A weekend with Papa and Nana

– Becky, 2021, under much duress, mostly at 2am on Christmas Day

Race out to the living room and

curl up in the biggest, comfiest chairs in the world.

Matching pjs, hair messy, and

volume on low, low, low.

Nana’s treat cupboard has cap’n crunch

and you chomp through a bowl and a half,

cereal cutting the roof of your smile,

until nana comes out and the channel changes to

to trading spaces and while you were out and what not to wear.

Nana is better at decorating than most of these people you decide,

and she doesn’t need a camera crew to transform a room.

There’s nowhere else you’d rather be 

at six am on a weekend at Papa and Nana’s. 

—–

Six am on a weekend at Papa and Nana’s finds you

racing around the basement,

throwing everything you might need

for the next eight months of your life

back into the suitcases you’ve emptied all over their floor.

Four years, and never a flight missed

(nana’s watch never lies).

If you’re not fifteen minutes early you’re late,

so be sure to leave enough time for

one cup of tea and two cups of coffee,

enough time for saying bye to the best parts of home

at the airport Tim Hortons.

—-

At the stonetown Tim Hortons Papa knows everyone

(And everyone knows Papa).

He always says hi to at least three people,

and introduces his girls:

Here for the weekend

Here to be spoiled

Here to split a sprinkle donut

right down the middle.

‘While you’re here,’ asks the man at at the cash,

‘Would the girls like to come back to the kitchen and 

decorate a gingerbread man?’

Heaven on earth is a Tim Hortons kitchen 

with vats of icing and buckets of rainbow sprinkles.

You leave with smiles

as big as the ones painted on your gingerbread

Papa always knows just the right thing to say

to the people behind the counter.

—-

The people behind the counter

at Godfather’s pizza 

are the scariest people you’ve ever met.

“Here’s the money” says Papa in the car outside, 

“Now go get our supper, Nana’s waiting.”

Your sister already had to call to order the pizza,

stammering out her request for a family meal deal

extra cheese, not too much sauce, with one Ceasar salad.

Now, your chin trembles and tears pool in your eyes.

Papa sits calmly in the front seat, heater running, 

unmoved by the terrified mess next to him

and you know there’s no going back home

without the pizza. 

Hand on the door handle, Papa speaks, says,

“You’re brave. you can do this.”

—-

“You’re brave. You can do this,”

you mutter to yourself,

standing at the top of a cliff and staring

out across the quarry back to where

Papa and your big sister stand on the grass.

Look down at your 

toes on the limestone, 

It’s a long way down. 

All you have to do is 

be brave for three more seconds, 

hold your breath and 

remember everything you learned 

about floating in Aunt Ruth’s pool. 

You your Dad your Papa,

three generations off this one ledge.

Deep breath 

one, 

two, 

three,

splash.

—-

The splash of the waves against the beach

Is the background music to every summer memory.

Waves filling in the the silence around the card table

when you crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and 

are allowed to shuffle 

for the grownup card games you don’t understand. 

Waves singing you to sleep when your eyes can’t stay open

any longer reading Archie comics under your built-in nightlight.

Waves keeping you company on long beach walks

while you learn how to find sea glass, find peanut butter rocks, 

find elderberries, find sandbars, find the right doohickey in the toolshed, 

find treasures where you least expect them

–

Nana is the queen of finding treasures in unexpected places.

She keeps all of them safe in secret boxes,

and pulls them out on snowday afternoons.

The tiniest polly pockets and dad’s old tonka trucks,

crystal glasses and delicate china, 

necklaces and rings with stories more precious than their stones, and

clothes she found at sally ann – the perfect size, the perfect colour. 

She puts most of her treasures away for the next time but still somehow

sends you out the door with a new (old) purse full of cookies

And a new (old) coat that she mended before fixing it up in the warsh 

And a new (old) travel mug from your favourite musical full of tea

And a stick of butter wedged under your arm 

“There was a sale!” 

Nana says

“I didn’t want you girls to go without”

–

“We can’t have you girls going without breakfast,” 

say Papa and Nana as they meet you both at Cora’s 

With a friend and friend and a friend of a friend tagging along

The best part of the waiter’s day is making Papa proud

(you can relate).

Leave the table full of sugar and enough breakfast for the week

and more love than you know what to do with.

