DECEMBER

I insisted on having time off this Christmas, which I’ve covered at the café for three years running, to spend the holidays with my mother in Copper Cliff. I’ve had my old room back during visits home ever since my grandmother died five years ago. My mother had moved Sigrid into the apartment for the last two years of her life. She never told me why she made that decision, even when I questioned whether it was the right thing to do, to keep Besta out of a hospital, especially when I knew they had never gotten along.

During the drive I think about the last time I had driven up, when my car’s alternator died en route and I’d had to call the CAA to tow me to a garage in Parry Sound. My mother gave me money for Christmas that year, which helped me to pay off most of what I’d had to charge to my credit card to get the car going again.

I haven’t been home in years, but everything looks the same: the wide streets with no sidewalks, old maples on front lawns of modest, wooden bungalows, with a pizza place and a Tim Hortons the only restaurants in town. The Stack—which made the town famous in its day, before the CN Tower was built, for being the tallest structure in the world—still stands, though it isn’t functional anymore; it had been built to solve Copper Cliff’s pollution problem, by pushing the smelter’s poisons up so high in the air that the wind would blow it all someplace else, to become an issue for other people.

My mother must have been looking out her kitchen window as I parked in the lot behind the low-rise building, because she is waiting on the landing for me.

“Hey, Ma! How are you?”

“I’m so happy to see you! You’re still driving that old car?”

“Well, it refuses to die. It has over two hundred thousand klicks on it, but Volkswagens can go over three.”

“I hope it has a good heater, since you have a tarp for a roof. Come on, I’ll make some tea to warm you up.”

Mom looks heavier to me; she seems to have forgotten her golden rule, “If you can pinch an inch, lose it.” Nonetheless, we nibble on the deep-fried fattigmann and the pepperspisser cookies she’d made a few days before my arrival as we catch up. I told her about how the freelance assignment I’d taken from Nick didn’t turn out as planned.

“I got sidetracked from the story when I found out what went on at the vineyards that I was supposed to be promoting. I met one of the foreign workers at a winery and he told me about the horrendous circumstances he and his friends were in. When I got home, I did some research about the situation and got involved with some people who’d organized, to push the government to take action.” I open my laptop and show my mother my blog posts, which had been cited by the group and helped them to get the attention of local politicians.

“I’m so proud of you, honey.”

“Thanks Ma. I want to do more writing like that, about issues under the surface. About things people don’t know about, or don’t want to know about.”

She was smiling at me. “I always thought you should be a writer. You have more going for you than most people who pour coffee for a living.”

“You can’t live on words alone, Ma. Plus, I think you have to hit a certain age before you have anything to say. It took me this long to stumble onto a story—one I wasn’t even supposed to be writing about.”

“I have an idea for a project you could write about,” she says, with a sheepish look on her face. “You could write about immigrants who came here after the war. You could tell your grandmother’s story.”

“Maybe,” I say, stalling and trying to be polite. “She was hardly a typical immigrant, though.” I pause and think of Besta. “She was a tough old broad.”

“I can’t blame her, really. She had a pretty hard life.”

I stop licking sweetened whipped cream from the electric beaters left lying on the kitchen counter. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you say anything like that about Besta. You used to tell me how cruel she could be to you. Like the time she hid in a neighbour’s apartment when you were six, and you got home from school and were calling and calling for her, crying, but she wouldn’t answer.”

“That’s true. She finally walked in and said, ‘Surprise!’ and laughed at the tear stains on my face. She was trying to toughen me up, she said.”

“She was strict when she looked after me. Remember that time when I went for a bike ride to get away from her after she’d scolded me for something, and I took a bad fall? You stopped sending me to spend summers with her, after that.”

“Yes, I did. But I’ve been feeling more sympathetic toward her lately. Maybe it’s because I’m getting close to the age she was when her cancer was diagnosed.”

“Ma, you’re not feeling well?”
“I’m fine, Sam. I get checked every couple of years, don’t worry. You should, too, when you get to be forty or so, by the way.”

“Yeah, yeah. My doctor knows the family history. We’ll be onto it.”

“You know,” she says, softly, “it wasn’t until after my mother died that I was able to forgive her.” Her voice trembled as if she were about to cry, which is not her nature. “I don’t want that to happen between us, Sam.”

“What are you talking about?” I put my hand on hers. “Why so sad? I have no grudges against you.”

“Not now, maybe.”

“I can’t think of anything you could do that I wouldn’t forgive, Ma.”

“We’ll see.”

***A Town with No Noise*** **by Karen Smythe (Palimpsest Press, 2025)**

About A Town with No Noise:

Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day.

But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2.

Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become.

In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides?

ABOUT KAREN SMYTHE:

Karen Smythe is the author of the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the ground-breaking critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s U.P., 1992). In the 90s, she was the guest fiction editor for The Wascana Review and fiction editor for the Pottersfield Portfolio, and she also guest edited the Michael Ondaatje issue of Essays on Canadian Writing. Several of Karen’s short stories have appeared in Canadian literary journals including The Fiddlehead, Grain, and The Antigonish Review. A Town with No Noise is her second novel. She currently lives in Guelph, Ontario