My Oma

I DON’T WANT TO LIVE A SMALL LIFE

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

– Mary Oliver

No, it’s not Friday, the day I typically post a poem, a companion photo, and some musings. But because I’ve been thinking a lot about my ancestors, particularly my Oma, this “saved” poem came to mind. As I wrote in last Friday’s photo and poem feature, we had a bumper crop of raspberries from canes we never planted but that found their way under our fence and which, over the years, have waxed and waned in number and in the amount of berries offered. It’s when I’m out picking those berries that my thoughts have turned to Oma as she loved to pick berries, especially the black and red currants from which she’d make the year’s jam and filling for her Christmas Linzer torte, my favourite tradition.

I had moved west by the time I learned in berry season that she, with my sister and her daughter, would go to the numerous “you pick” farms filling buckets and baskets with juicy goodness. From her, my niece learned and elevated the craft to become a gourmet jam and jelly maker, creating concoctions sweet and savory, fragrant and smoking hot. I have several of those jars in my cupboard, as I do one final frozen Linzer torte sent from my Oma in her final famous care package. Given Oma passed in March 2002 and for a few years before lived in a seniors’ residence in a small one room suite without a kitchen, that cherished cake must be three decades old. But like wedding fruitcakes, with a generous splash of brandy and a prayer of thanksgiving and love for my Oma, I know it can be resurrected. In the meantime, I have learned to make a good enough version and do so every Christmas as a tribute to her tradition. Truthfully, I’m in no hurry to eat that last one of hers as it’s a treasured keepsake of her handmade love.

Picking raspberries this summer in the quiet of my backyard, I’d talk to Oma, as I often do when I’m in my kitchen cooking, using one of the many utensils and dish towels she’d packed for me in those care packages, measuring sugar or flour from the avocado green cannister set she gifted me when I moved into my first flat during grad school. She helped me clean and paint that flat. We drove the two hours together in her new hatchback, the car she’d bought herself after learning to drive in her sixties. We slept on the flat’s hardwood floor after she’d worked circles around me, and before falling asleep, surprised me with the grief she felt at the news of Elvis’s death.

My Oma – despite many unspoken hardships as a single mother in WWII Germany; emigrating to Canada on her own after my father had sponsored her; then marrying a German widower and moving several hours away from us to start a new life in a new country alone; working on the assembly line of Bausch & Lomb stitching glass cases for piecemeal wages – did not live a small life. Fiercely independent and always up for a new flavor experience, determined, courageous and curious, in so many ways she inspires me. I attribute my intrepid, solo-traveling nature to having been “seeded” by her.

Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

I do and thank you, my “ever loving Oma”.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.