My Grandmother's Guidance

by Cara Thompson (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

A leap into the unknown Canada

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When you find yourself lost in the backstreets of Montreal, Canada during their worst winter in a hundred years, there are two major things you learn about yourself: 1. You can find reassurance in the strangest of places. 2. Your mobile phone will die when walking around in temperatures of -30 degrees. When I found myself lost and staring into the void of my lifeless phone screen in the middle of a Montreal blizzard, reassurance came to me in the form of a woman whose time on this earth had ended over twenty years before mine had even begun: my grandmother. I had arrived in Montreal as an eager international exchange student, and I was determined to explore the city of frosted glass I would be calling home for the next six months. Having left my dripping hometown of Nottingham, England in the early hours of New Year’s Day, I had swapped out fireworks, fleeting resolutions and flutes of pink champagne for a three-thousand-mile journey across the Atlantic. The air in Montreal was dry and thin, and every time I breathed in my lungs were given a sharp, satisfying chill, as if I had just swallowed a handful of peppermints. One thing you notice when stepping through the streets of Montreal is the crunch: the inescapable noisiness of treading through fresh snow – how footfall takes on its own musicality as you stamp out odd rhythms in powdered sugar streets with your shiny new snow boots, how your footsteps syncopate with the lilts of local Francophonic chatter you do not quite understand. A second thing you notice while venturing through Montreal is that the streets melt into each other and come in an array of fun names: Rue de Bleury bends into Rene Levesque Blvd, St Catherine carves into St Urbain, until you circle back on yourself like a set of Penrose stairs. The final thing you notice while wandering through Montreal is that the sun sets very quickly. And you are lost. At first, being lost didn’t frighten me: it was all part of the adventure. I wandered until my legs grew tired from the perpetual lifting and dropping of my weighted winter boots. An attempt to ask for directions in fumbling French was met with an alienating eyebrow raise, and tracing my own footsteps became difficult as a growing blizzard lay down a fresh sheet of snowfall behind me. But it was something about staring into my black, frostbitten phone screen, my last gateway to the unfrozen world beyond my own, that sent me into despair. I crouched to the pale ground and held myself like a child, heaving in that thin, wafer-dry air over and over as the peppermints that filled my lungs were crushed under the heaviness of my breathing. I closed my eyes and wished that beneath the ocean, the continents were holding hands and trying to pull themselves back together; that the British Isles would haul themselves across the North Atlantic Ocean and lock arms with the Americas once more so that I could simply skip back to the safety of home. I wondered if my grandmother ever wanted to go back as well. While my grandmother was a stranger to me, she was no stranger to a scary journey. Born in 1920s Jamaica, she was one of the 500,00 Caribbeans who boldly weathered their way to Britain during the twentieth century by sky and sea. She had only ever been accessible to me through static photographs and second-hand memories, but in that moment, she felt sharply familiar: another wide-eyed young woman staring straight into the darkness, but who never looked back. Crouched there on the pale ground, I compared my feeble semester in Canada to my grandmother’s irrevocable voyage to England. I envisioned her piling out of her plane with dozens of other Jamaicans, pristinely dressed and profoundly dignified. Far from the cover of the Caribbean sun, she’d hoist her sharply cut coat around herself and march bravely into the British mist. Seamstress and seafarer; matriarch and maverick: her leap into the unknown created me. And by remembering the resilience that bore me, I stood up and marched my way through the frozen darkness.