You haven’t seen this much food since

Nana packed your lunches for a field trip

Two sandwiches, two Jellos, 

and two packets of dunkaroos

Made all the more delicious because you knew

All of the magical snacks would transform into celery and shreddies

When your parents come back home

–

“When your parents come back home

What are they going to say?”

Nana asks, staring somewhat desperately

At your black, black hair

And your pink, pink room

And your ankle (probably not broken, just sprained).

Your rebellious phase that lasted exactly one weekend

when mom and dad weren’t home to ask questions.

“Maybe you should call to warn them” says Nana

Papa just laughs,

but then he hands you the phone

–

You hold your phone in your hands

Listening to love crackling through a rhyming voicemail,

home showing up in

Nova Scotia Quebec London Buffalo Windsor St Catharines 

through imessage and skype and facetime and portal

and facebook messenger and email forwards and late night phone calls.

“There once was a girl named bri who went to go live by the sea” 

starts a voicemail,

“Give us a call when you’re done partying,” 

it ends as you stare ruefully at your piles of homework

“and make sure you get home safe from wherever you are.”

Nana’s prayers and find my friends walk and drive and fly

Every mile next to you until 

one, 

two, 

three A.M.

Keeping watch until

everyone is back where they should be.

–

You aren’t where you should be,

Nana is sitting in the passenger seat

and somehow, seventeen years later, 

your hands are on the wheel.

Nana is quiet (maybe praying)

And for the next 45 minutes 

you circle the Wescast parking lot 

while she makes parallel parking sound

just as easy as folding a fitted sheet.

Which, to be clear, also isn’t easy

(for anyone who isn’t Nana).

Driving this car is nothing at all like 

figure-eights on the lawnmower

no matter what Papa says.

—

No matter what Papa says,

you know he must like cats.

At least some cats.

At least Cleo.

You’ve seen the way she sits on his shoulder and 

you try to get the tiny kittens tumbling in the grass to

stay on your shoulder, too, but

neither of you are good enough at sitting still

“Time to go!”

With a Dad’s cookie in hand,

Papa backs the old truck down the gravel driveway.

If you’re lucky it’s your turn to sit behind the wheel,

your hands on his,

windows down,

wind rushing in,

singing take me out to the ball game

top of your lungs.

“It’s the only song I know,” he says

—-

“It’s the only song I know,” he says

even though every year you 

sit next to him on the big chairs in the living room

and you know that he could sing every word

to every song

from the Sound of Music.

But out of respect for Julie Andrews

everyone stays quiet and

welcomes in 

another Christmas

—–

Another Christmas and 

Papa and Nana remain the hardest people you know

to find a present for

“We don’t need anything!”

They say

“As long as we have you girls

And your mom

And your dad

(and maybe Jordan too, adds nana)

All around the table

What more could we ask for?”

And they’re right

you can’t imagine any Christmas

anywhere in the world 

That could be better than this

garlic fingers and donair sauce.

“Oh my goodness, this tastes exactly like home!” I pronounce dramatically, lifting a garlic finger smothered in donair sauce high into the sky. Davita and Beth and I had created an impromptu picnic on the grass by the water and we inhale the meal as an incredible sunset over the dykes turns to fireworks, turns to stars shining bright against the dark sky as we drive down never-ending dirt roads into the Gaspereau valley hunting for our AirBnB.

It’s ludicrous to believe that you can showcase four transformational years of your life in a 36 hour road trip, but I had promised to try.

——

“We’ll take the fastest way to the house Davita’s at” I said, turning off my GPS as we drove past the town sign and shifting into autopilot as I turned left onto University, automatically swerving back and forth across the road to avoid potholes that no longer existed.

“That’s where I skated,” I narrated, putting on my tour guide voice like I had so many times before when friends and family had come to visit “… and that’s the nicest building on campus, and this is the part of the hill where I’d be out of breath on phone calls, and this is a shortcut through the woods, and if you turn around now you have one of my favourite views that reminded me every morning how lucky I was to live here, and this on the left… this is…” I inhaled sharply “oh…that’s not right. they changed the shingles. they weren’t like that, you know, before. when we lived here. they were different. Darker? Lighter maybe? I haven’t seen the house since they…. did this…”

The car behind me honked, startling me. I sped up, putting the house and the memories behind me, but not fast enough to stop the tears from pooling in my eyes.

