This winter’s cold truth can’t spoil a homecoming
Florry Knapp sits across from me at the kitchen table of her east Mountain home. On either side of her are daughter Wendy Prosser and Wendy’s son, Jason, and it’s funny but their smiles seem to flow together in a single stream, joined across their faces.
And the mouth at the headwaters of that river of a smile is, of course, Florry.
You don’t need to be told they’re family. Or that they’re close, though close is what you make of it. Jason lives 14,000 kilometres away.
It takes 24 hours of travel by plane and airport layover to get from his home in Cambodia to Hamilton (though if you catch the green lights in Phnom Penh, you can shave a few minutes off that total — that’s a joke).
He’s there as a missionary/staff pastor, New Life Fellowship, 1,200strong at the church.
They don’t get snow in Cambodia, and Jason loves the Canadian winter, the colder and snowier the better. He misses it sorely, as he’s been gone 14 years.
So he’s here and, says mom Wendy, he picked a good hard winter to come. Lots of snow to shovel at his grandmother’s. But that’s not why he’s here. And he didn’t pick the winter. Cancer did. He’s here — and this is hard — to say goodbye. To Florry. She was diagnosed last Thanksgiving, stage four. It’s in her lungs and lymph nodes. Doctors recommended against treatment. She agreed.
This is the woman, Jason tells me, he’d playfully hide from when he was a boy with his older sister Heather, under the big pile of leaves they’d rake up when visiting their grandparents’ place, in Binbrook back then, where Grandpa raised hobby pigeons.
“And she’d pretend she didn’t know where we were,” says Jason.
Now they’re measuring Florry’s time in weeks. Doctors mentioned three months; that was at Thanksgiving. “I think I’m ready. I’m not frightened,” she says. Then an impish grin takes shape on her face. “I didn’t think I’d still be here,” says Florry of Jason’s visit. “But they can’t get rid of me.”
There’s a sticker on Florry’s fridge: “Life is short. Eat dessert first.”
That sentiment, as with so much about her, including the dolls, knick-knacks and collectibles perched on every inch of mantel top and shelf space, expresses Florry’s playful good humour.
She asks Jason to say something in Khmer, the language of Cambodia, and he does, fluently.
“It’s got the world’s largest alphabet (74, according to Guinness records) but the hard part is the difficult sounds.” His three kids speak it — they’ve grown up there — and his wife Angie sings songs and hymns in Khmer.
Jason’s family stayed back in Phnom Penh — they were all just here last summer — but their hearts are with Florry.
“Justus — he’s our expressive one,” Jason says, smiling. “He cried when he heard. He calls his greatgrandparents his ‘greats,’ and he said he was crying because he’s not going to have any more ‘greats.’”
Florry’s a “great” indeed. A north-ender by birth (Guise Street), Benetto alumna, one of 10 siblings, she remembers tobogganing right onto the bay.
“They had the streetcars back then,” says Florry, 83. “The ice plant was behind our house and the street would be blocked up with cars picking up ice for their iceboxes when it was hot in the summer.”
She worked the cash register and got people’s shoes at Westdale bowling lanes where she met her late husband Gerald, who worked in the lumber yard right behind it and sometimes would help at the alleys as a pinsetter.
(Florry came home one day in 2014 to find Gerald, 80, sitting in his chair, gone; natural causes.)
She also worked at the candy factory and, later in life, at Grace Villa, helping seniors.
Through everything there’s been her family — Wendy’s one of four children — and faith.
One reason she and Jason are so close, is church together, Living Hope Christian Assembly on Garth, with its strong mission ministry. Jason felt his first travel pangs there, listening to Hugh Layzell talk about Africa. At 19, Jason went to Cambodia for one year. It got right into him.
He returned, went to Bible college in Portland, Ore., married Angie, from Portland, who’d also been to Cambodia. And then in 2004, they went again and stayed.
“They’re so friendly and warm,” says Jason of Cambodians. “So welcoming and open. They don’t have much, but what they have they give. One of the things that attracted me to Angie is that she’d been to other countries but never felt that way (as she did about Cambodia) about other places.”
Jason and family (Justus, 11, is in the middle of Caleb, 14, and Emma, 8) keep in touch over Skype and FaceTime and visit every few years, but he hasn’t been through a proper Canadian winter in ages.
“It’s been a special time,” says mother Wendy ( Jason is here until the 26th).
“We’ve said to each other what we’ve wanted to say,” says Jason. “We don’t have to make every moment ‘meaningful.’ We talk and joke. That’s what we’ve known all our lives. And we have the hope of our faith.”
“And he shovels,” says Florry, with that Knapp-Prosser smile. She gets many visits and kindnesses from friends, family, the people at Living Hope.
“This is life,” says Florry. “We’ve always accepted. You can’t hide or run from it. We really appreciate the hope we have in God.”
Florry has no pain, though breathing is hard, and her legs are too swollen for her to walk much.
“Life is what is happening right now,” says Florry. “I’m not resigned to it (her prognosis), but I embrace what comes.”