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve lost you too, Canada. I’ve crossed the border so many times in my life, including long before we needed passports to go back and forth. I guess I thought you’d always be there. That I could always come home to you. That nothing would change. That I didn’t have to treasure every single day we had together.

And yet. I’ve spent the past months, weeks, days working to make it possible for my older son to enter Canada to start university, despite the border being closed to most Americans because of the pandemic. We were so nervous, but you let him in. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.  

When we clean up our act, your rowdy southern neighbors, I know you’ll let us come back too. I can’t wait. First, to see my son. And then to see you. Next summer, I want to stand on the deck at the cottage, surrounded by flowers Dad planted. I’ll gaze at your sunset over the sparkling blue sea. I’ll speak a soft refrain: I’ve missed you. I love you. I love you.

Claire Robinson May is a writer and playwright from Cleveland Heights. A graduate of the NEOMFA creative writing program, her plays have been performed on the stages of Talespinner Children’s Theatre, convergence-continuum, Cleveland Public Theatre, and Playwrights Local. She is a professor of legal writing at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.