“I just need a second” I said, around the corner. “I hadn’t thought… I didn’t realize… I knew they wouldn’t be there, they weren’t there all of last year but… it’s my first time back since Poppa…”

————–

And I took two more breaths, and collected myself, and then there were hugs and squeals and laughs and a long walk in the setting sun next to the salt water, and garlic fingers with donair sauce. Which tasted like home.

To be more specific, they tasted like 3am on the kitchen floor of my micro-loft. Like hysterical laughter and sleep deprivation and desperate last-ditch efforts to hit our deadlines. A taste synonymous with Nova Scotia university days for almost every student, except it was my final semester, and the first time I’d had them.

————

I am grateful for every friend I had during undergrad, because the friendships happened against all odds and with very little effort on my part. The friends from Kinesiology who sat next to me in every class of first year, who reached out over and over again to invite me to for dinners and campus events after I disappeared from their everyday life. For the skating team, my only consistent touchstone with normal, once a week at 6am. For the friend who found me at the writing centre in my third year, then brought me to a small group, for the friend who took me from the small group to a larger group, for Davita, who looked at me across the kitchen counter in the midst of the larger group and said “I just harass people into friendship, I find it’s what works best for me.”

But that didn’t happen until after home had changed. By that point, it wasn’t the three of us living at the top of the hill, it was me and myself and I staring out over the Minas basin trying to process the three years that I still haven’t finished processing almost a decade later.

Home for the first three years tasted like casseroles and couscous, chicken pot pie and multigrain cheerios, peanut butter cookies and endless pots of tea. Home for the last six months tasted like garlic fingers with donair sauce.

————

I didn’t know how to explain home to the people I met at school. Everything would get awkward after I said the word ‘dementia’ because nineteen-year-olds don’t know how to have those conversations, and then we’d pretend I’d never said it and go back to school or skating or grocery shopping, and they’d quietly accept that I spent most of my evenings at home and that sometimes I’d be sad or exhausted because of “things going on.”

I wish, now, that there had been more overlap. That I’d found a way to build friendships strong enough to have survived the climb up the hill & that I could have trusted them with the life we were living up there. Then maybe those friendships might have lasted longer, and maybe they’d be able to remember that life with me.

—————–

Instead, I fall asleep at the Airbnb walking through the old house in my mind. The shingles are the right colour. There’s the garage, where Poppa spent so many hours trying to sort the garbage to town council’s exacting standards. There are the perfect green swivel chairs where we’d chat over bowls of cereal at midnight. There’s the kitchen table where he’d look at me mischievously before pressing an invisible button while saying a key phrase sure to set off a specific story we’d both heard a million times. There’s the living room where we buried ourselves in books and papers and memories only to pull ourselves back out again. There’s the bedroom, his half meticulously organized next to Grammie’s drawers overflowing with treasures. Then downstairs to his desk in the office, where he’s putting together an email and wants my opinion on whether or not the salutation “ahoy!” is too colloquial for a church acquaintance. There’s the magical storage area, source of boxes of creepy dolls and children’s books that he places into my arms because “your grandmother wants you to have these.” There’s the spot that he always talked about installing a sink. There’s my room, which is what they called it when they were convincing me that this was where I should go to school. Back up the stairs and there’s where he’d wait by the back door, impatiently calling for us to join him – it’s time to go for ice cream.

Ice cream tasted like home, too.

———————

We’d carved out 36 hours between Beth’s shows at the Charlottetown Festival “for Bri to show you Nova Scotia and also to pick up Davita” – an ambitious plan, but we wake up determined and so we criss-cross the province and accidentally drive across the Macdonald bridge five times in an afternoon. Peggy’s Cove, the lookoff, the harbour, and my favourite place to buy apples. Walking around the tall ships, we unexpectedly ran into my friend from the writing centre. Because: Nova Scotia.

“How are your grandparents?” He asks. I fumble, looking for my words. He knew me when they were the centre of my world and the centre of my identity and that hadn’t been the case for two years and so no one asked me about them anymore and I hadn’t prepared an answer.

“Grammie’s living in a long-term care now, and they’re taking really good care of her. So that’s really good for her, and it’s nice to see her so cared for in a way that I couldn’t do? Poppa…. um, he actually developed it too? and um, our family doesn’t do funerals, really, so I’m kind of processing saying goodbye while I’m out here?”

—————

It was the first time I’d said it out loud, but it felt like the exhale I’d been holding since I’d seen the new roof.

I had said goodbye. A never-ending, incremental goodbye over the past two years, that culminated in the phone call where he knew me, and knew my name, and we talked like we hadn’t in months and never would again, and I saw him again after that, too, but he didn’t know who I was anymore.

