Day Trip to Strasbourg

Colette Yolande had worn her hair cropped short, above her neck, for years.
It was graying into white.
She wore bright colors, turquoise and fuchsias whenever an occasion allowed it, and even when it didn’t.
She looked intensely through her piercing hazel eyes, as if she were about to reveal a great secret from the depths of time, or ask you for one.

Looking at a tattered copy of Hermann Hess’s Steppenwolf I saw on Nathalie’s bookshelf in Salt Spring, my mind raced back to how much Colette had loved to speak and read German; she’d mastered it.
She kept telling me that I must read the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

The last journey I took with my mother was to Strasbourg,
on the far eastern edge of France.
She could barely walk anymore, but I brought along a
fold up wheelchair so she wouldn't have to.
We ate pasta in a Restaurant, outdoors.
She laughed that day, reminiscing about the many
trips we took to exotic countries when I was a child.

There was a vibrancy to the air around us...A timeless link between the "now" and the travels of early childhood, the Ocean liners docked in Venice, Athens, Mythylene, Bergen, Oslo...The Midnight Sun.

Dusty streets of Beirut in Wartime, smoke and tear gas.

Dry rocks of the parched Mediterranean in the Technicolor Sixties.

We held a toast, to all the flights and crossings of my childhood,
the broken wine glass in Piraeus, the lopsided family that we had been.

She sipped spaghetti noodles with all the strength left in her.

Going back to the train station, we argued. It erupted like a sudden tropical storm.
My watchfulness dropped for all but a second, but the Devil was out of the bag, running loose on the square, skidding on the pavement, wet from a sudden and passing shower.
I was exhausted. My own strength diminished from months of preparing for what was about to come.

It was Seven years ago.