Of This Earth Read Online Free

from the blue silence ofsnow, suddenly there, like hoarfrost spirits among the winter aspen.

    The south wall of that CPR house on the knoll was the background for the first photograph of our entire family.

    Angled against the logs so as to face into the light, Mam and Pah sit on high-backed chairs whose carved rungs are visible between their legs. We seven children circle around and between them under the overhang of the pole-and-slab roof. The slab door of the kitchen stands open behind my sister Helen’s left shoulder, beyond her face squinting into the evening sun. The heavy shadow of the photographer—someone who seems wrapped in a heavy cloak—is thicker than any of us; the shadow reaches across the bare foreground and up the right side of the picture, it cuts a black angle through Helen’s legs just above her ankles and the shapeless bump of its head blots the corner of her skirt. Helen will be the first of us to die, in late March when World War II in Europe is at last coming to an end, and thirty years before our father seated beside her, who will be next. The shoulder bulge of the long shadow barely misses Pah’s left foot so close to Helen’s right, but his large worker hands lying on his knees are already balled into fists, and ready.
    The click of a box camera exposed my slightly unfocused family in a place and position no memory could retain so absolutely. An image to fit in your palm, several aged cracks across its surface. All proper in our Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church best, Pah and Abe and Dan in suits and ties, Tina, Mary Helen and Liz in dresses and stockings, Mamin a flowered dress with triangular dark collar and a black cloche hat whose buttons shine above her forehead lifted high into the sun. No one faces the low light as openly as she.
    I stand at her knee. Or it may be I am being held tight against her knee, because my mother’s right leg is angled against my chest, her right arm tight around my back, her right hand grips my right elbow and her left hand holds my right hand down on her thigh as if, were she to relax for an instant, I would vanish. Aus du tjleen weascht, she often told me, when you were small you never crawled; you walked, you ran before eight months.
    Tjleene Tjinja klunje o’pe Schoot,
Groote Tjinja klunje op’em Hoat.
    Little children trample your lap,
Grown children trample your heart.
    In our meagre photo collection from various times on two continents, this is the first in which I appear. It must have been an important event—someone’s first box camera?—because we have four photos taken on the same spot on the same day.
    In the other three photos, all without the shadow, I have been released, small me, to stand on one of theornate chairs. Once I am flanked by Abe and Dan, who are so tall that my head barely reaches the crooks of their elbows; then again I am surrounded by six girls, three of whom are my youngest sisters but the other three I do not recognize. All the girls look into the camera, except Helen, who is exactly my height on the chair and looking at me, her mouth open. Perhaps she is already telling me a story.

    In the fourth photo taken that day, I stand alone on the chair. My mouth is opening, my right arm rising as if I am about to orate. Compared to the standard height of a chair, I could be seventy-five centimetres—thirty inches—tall. How old is that?
    I contemplate the four photos; gradually I am drawn to my oldest sister, who appears only once, in the picture with the shadow. Tina stands at the back, so slender between Abe and Dan, her face tilted down and it seems her eyes are closed. Or it is possible, to judge from the angle of her head, that she is looking down over Mam’s shoulder at me, and it comes to me that memory in these images is like the ineffability of the love she and I gave each other, oldest and youngest, always separated except for a few days, or a few hours, of visit year after year; a love we felt that needed no