The Greatest Gift

By Kim

Robert Ahrens and Mildred

I am currently in that no-man’s land called Between Books. My editing is done, the synopsis and query letters are written and have been sent out. Now I wait and try to figure out what to do next. I have a solid idea for the next novel which I have not yet started, hoping I will soon receive “the call” and be thrust me back into a story that still won’t let me go.

Perhaps it is because I live with constant reminders around me—paintings, photographs, Madonna’s bracelet, my daughter’s miniature “Carl feet” and even my own reflection. Perhaps it is because people regularly contact me to add their Ahrens work to my catalog.

Occasionally I receive an e-mail that reminds me of the greatest gift that writing The Oak Lovers has given me. It’s not dreams of fame or fortune, which would be nice, but have nothing to do with why I write. It’s not simply about restoring my great-grandfather’s legacy, much as I hope to do so. No, the greatest gift is that a century-old family rift has been mended. I'm an only child and don’t have a big family, so I cherish any new relatives I can find.

Emily Ahrens

My grandmother grew up knowing her father had another wife before meeting her mother. The topic was not openly discussed, but it was certainly not a secret in her generation or my father’s. I always knew about the family scandal, but did not learn the name of Carl’s other wife and children until I read Madonna’s memoirs as an adult. Names were all she gave.

Inside one of my late grandmother’s scrapbooks I discovered a photocopied letter addressed to “Kim” from “Grandpa Ahrens.” It was about living on an Ojibwa reservation as a child and could only have been written by one of the sons from Carl’s first marriage. Where had it come from? There was no envelope. No clues. My aunts knew nothing about it.

Martha McGowan, Kitty Turgeon, Kim, and Janice McDuffie

Years later, while researching Carl’s file in the local history room of the public library in Kitchener, Ontario, I found a letter. It was written by a woman named Martha McGowan and asked for information about her ancestor, Carl Ahrens. A simple Yahoo people search led me to my half second cousin. It turned out she had found my grandmother in the early 80s and had a brief correspondence with her. She had also forwarded along the mystery letter, originally written to a cousin of hers who shares my name.

Martha and I decided that a century was quite long enough for the two halves of the family to have been kept apart, and we agreed to meet at the Roycroft campus in East Aurora, New York. The very same place where Carl met my great-grandmother and eventually left Martha’s. We laughed about the irony of the situation. About a year later we met again, along with Martha’s mother, a granddaughter of Carl and Emily, at an exhibition of Carl’s work in Ontario.

This week I've had the pleasure of corresponding with the very same Kim who received the mystery letter from “Grandpa Ahrens” when she was in 6^th grade. She has showered me with photographs of a family I never thought I would get the chance to know. It has been Christmas in October.

The biggest treasure arrived in my inbox this morning – the only known photograph that includes Carl and Emily. It was most likely taken as the basis of a painting to be done by Canadian artist George Reid, a friend of Carl’s. Reid is the man seated backwards in the chair. Emily kneels on the floor hunched with two children and seemingly crying. The boy peeking through the chair is Carl and Emily’s son, Robert. Carl is the hunched figure in the background. If you look close, you can see he leans heavily on a cane. He, too, appears to be grieving. What is especially haunting about this pose is that it is a metaphor for his first marriage. Emily, a maternal woman, sheltering their children and keeping her back to the invalid in the corner. The man who has disappointed her for years. Even more telling is that there is someone sitting between them.

Thanks to the internet, chance, curiosity, and a century of time for old wounds to smooth over, you would barely notice a scar where the family rift used to be.  A tremendous gift indeed!

Update: I have just learned that the photograph isn't a photograph, but rather an image of a completed painting by George A. Reid called "Family Prayer." It is one of his best known works and hung in the Salon in Paris in the 1890's. This explains why Carl, who was only 26 at the time, appears to have white hair. Reid could have used his frail build as the basis for an old man and changed his hair color. 

Sticks and Stones (Reprised)

By Kim


This post originally appeared on December 11th, 2009.

Anyone entering my dining room will not see a table but a family shrine. The walls are covered with paintings, etchings and sketches by my great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens. The hutch holds not dishes but century old photographs, books inscribed to ancestors (including one from Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King), an antique sewing box, and even a bracelet Carl had given to his wife Madonna.

Scattered among these items are sticks, stones, a small jar of sand, and a pinecone or two. Yes, my husband laughs, but he humors my habit of littering every shelf in our house with rocks because they are, after all, the cheapest souvenirs I could possibly collect.

There was a time that I bought T-shirts and trinkets from everywhere I went, and I still will if I happen to be in a city with a Hard Rock Café. In the past few years, however, my travels have been research for The Oak Lovers and the places I go aren’t exactly packed with tourists.

This was certainly the case on that rainy September afternoon back in 2004 when my cousin Chris and I visited the old covered bridge in West Montrose, Ontario. It was just one stop my friends Mike and Wendy made on our short driving tour of the Mennonite villages of Waterloo County. I snapped some photos and we were about to go when Chris pointed out that the bridge had been there since our great-grandfather’s time. Carl’s home town of Kitchener (then Berlin) wasn’t far away and Chris wondered if Carl would have been to West Montrose. Remembering a short story Carl wrote about canoeing that very stretch of the Grand River, I told Chris I was certain he had. At the very least he went under the bridge. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I felt a strange compulsion. I ambled down to the river’s edge. The bank was muddy and I saw no stone that would easily be obtained; this only made me want one more. “If anyone sees a small rock on the bank, let me know,” I said.

Had I known Wendy as I do now, I may not have been shocked to see her wade out into muck without bothering to ask why I may want one. With a triumphant cry, she pulled a nondescript round stone out of the murky depths of the river itself.

“This one was certainly here when he was,” she said, plopping it into my hand. From that moment on, I have considered Wendy my best friend. (The stone now sits on my hutch.)

The next day the four of us went to the village of Elora. Using my great-grandmother’s memoir as a guide, we located the place where Carl must have fallen from a cliff into the Elora Gorge as a boy. After climbing down into the gorge itself, I took pictures and slipped a couple of rocks straight from the river into my pocket. Mike found a small piece of driftwood and handed it to me. “You might want this, too. Perhaps he knew the tree it came from. It’s lighter than rocks in any case.”

I could have bought a T-shirt in the village that day had I really looked for one, but I knew it would have been made in Vietnam or Bangladesh. I would have worn and washed it until it became faded and torn. The rocks, on the other hand, had been molded by the power of the Grand River, had been there since long before there was a Canada, let alone a Carl Ahrens. When I hold one, history and memory collide.

While I’m in Dallas now, I can open a jar and touch sand taken from the beach beside where the Ahrens summer cottage once stood. Perhaps as my grandmother skipped from the house down to Georgian Bay for a swim with her father, one of them stepped on those very grains.

Many writers create character sketches before they begin a novel, photographs of how their characters look, lists of likes and dislikes, images of clothing individuals wear or name of the perfume they use. For me, though, the shrine in my dining room is a character sketch on constant display. I can wear Madonna’s bracelet or fit my fingers into the grooves on Carl’s paintbrush or open one of the books to see poems they marked with favorite passages underlined. Now, thanks to all my sticks and stones, I can also touch the places they have been, and a part of me can physically be there, watching the scenes play out.