Weathered Wood

The house my father owned for all of my

26 years sold this summer

while he and my stepmother were touring English villages.

We drove by on the way to new-home,

and the scarlet tulips he and my mother planted when I was born

are covered by a fresh concrete walkway.

So little of what is mine lives in this town now.

He made me a soft-boiled egg this morning

(though did not cut my toast into soldiers)

I had forgotten how to eat from the egg-cup

in the many years since I was a child.

My damaged younger brother

cried on the phone while asking him for money the night I arrived.

I overheard his voice going stern during the conversation.

We drove on the rainy highway

green mountainous curtains parting before our car

while snaky tendrils of white cloud trailed through the trees.

My stepmother sat in my spot in the backseat

so I could see the river

and I argued with him about Nisga’a land rights

looked out the rain-pebbled window at the

wide green Skeena and thought

how do I keep this minute forever

26th
December

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I picked up my old kitty cat. She’s 19 now, my constant childhood companion, and so feeble and slow that it’s hard to recognize her as the sleek black shadow the vet once called “the fittest cat I’ve ever seen”. I’m home, but things are different, just a little different, and I don’t really fit here any more, and I don’t know how many times I will get to say goodbye to my cat again. I picked her up, and this song began playing, and I just started to cry. She’s so old and hates being picked up, is sensitive about where she is touched, but she curled her claws into my shoulder and started to rumble her tiny purr and looked out the window at the snow with me while I stroked her, her green eyes reflecting the light in a way I couldn’t see her cataracts, and it was just like I was fifteen again and we would be going out to explore summery woods, her little ears flicking as she pretended she wasn’t following me. Tears running down my cheeks, and I know part of it is the stupid song, Bon Iver way too good at touching my emotions: I cry under a hands’ count every year, it’s not much, but fuck, tears rolling down my cheek. Home is such a complicated thing. It is good and it is sad and whether a place or a thing or a person or a combination, nothing remains constant, and death and change are inexorable inevitabilities that can be so wonderful and so cruel. Even in the midst of a wonderful, joyful rest, with a family I love, moments like this come. Christmas and Home even for someone so lucky as I am are never simple, never easy, and I wonder if I will ever be able to create that Home for myself the way it is here, with my mum, and this dying cat.

8th
May

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3rd
May

4 notes

15th
March

2 notes

i bought this today.

here is a story:

one time, when i lived in my small, remote, northern home town, i was, as we all do at nineteen, struggling with things that seemed socially and emotionally apocalyptic. i felt not just alone, but abandoned, and by my closest, heart’s friends. it was a grey afternoon and i drove my mother’s little toyota down to the skeena river to wander. i was stumbling down the bank, my shoes sinking and sticking in the viscous river mud, when i noticed something odd a little farther down and began scrambling with greater urgency, my heart in my throat. i reached the bottom, where a large metal drain opened into the water, and a scattered bunch of bones lay half-exposed under the sky. there was no skull but the ribcage was large, too large for human. cow, or perhaps moose. a tattered bit of rope poked out of the sand nearby. the set of bones seemed both sad and serene to me, half-sunk into the quickening earth, on the bank of the rushing skeena, a river dark and deep and terrible. the worst had happened to these bones and here they were, slowly washing away, nothing left to do but watch the sky.

when I finally walked away from the grave of sorts, it was with a small smile on my face and renewal in my heart as i remembered the most cruel and joyous thing about the world: this too shall pass.

27th
February

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alder, hemlock, birch, pine, sitka.

icy bottle green water tumbles through the crystalline craters of kleanza creek

frozen slabs cracked open, bleeding spring rivulets,

ice blossoming high into flowering sculptures where deep pools gather and tumble.

we are snowshoeing.

i pictured contraptions of twig and cured catgut only to find

steel and plastic strapped to my boots.

snow groans beneath them.

we see tracks, pellets, urine; and trees,

palely split open over the trail, like arched ballet dancers with broken backs.

my mother, huffing ahead of me, tells me about

the ground bees that stung her friend near here.

silence in the winter forest is a truly heavy, clean absence of sound.

later a murder of crows catching and flinging in the high winds

while a bald eagle hunches on a branch

and i watch, unconcerned for a moment with anything but observation:

in the cold woods, my feet on snow, an animal too.

my hometown. old friends. I used to feel uncomfortable coming back just as i used to feel uncomfortable dressing ordinarily. the distance I felt needed to be reflected in every perceivable aspect. now I feel settled into myself wholly, it’s not the differences that matter so. it’s the interior landscapes, and the spiderweb connections between beings that help me define myself.

a day last winter, home for the solstice.

rambling up an overgrown path on a steep mountainside, pushing young branches and snowy cobwebs aside. years since i last visited my destination, but my steps are sure through the icy top layer of snow. evening is threatening to fall, coldly darkening what had been a warm, sunny winter day. the bright cornflower blue of the sky is beginning to show the strain of night’s dye around the edges. stars are burgeoning here, there, and venus coyly reveals her shine near luna, whose pale face has been present all afternoon. the treeline loses its detail to dark silhouette.

having spent the day observing through the eye of a camera, it is refreshing to feel present in the pumping blood, heaving streaming breath, and darting gaze of a human body. i am warm under layers of clothes as i tramp up the slope to the spot i am aimed. top of a rocky cliff; lined with evergreens, kissing the sky where it meets the lace of mountains surrounding it.

23rd
December

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