“You traveled for 10 months with your kids. Wow, but what about school? To this question we often pause a moment and then admit somewhat sheepishly that we “kind of” mostly home-schooled. The response is always a variation of “well it probably doesn’t matter. Think of the memories they will have.”
It is November now. Cadets sell plastic poppies outside shopping malls in remembrance of fallen soldiers and the battles fought for king and country. We are reminded of climbing the dunes at Dunkirk looking out to the vastness of the sea. We remember reading the names and ages etched on white crosses in Vimy and Ypres and Passchendaele. Losing each other in the trenches of Diksmuide while poppies blew and songbirds sang.
And we also remember the silence of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp and consider the world that made it possible. We remember the victims of landmines in Cambodia and the survivors of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the tentative peace in Aceh. We remember the crowds in Hiroshima pleading for nuclear disarmament while anxiously watching America and North Korea rattling sabers off their coast. We remember the violence inflicted on indigenous populations as colonizing nations fought and fight today among themselves for economic domination- trade “partners”, resources, exploitable labour to make cheap clothes and dollar store items- in the name of development. And we remember the migrants escaping war or corruption, discrimination, poverty or environmental destruction gathering in the modern day port cities looking for a break, seeking another way.
Yes, our children have memories. Lest they forget.