Emanuel Melo torontonian azorean writer

It’s been four years since the last time I stood with the Atlantic on one side of me and Azorean earth on the other but the smile of contentment still lingers. 

I have stayed in Achada several times over the last two decades. Lately, my memory takes me back to this village in the district of Nordeste on the island of São Miguel at a time when travel has become complicated.

My father and his family were born and made their lives there until they moved to the city of Ponta Delgada for a while before later leaving for Canada. But there are still primas and primos who live in the village, some who had immigrated to Canada and then returned, and others who have never left the island.

My first few visits to Achada elicited an overwhelming emotional longing for a connection with my family’s past as I walked the streets and meandered down from the cliffs above to the beach coves below. I have explored the village and its surrounding countryside until its geography has become so familiar that I can anticipate what there is to see around the bend of a winding road.  Eventually, by the last couple of visits, it has felt like a coming home.

Strange that I would feel this way about a place that I had limited contact with as a child.  I was born in Ponta Delgada, a city that was more than a two-hour car ride in the days before the new highway opened around ten years ago. It’s now a thirty-to-forty minute drive into the city, which means that it’s possible to go down to see a movie or go shopping, attend a festa, and return to Achada without having to go in and out of the villages along the way.

My childhood visits to Achada stopped when my father came to Canada. But I know that I was coroado, crowned during the Festas do Espirito Santo when I was five years old.  I have a photograph to prove it. Here I am, standing on my grandparents’ front door, my grandmother behind me and a small cousin next to me as I held the crown on my head, looking so worried, perhaps afraid that I might drop it.

I can honestly say that I remember little about those early years of childhood when my father, who already had a car, would drive us for weekend visits. Whatever knowledge I have is mostly informed by stories my mother tells me about the picnics we had in the shelter of a quinta full of fruit trees and grapevines, of the murmúrio do mar – the hush lullaby sound of the ocean waves, as I slept next to my parents while they sat on a blanket under a breeze-whispering tree.

The Achada I have come to love is more than a place of remote family history; it’s a place of continued living experience where I stay in my grandparents’ house and sit by a loft window to watch the waves in the distance between house and ocean, the green undulating landscape, the few cows in pastures before me, and the sound of people on the street as they go about their lives.

A direct flight from Toronto to São Miguel takes me back to be with people who I’ve come to know over time. They are generous with me. They feed me. They take me on trips throughout the island. With them I can speak Portuguese without the cumbersome intervention of translation, which would feel like a pull back to my English-speaking life. So, when I am there, I can immerse myself in whatever ‘Portuguesness’ I still have left in me after a lifetime of living in Canada.

My other cherished moments are when I am on my own for hours on end, walking the trails and the village streets, sitting by the ocean, and generally taking in the feel and life there. But it’s the people, above all, who give me a sense of home in Achada.

I wrote a non-fiction essay which, to my delight, has been included for publication in the latest online issue of Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies.

“I waited alone in the small room that promised the comfort one might expect from someone’s living room. There were a few bookshelves crammed with paperbacks frayed at the edges, perhaps left behind to be read over and over by strangers who maybe just found it helpful to flip through the pages while their minds worried over the reasons that had brought them there to wait. I sat on a sagging yet strangely comfortable sofa, looked out the window onto a barren winter garden, and for a moment tricked myself into believing I was still at home on that dull Sunday morning.”

I hope you enjoy reading the text in full: Tia Catarina

Many thanks and gratitude to the editorial committee of Gávea-Brown for giving my short memoir story a home in their 44^th issue.

I am grateful to Susan K. Riggs for her generous review of “Tia Catarina.”

In his latest work, Emanuel Melo paints a vibrant picture of—Tia Catarina– for whom life literally sings off the page, aquiver with colour, music, and a personality unafraid to burst the bars of polite society and express an irrepressible kindness for her family, friends, her beautiful Portugal and humanity in general.

Melo’s “Aunt Cathy”, the aunt of the narrator’s partner, oozes engagement with life, embracing its love and warmth and all the wonders of nature. A force of nature herself, she seamlessly blends into the blazing setting of a Portuguese sun, merging, for example, with the music of nature, emitting “a musical shriek of laughter” into the “whispering wind”, “a laughter so piercing and high-pitched that it float[s] far off in the air into the neighbouring hills”, a sound reminiscent of “a strange foreign bird.”

Tia Catarina is one of Melo’s finest portrayals, for she embodies humanity at its best, and her bombastic approach to life pummels its way through a stream of optimism clear through to the far shore of her death.

On this latter note, Melo deftly records the passing of Aunt Cathy in a kind of “bookended” fashion, her impending demise appearing solely at the beginning and end of the story.  Thus here, death is a mere preface and epilogue—lost in the deep and pervasive “weeds” of Aunt Cathy’s extraordinary spirit as she bubbles through life, the technicality of her dying recorded by an introverted and proper narrator, a foil to Aunt Cathy. (Indeed, the narrator seems caught between a rock of awe for Aunt Cathy and the hard place of his more inhibited nature.)

Overall, there are echoes of John Donne’s “Death, be not Proud”  in the life story of Tia Catarina: the ultimate destroyer is itself destroyed within this repository of never-to-be-forgotten memories that, in the final analysis, triumph through the image of petals of a violet in a pot in the hospice…….a flower that survives, bathed (we imagine) in the expansive energy of Aunt Cathy, who lives on before and after “death” to crash and splash against the ever-moving shoreline of a life well-lived.

