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Looking back on childhood is like looking into a deep well. Where the sunlight hits the water there are little bright spots. This memory of my grandma is one of those bright spots. Her name was Magya, and she came to this country from Iceland and the beginning of the twentieth century. Her family homesteaded near Winnipeg, and although it must have been an unending struggle, she rarely talked of those days.

By the time we, her grandchildren, came into her life, she'd been married many years to a dour Englishman. My grandfather came back from the First World War damaged by mustard gas. He suffered the effects of that nightmarish time for the rest of his days. He was never mean to us when we spent our summer holidays with them in Steveston, BC. But at night we'd hear him in the bathroom, so sick we could only cower under the blankets and try not to hear.

My grandma was short and round, and had the softest and whitest hair I've ever seen. She was gentle, quiet and very kind. If there were only two porkchops for dinner, she'd give them to us and eat bread and butter herself. Three or four times every summer she'd get us up early in the morning, pack a bag with sandwiches and off we'd go on the old trolley into Vancouver. Long happy days were spent in Stanley Park or at the PNE. By the time my brother was old enough, there were three of us kids. She must have been completely exhausted by the time the last trolley of the day took us back to Steveston and we walked the six blocks home.

The summer I was 9, I took my little chihuahua with me to Grandma and Grandpa's house. I couldn't bear to leave him at home for six weeks. We lived in a truck stop about 100 miles inland, and I'd lost too many pets on the busy highway.

Steveston in those days had wide, deep ditches along most of the roads. We'd spend hours with nets on poles, snagging frogs or tadpoles, watching for turtles in the reeds, or pretending the ditches were wide rivers about to carry us off to far places. In summer the ditches grew a bright green covering of algae. It got so thick the water was hidden in places.

One day, as my grandma was on her knees pulling weeds from her lovely rose garden, my little dog chased a butterfly down the grassy bank of the ditch and tried to run across the green blanket of algae. He disappeared into the mucky depths of the ditch. I screamed and my grandma ran, thinking I'd fallen in. I was standing on the little wooden bridge over the ditch, still screaming, pointing to the black hole where he'd disappeared. My wonderful grandma leapt in, shoes and all, shoulder deep into the blackest, gooiest depths of the ditch. She reached down and found my dog, pulled him to the surface and wiped his nose so he could breathe.

The bank was so steep she couldn't climb back out, and grandpa was at work. I can't really remember what happened next, but it must have involved packing a ladder from the shed. She did eventually get out and my little dog was safe. When I think of my grandma now, that's always one of my strongest memories of her. It's also one of the things I think of when I try to define the word 'love'.

Learn more about this author, Carolyn Paradis.
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