The Courtyard

The silence of our backyard and the backyards of the neigbbours in our street is unsettling at times, especially now that summer is over. The sound of lawnmowers and the happy chatter of campfires and BBQ. dinners have stopped. My son and husband and I are no longer enjoying eating outside, talking together rather than being inside on our computers. The disquiet triggered a memory from when I was about 13, visiting my father's mother and aunt, who shared a small rental apartment in Oostende, in a very quiet part of the town, on a square called "Het Vlaams Plein". My grandmother, who became a widow at age 38, and never re-married, lived with my father's youngest sister, Lieve, who devoted her entire life to work in the social assistance sector and never married. I loved spending time with them, and my respect and admiration for my aunt stands to this day. They rented the bottom half of a row house which consisted of a very small kitchen, a small living room, a toilet in the hallway, a small bedroom they shared, and a dining room. There was a bathroom, with a bath and shower they shared with the couple renting the rooms upstairs. The one grace the place had was access to a small, walled backyard, with a few shrubs and flowers, and an almost surreal view of a field, edging the urban scene. The silence in that backyard was final, unnerving,enhanced by the walls separating the next door row houses. I would take a walk in the eerily silent walled enclosure, while my grandmother would busy herself making us lunch, and the memory of that abyss of silence stayed with me. I had not thought of that memory until recently, when the equally unnerving silence of our backyard, haunts me in fall and winter. No more children visiting our son, no more Birthday dinners and BBQ.s, very few friends coming over now that our son is grown. No family of course. My father's youngest sister says I  look like aunt Denise, my father's and her older sister, who has lived for the last 60 years very close to the village where she and my father and their other sister were born and grew up, Leke, in the west Flemish part of Belgium. Aunt Denise and her husband, my uncle Noel, have been married more than 60 years, and have three children, one of whom, my cousin Marc, who is divorced and 59, lives with them, and runs a beauty shop out of the big front room of the house, which used to be a deli my aunt Denise ran for many years until she retired. Her life and that of her husband and son is a very quiet one, as is mine now. As I am in my mid fifties now, and have a hair colour and smile, and even glasses similar in style to hers, I too can see the resemblance between my aunt Denise and I. A resemblance physically and also emotionally, a resilience in the face of challenges, isolation and frustrated talents. Like me, my aunt Denise has made her family her priority at the expense of an intelligent and creatively talented mind. It made me wonder about free will. Is there really such a thing? Or do we fall in to patterns long established before our births by family dynamics, circumstances and genetics? I have tried very hard, and still do, to break free of my family's traps and pitfalls, only to realize that that chain will give, but rarely break. I see that struggle also in my husband, and even in my son, the next generation, alert to stay free from the shadows of  both my husband and my families' dysfunctional codes and behaviours. So far so good. I feel best when I focus on each day, and leave the past and its luggage in their lockers. Given the tragedies locked in that suitcase, it is no wonder that the question of free will  tugs at my convictions certain days. The steadfastness of my father's sisters and their families gives me great hope. These  people are strong, determined and honorable in heart, spirit and soul. So, as disconcerting as that silent backyard, both the one from the past ,and the one I live in now may be, I will take it any day over the path of destruction my mother inherited and she so stubbornly denied, until the facts started taking over.