This is the Place I Come to in My Dreams
An Essay by Bruce Hunter I made it through delivering my mother’s eulogy, and as I scanned the church filled with the last of my great aunties and uncleswho’d driven down to Calgary from Olds, I saw the Elliott tartan of my mother’s mother’s clan. Then the hired piper played “Amazing Grace.” I could no longer restrain myself. Ten years earlier we’d lost my great uncle John Elliott, our patriarch and our piper. Hearing the skirl of the pipes never failed to take me back to him pacing the yard of the Upper Saskatchewan Ranger Station on Alberta’s Kootenay Plains, under the watchful binoculars of Roly the fire lookout man on Mount Cline, and to the bafflement of the sled dogs in their pens and the pack horses in the pasture. After my mother’s funeral that Saturday in late spring of 2001, we retreated to my brother’s place. The phone rang and my sister-in-law said, “it’s for you, from Rocky Mountain House.” An unmistakable voice came on the line, somewhat frail—a scrappy London accent even after 60 years …