Because we’d our goodbyes had spanned from Ontario to Vancouver I hadn’t realized how inextricably he was tied to this place and this home, and how empty it would feel without anyone who could remember that chapter with me.

“But it’s been really good to be back!” I hurry on “we even managed to introduce Beth to garlic fingers last night – it tasted like home!”

———————–

There are some parts of Nova Scotia that are home.

And then there’s eight months that weren’t quite home but were something else worth remembering anyways.

Eight months that tasted like chocolate banana milkshakes and popcorn from muddy’s and salt water spray on the Dartmouth ferry and paneer curry made in a friend’s kitchen, and late night drives home from Halifax, and cups of tea in another friend’s living room, and snacks from the market and a London Fog from JustUs, and champagne after winning regionals, and apples in a bag as big as my torso, and the fresh air off the ocean. That tasted like dance parties held in living rooms wall-papered with tinfoil, and early morning ice time, and the satisfaction of digging your way through six feet of snow in the driveway, and the anxiety of grad school applications, and laughing hysterically watching the saddest movies in the world, and the dust rising off of twenty-six boxes of archival boxes, and the thrill of a good find at Frenchy’s, and the hunger you feel when you see your name on an article byline for the first time, and the satisfaction of closing up the writing centre after back-to-back sessions mixed with heartfelt conversations about everything to come.

And garlic fingers. It also tasted like garlic fingers.

——–

We cross the bridge back into PEI with the skylight rolled all the way back so that the light from the stars can shine into the van. Sam Hunt plays over the radio, because he was the only thing that was ever on the radio that summer no matter which station we tuned in to.

I try to put a little bit of these feelings into words, but I don’t have them, not yet. “I wish I could have met them,” says Davita, even as we wonder if maybe she sang with Grammie in choir, or met Poppa at the grocery store, or ran into them at a church function. I wish so, too. Of all the friends that could have made it up the hill, if I’d known, if we’d tried, I know, now, after everything else, that Davita would have thrived in our rhythms of tea and stories and laughter.

But, instead, we have garlic fingers with donair sauce and the laughter and healing and hope that they brought with them. And they may not taste like home, not really, not if I’m being honest, but they do taste like a friendship that’s grown beyond a physical location into incomprehensible phone nicknames, and a common language of inside jokes, and at least three hypothetical book proposals. And that’s kind of a home, too.

lately

At the risk of being self-indulgent: I’m tired. 

(I know, I know. Who isn’t.)

And I am so very grateful for all of the good (and very good! and surprisingly excellent! and basically perfect!) that there’s been in the midst. 

And I’m grateful for all the things that could have been scarier but weren’t.  

And I’m grateful to live in a place where things are absolutely better than they were and there’s no immediate signs of danger ahead.

But being thankful it’s not worse is not quite the same thing as any of this being okay. 

——————————————————-

This year I’ve pivoted from offline healthcare to online practice, then lost my job due to restructuring, then cried on my new, empty TTC commute every day for weeks,  then worked on an outbreak unit while having panic attacks between shifts, then spent months in a field hospital holding patients’ hands through endless layers of PPE while trying to create light in windowless rooms. 

In many ways this is old news. And in many ways it’s infinitely better than what my colleagues and friends and family members have been carrying and surviving through and trying to let go of.

——————————————————

But I’ve been trying to “get back to normal” and “find my life again” since June  in some very tiny ways and some very big ways.

And sometimes what approximates normal feels like a comforting sweater and I want to wrap myself in it and never take it off but then other times (and completely without warning) it feels claustrophobic — like someone took normal and put it in the dryer on hot but then made me wear it anyways because that’s what will look best in pictures. 

And so for every day it feels like I might be a step closer to the parts of myself I miss, there’s a day when I’ve never felt further away, and now it’s October and I’m so close, I might finally have something that’s the same as before, but it’ll be a different me who gets to have it, I guess.

——————————————————–

I’m brittle in ways I never was before, and scared to care too much because what if it all ends again, and I can’t stop instinctively shutting down possibilities that might take too much of me even if they’re actually what I want. I’m sarcastic where I think I used to be supportive, and my self-confidence is hysterically uncertain, and I don’t remember how to plan anything or how to be the first to send a message, and when I reach for my words the writing all comes out like this – dramatic, and sad, and unresolved.  

