John Carnegie comes from Toronto, and since 1991 he’s lived in Paris, Greece, and Amsterdam with the painter Julie Wyn Summerfield.
Snow Angels
Somewhere far upstream in my bloodline was a Viking who took a fancy to a Scotswoman
ancestral to my father. Took a fancy or simply took, I’ll never know, but one way or
another he dove into my genetic backwaters and pissed in my gene pool.
I like to think about winter, but this globally warmed version rarely delivers what I used
to be used to. So it lives at the back of my memory, a wall of black ice and slush
ploughed to the edge of the parking lot to keep the pavement clear for capitalism.
My mother, at seventeen the eldest, walking the bitter miles of road, snow-cleared by
a thousand-mile wind, to light the schoolhouse stove and explain “Führer” and “Europe”
so the kids would know where all the daddies and big brothers had gone.
And my Oma before her, muttering through the snow in Ekaterina Oblast to retrieve
the severed toes of Opa’s left foot. He hadn’t spoken since the scarlet fever took
his hearing, but he made much noise when his axe went astray on the downward arc,
this kind and silent man who touched my mother’s throat to hear her when she sang,
tapping his short boot in time. But they were safe from the Bolsheviks in Manitoba, and to
celebrate he would wake the children from their brick-warmed beds for one more song.
Somewhere back up my bloodline was a Viking, and I prefer to believe that he actually
fancied that bonnie lass. It may have been in a peat hut under sleety rime,
or under the Pole Star and an emerald sheet of aurora, but I am sure that
they let themselves fall back into the unscribed powder, sinking half-weight and
barely breathing in that great northern hush, saying “Are you ready?” and with their
upward eyes fixed on the pinhole night, they began slowly to fan their legs and arms.