Here’s a nice little snippet of things to come: 273 Days. Here’s to 2025. – Miguel F.
| Day 222 out of 273 Days |
Her home just off the main drag in Prince George serves as a museum for me. The walls — faint egg yolk, dying sunlight, tarnished daisy yellow — are strewn with memorabilia that suggests a full and well-lived life is coming to its inevitable conclusion. There are books, first and foremost, easily 1000s, crammed like bricks in a wall that would hold floodwaters back; tight but mismatched, fused to one another, owing to their age. There are medals, and PhD’s, and recognitions. There are more books. There are authors whose names exist now only on these shelves. And if not here, perhaps on a few crumbling headstones or tattered prayer cards that exist in the world from sea, to sea, to sea.
“We always used to gather like this,” she says, gesturing to a hissing teapot and chipped floral teacups that summon Dakota and I into the sitting room currently under assault by the blizzarding world outside.
“Or at the Legion. Or church. The rink or the town hall,” she adds. “Falling asleep on chairs or benches underneath the adults’ coats.” She’s not the same woman we met at the cafe in Manitoba this summer, all-yellow and Glinda-adjacent. She has shrunk: her skin is tired and bruised, her bones seem bigger and are trying to escape her skin. She is a survivor perhaps, from an incident involving a falling house. Her sentences are still small and tight, but she sits, eyes closed and wavers back-and-forth, momentarily set adrift.
“Look, we’re sorry for interrupting your holiday—” I begin.
“Bullshit,” she says. She smiles. “Age makes me fucking hate company. But, I’m old enough to know it does me good.”
I reference a museum, not only because of the artifacts around us — an old Mac computer, more books, printed photographs, journals and real pens — but because our tour guide, The-Woman-In-Yellow, today dressed in a battered cardigan, weaves us through her life not-unlike a seasoned professional. I can sense from her story: a throbbing heartbeat at the core of her words, the dive and dip in her narrative, the thrum of loss or redemption when necessary, that she’s told these stories often, and with heavy-handed variation when necessary.
“I could walk the halls of this house and tell a story by touch alone, with eyes shut,” she says.
“It’s not your home?” I ask and she ignores me.
And there is a litheness, and virility that hums alongside her thoughts on religion, on art, on history, that suggests she has more to give. She doesn’t falter when she tells off all three representatives of humanity in her sitting room, reprimanding us on our inability to know each other as deeply as we should. She reminds me of our recent shopping trip days before winter’s first blizzard settled into the Cariboo Mountains.
I’m reminded then, a little, of my grandmother’s house on Vancouver Island during the in-between purgatory that is the five days between Christmas and the New Year — the warm air and the smell of pine of course — but it is mostly the silence and the stillness as the year drives towards it’s frequent yet inevitable end that raises sentimental feelings.
Well, near silence. The radio just hummed and hummed away about last-minute holiday shopping and the great deals yet to be captured by their listeners. That moaning, interrupted intermittently by Christmas music acted as a railway spike driven between my eyes as we entered the parking lot on the north side of the city.
“Need anything?” Dakota asked, raising his eyebrows up and freezing his facial features.
“No,” I said, but in retrospect it was more of a grumble.
He insisted.
“Just go, Dakota. Please,” I said. And he did, slipping away into the sea of cars jostling for parking.
I was thinking about legacy again on a cosmic scale. What will we — as a people — be remembered for? Our plastics, our pollution, our warring for clean, drinkable water then can be packaged and sold faster and with less humanity than our competitors? I deduced that it would be our places of worship that would be studied long after the end of the Anthropocene (Ant-thr-pa-seen.)
“It was the closest thing to God they had at the time,” the researchers and historians will agree. In a time when the understanding of our world is lost, future civilizations won’t be able to imagine a need for something so encompassing, a large empty stall, a place of remembrance, a skeleton, that will live on the future plains, and hills, and deserts of Earth. And with shelving units taller than trees, white fluorescent lights on the ceiling that mirror clouds, a ground that doesn’t rut or wobble like sand or grass, what could we have ever needed such solidity, such expanse for, if not a deity?
“And this was during the time when the final ice age was obviously ending,” the professor in his history class will note to an auditorium of students. They will gasp and twitter at the thought that we’d so foolishly act in primordial ways when the ice age was obviously ending. They will act like we were animals, something primitive. They will be a little disgusted by their ancestors, not unlike how we marvel at hand paintings on cave walls and joke about neanderthals’ inability to think beyond their clans or needs at the moment. They will see us as fools.
And maybe, in retrospect, it was a little foolish.
I watched a young woman and her husband pack their car beside us with their collection of children, followed by seven industrial coffee makers captured during an ‘absolute raid’ of the store. She went on to tell her husband that her mother needs a new one, because the ones from the ‘other store on the south’ are just shit. Her mother can toss it in the garbage now, she added. When Dakota returned with some toiletries and food, he gleamed and told me it was all 50% off.
We ate together in the silence of the van and for a moment I thought to apologize, to those that will come after us and who will be left with our garbage dumps, and our sullied rivers and our empty forests. I apologized to those who will think that we were all villains and beasts. Of course, we weren’t. Aren’t.
“It was like Christmas on sale,” I say, sitting again in the little home in Prince George during the blizzard. “It wasn’t like this when I was a kid.”
She nods. We apologise again for intruding, try to leave her to her holiday, and she mentions in passing that her sister died last week. Not enough electricity — as the Canadian Army pushed in from Prince Rupert — as the rolling blackouts kept her sister’s life-giving machines from pumping and purring. We apologise for her loss and nod again. But finally, we agree to spend what she describes as her “final holiday season” together, as if it is a gift to her, and her alone.
I feel sick. Like, I’m sitting at her coffee table and swallowing marble after marble after marble until my guts roil and attempt to stage rebellion against the glass balls filling up my soft pink insides and pushing and pushing until I pop like a tick. It’s longing, I think, for something I don’t get anymore, maybe never will again. It’s hope, maybe, that I can be a small piece of the larger world that creates a softer, warmer country for someone not yet born. Or maybe, it’s love, or admiration, or something unfamiliar and distant as the end of my life and my country draw closer.
Instead of watching Christmas lights across the street or Home Alone on VHS on her little box tv, we listen to the windows rattle in their frames. In the distance, the army is raiding and shelling the countryside. But it doesn’t bother us. We drink tea lit by a few spindly taper candles, and she fills in the rest of the holes in her life story: her career as a nurse, a teacher, a mother, then as a writer/plagiarist she jokes, a caregiver, an activist and traveller. At the end of her life, she says, she’s squatting in her dead brother-in-law’s house.
“Nowhere else to go,” she says matter-of-factly. She slurps tea from her cup. “I’m someone perfectly ordinary, who’s been forced into extraordinary circumstances.”
“But it all must end.” She says this as if she’s returned from another conversation. “If it went on forever, we wouldn’t know how good we have it.”
And we have a chance to meet each other’s eyes, and I’m somehow warmed to know we both get to celebrate our final holiday season together as we sit in the only glowing house on a dark street; the rest of the city trickling south in search of further holidays to come.
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