——————————————————-

And I’m just so aware that even on the days I find something close to normal, I’m still spending most of my time in a field hospital trying to explain that my yellow gown and mask and shield and gloves aren’t a threat it’s to keep you safe see my eyes they’re smiling you don’t need to be afraid we’re here to help you no I can’t take this mask off it’s to keep you safe we can’t go outside right now we have to stay inside because it’s safe, you’re safe here, I promise no you can’t see your daughter but I can call her on this screen for you you’re safe just hang on two seconds let me just wash my hands before I touch yours no you’re not dirty no I’m not dirty it’s just so we’re safe do you remember that virus on the news? no? don’t worry about it because it’s okay, we have a vaccine now, but this is just in case, just to make sure you’re safe, we’re safe, I promise it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay 

————————————————————-

None of this has been okay.

—————————————————————

But it is where I’ve been,

lately.

false.

True or false. . . highschool was the best four years of our lives.

False. Categorically false. See also: everything that’s happened since. 

And yet, when I’m home in my childhood bedroom, it’s the highschool memories that I find myself tripping over.

Strangely, the memories aren’t the ones I’d thought they’d be. They aren’t the ones with familiar punchlines and photo evidence. Instead, they’re the moments I didn’t take pictures of and didn’t write down. And maybe it’s because even then I thought they were too precious to write about, or, maybe, forgetting half the details has made them more beautiful. Or, maybe, I naively assumed I’d remember them by default because they were my entire world.

Or, maybe, it’s because we were friends then, and now we’re not. And I don’t know what to do with the memories because I can’t remember them with you. And I can’t ask if it was real. If we were real.

True or false: We promised we’d be best friends forever.

True.

I have a memory of all of us standing on top of the roof of the high school. I know, logically, that there’s absolutely no way we were all there. I’m surprised any of us were. But in my memory? It’s all of us.

I don’t know if it was during rehearsal or if it was one of the thousands of other times we were in the drama room in class, or on weekends, or on snowdays, or in the middle of summer vacation.  That day, we had a key to the costume room tucked away on the second floor, and in the far corner of the costume room there was a small flight of stairs leading to an even smaller door.

I don’t remember who noticed the door first. I don’t remember who tried the door and found it unlocked. I don’t remember if we anxiously debated the ethics of accessing the roof, or if we walked out without a care in the world. 

I do remember standing on the roof. It was so much higher up than I expected, and we all stared out at the view that was full of nothing but the fields behind our school. I remember a reckless smile on my face (on your face?). I remember the exhilarated feeling of being somewhere we absolutely were not supposed to be, and also the slow realization that there really isn’t much for a group of partially-costumed teenagers to do when they unexpectedly find themselves on a roof.

I do remember that the door was never unlocked again.

True or false: This happened. I didn’t make it up. We were there.

things I know were real: we spent our mornings running the school announcements (after band but before homeroom), our seven minutes between classes at our lockers that ended up (by chance or by fate) next to each other, our classes as partners  as often as our teachers would let us, and then met up every day at 3:05 in front of the office for a final grasp at togetherness before buses left and rehearsal started.

I have another memory that doesn’t feel real, but that I think has to be.  We were all staying in a residence building three towns over, and we’d come back on a post-show high from performing a poetic reflection on life and death and the apocalyptic afterlife featuring interpretive dance, heavy black eyeshadow, and someone painted silver and hidden in a barrel (I’m all too certain of those details). Our adrenaline was electric and we tried to have a school-sanctioned party in one of the common rooms, but we were too full of our characters to settle back into ourselves. I remember we decided to go back to our dorm room early, but left the door propped open, just a crack.

And I remember we were up, too exhilarated to sleep, when we heard our friend out in the hall. He’d been locked out of his room, so it was only natural to sneak him into ours. And I don’t remember how everyone found out we were there because I don’t remember any of us having cell phones at that point. But all the people who mattered most found each other in our room and we stayed up for what I think was hours, and I don’t remember any of the jokes or any of the conversations, but I remember how it felt trying to shrink our laughter down to whispers so that we wouldn’t be caught and it wouldn’t have to end and I think I remember him reading us Peter Pan as a bedtime story in the early hours of the morning. 