Susan K. Riggs/2022

Susan K. Riggs

A writer by profession, Susan has published in both print and electronic media and in 2009 was appointed adjunct scholar to the James Madison Public Policy Institute in Florida.  Along with newspaper and journal articles, her background includes writing drama for CBC radio and speeches for senior representatives in the academic, government and business communities.  Her “America” series of articles has been published throughout the United States.

The day I went to Hendrie Valley was the first time in eighteen months that I had taken public transit! I had hesitated to use buses and the subway during the pandemic and, although the virus is still with us, I am slowly returning to my former ways of living in the world beyond the inclausura of home.

Hendrie Valley, situated across from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario, is a place I had never been to before but it was well worth the long trip from Toronto by GO train followed by a bus that took my friend and me near the entrance of the nature trail. There we walked along boardwalks and lookouts with beautiful views of marshes and deciduous forest.

It was a day well spent in the good company of both a friend and nature.

A Golden falling at Rosetta Gardens

The month of October at Rosetta McClain is a time to put everything to rest for the winter months ahead.  The garden’s staff empty flower beds, pots and other containers of summer plants while nature does its part by changing the colours of leaves on trees to an assorted shade of reds and yellows. Some trees shed their leaves fast, covering the ground with a carpet of golden yellow while others hang on a bit longer until the cold days arrive. It’s still pleasant to walk through the garden and see all these changes and be grateful for the lingering memory of the summer and autumn of 2021.

Until next spring…

Although not as showy as the vibrant colours of our usual autumns, I do like the soft, demurred shades of reds and yellows splashed throughout the forest of the Vista Rouge Trail, one of the eight trails that make up the Rouge National Urban Park.

It always amazes me to see how much nature co-exists within the city of Toronto in a seamless geography of concrete and green.

Here are some photos of a pleasant day’s walk.

It’s mid-October and the colours of autumn in Toronto are taking their time in reaching a full show of yellows and reds, although some have already made their presence on trees. A visit to the Doris McCarthy Trail starts with a descent along a path through a beautiful forest with a brook below, the sound of running water a soothing soundtrack to accompany your walk until you arrive at the bottom of the trail. There you are greeted by the expanse of Lake Ontario. You can then walk for a long time and enjoy the sight of the lake on one side and the beauty of trees and sumac already turned red on the other. These are photos from a recent visit.

Tommy Thompson Park is a great place for walks and cycling along 10 kilometers of nature paths with wonderful views of Toronto’s cityscape. It’s also the home of remnants of demolition materials turned haphazardly into art along the shore of Lake Ontario.

Thousands of people visit the park on weekends during the summer months but it’s also a wonderful place to visit during the fall when it’s less crowded. Regardless of the time you go, you have the pleasure of being away from the city but also the comfort of knowing that it’s still nearby.

Sunrise over Lake Ontario from another August in Toronto

Every sunrise assures us of a new day coming and that the world is all right despite our human folly.

August in Rosetta McClain is a time to appreciate the array of colours found in its many flowers and plant life. People visit the garden for various reasons but mostly to photograph it, to read in a quiet spot, to sit in contemplation and even paint. Since the pandemic, there have been intimate family picnics which are, technically, not allowed, but they happen anyway, because there’s no better place than a garden for people to gather and be with one another. It’s good to hear the laughter of children and the relaxed look on people’s faces as they explore the garden, leaving behind the worries of the world.

Flowers have always been an important part of my emotional landscape. I grew up with them, not only in the house, where we kept flower pots of geraniums and coleus but also out in the garden. In public spaces on the Azores, flowers abounded, too. Flowers could be found in churches decorating the altars of the saints or on the procession routes throughout the city on the many feast days that brought the holy statues out of their churches and onto the streets of Ponta Delgada.

The religious use of flowers was not restricted to public display but was intimately a part of family life. In my parents’ and grandparents’ bedrooms, on top of their dressers would be a religious statue surrounded by fresh flowers.  Their scent is still with me, and when I survey the beauty of the garden I have the privilege of walking in every day, I am reminded of the place of flowers in my memory of home.

A display of flowers in honour of Senhor Santo Cristo in the 1940s or early 1950s, from my family’s photo collection. Ponta Delgada, Azores.

We would gather to pray the rosary in front of Our Lady of Fatima. Photo from May, 1969, Toronto, Canada.

And now, back to photos of Rosetta Gardens, the place that conjures up memories of my past.

Photographing the garden

Reading in the garden

Blending in with the garden. Can you spot the person amongst the flowers?

Painting the garden

May the path take you on your own discovery of the garden

The Portuguese word for sunflower is girasol. I don’t remember seeing them when I was growing up in Ponta Delgada but I do know that they grow on the island of São Miguel. My mother tells me stories of how she loved them when she was a child, so I don’t know why she didn’t have them in our small garden.

Rosetta McClain Gardens has sunflowers in July and August. It’s a pleasure to see them on my walks and for some reason, when I see them, I try to recall the past. Surely I must have seen them somewhere back home, so my mother assures me, surprised that I don’t remember. Yet, I rely on her memory to inform mine. Which begs the question, do we always remember accurately or is memory-saudade-nostalgia seeking something else?