Today is my grandmother’s birthday. If she was alive, she would be 105 years old.  She was born in Leeds, England, but emigrated to Toronto when she was under a year old.  When she was 7, she accompanied her widowed mother to Vancouver BC by train. Her mother had purchased a boarding house in Vancouver, sight unseen.

Near the end of her life, at the age of 99, my grandmother told me about that train trip in 1911. Up to then she had known only city life. “I can close my eyes now,” she said in her quavering old-lady voice, “and see the dawn rise on the Rocky Mountains, as I pressed my nose to the train window. I had never seen a mountain before, and I didn’t know what they were. So I woke my mother, but I was so excited all I could do was point out the window.  She wasn’t very happy with me for waking her up, and snapped ‘for goodness sake, it’s just a mountain!’ and went back to sleep.”

“But you know,” she added, “I’ve lived a long time and travelled all over the world, but I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the dawn coming up on the Rocky Mountains, framed in a train window. When I think of heaven, that’s what I think of.”

And when I think of my grandmother, that’s who I see – an awestruck seven year old gazing at her first sight of a mountain, looking out of an old lady’s eyes.

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