True or False: This is all too weird to make up. This happened. We were there.

things I know were real: 90% of our heartfelt confessions happened through either notes or MSN – back and forth across desks, frantic typing in multiple flashing popups, your complex origami-style notes in the hallway, tucked up underneath the chair we both used in our separate math classes, group chats, and sub-group chats, and sub-sub-group chats, a chart-paper sized set of notes you sent with me on an airplane so I wouldn’t forget you in the eight days I was away.

I have another faded memory of the two of us lying on my bedroom floor, with the sunlight pouring in my windows – uncomfortably warm, but perfect for basking in a friendship I believed in with all of my heart. I remember that we had just finished a play that meant everything to us, and that we were already looking forward to our last year of high school with equal parts excitement and dread. I remember handing my copy of our Grade 12 script back and forth, and reading the entire play in one go.

“It’ll be perfect,” I remember you saying. “I’ll be the lead, and you’ll be the other girl, and we’ll make sure our other friends get cast too, and we’ll have another perfect year just like this.” I remember that I didn’t question that you’d be the lead. I remember that I didn’t question much of anything once you’d decided it would be a certain way.

I don’t remember if this was one of the conversations where you talked about how much better our lives would be after high school. How you’d get to do everything that we were holding you back from. But in my memory, those conversations, whenever they actually happened, are linked.

I remember asking you, backstage that May, immediately before we walked on stage together for the last time, if you remembered our sunny afternoon of impromptu scripts. “Remember? that was then and now we’re here, and it all happened just the way you said it would, and now it’s over. It’s all over.” and I don’t remember the expression on your face, and I don’t remember what you said in return, but even then I don’t think you remembered, really, the afternoon I was talking about.

I do remember that you didn’t see this as an ending you saw it as a stepping stone to something bigger, but it really was an ending after all, and I don’t know if it’s sadder that you didn’t recognize it or that I was expecting it.

True or false: This happened. I didn’t make it up. We were there. And now we’re here.

things I know were real: we did costume changes into clothes from each other’s closets in greenhouses and town council offices. we never performed anywhere that was actually meant to be a theatre and so we were always running between scenes – around the outside of town hall, from the gym into the hall and back on to the stage, sneaking around the floor-to-ceiling curtains that covered three sides of the drama room. we ran screaming into the freezing lake at 2am on my 17th birthday, hair still done up in curls from prom, and never more alive. 

I have another memory, and it’s one I never told you.

Our last day of high school was well-planned and perfectly executed. It was the final day of exams and our first drive out of town without one of our moms in the driver’s seat of a minivan.  I still have the godawful mix CD we made in my car, even though it skips from Glee remixes to Finnish Metal to ‘Brick House’ by the Commodores. There’s a sound clip of us singing our hearts out on the dark drive home. Just us and the country roads, in that exact configuration for the first time and the last time.

And I love that memory. It makes me laugh, and it makes me cry, and it was a perfect night of celebrating everything that we’d been.

But for me, my true “last day” was a couple weeks later. I’d accidentally fallen into another group of friends-once-removed that Spring, and I don’t remember how or why we were all hanging out together, but I remember thinking that you wouldn’t like it, or like how much I liked it, and then I remember realizing that you didn’t need to know.

We ended the night all lying on the trampoline, staring up into infinity and into everything that was going to come after. And it was one of those perfect nights where you know that there’s absolutely nothing but air and gravity between you and the stars, and it feels like at any moment you might fall off the face of the planet like the stars are falling across the sky.

We didn’t look back. Instead, with the earnestness that only a bunch of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds can have, we talked about who we would be next. The one thing we would do if we knew we couldn’t fail. And I think I can remember some of the dreams – the girls they’d date, or the worlds they’d save, or the books they’d write.

But I can’t remember what I said. What I wanted more than anything in that moment.

things I know were real: I didn’t have my own license until two years later, so he drove me home from that perfect last night with the gas needle on empty, and I never had a curfew but it was the closest I ever came to breaking it. I was told I was too scared to take chances so I started taking every chance I got and they helped me pack my suitcases and made sure to tuck home between the layers of clothes and books and every time I’ve been scared to move forwards I’ve looked around and seen them taking every step with me and they’ve known every version of me I’ve ever been since then and loved almost all of them.

True or false: I’ve accomplished the dream I wanted most on that perfect summer night at seventeen.

True or false: you’d know if I had.

Alone

“If I need the equipment I’ll install it, even if it doesn’t work for guests.  They can just use the other bathroom.” says my favourite patient, a 90 year old woman who keeps me on my toes.

“That’s my favourite part of living alone,” I answer, “you can just keep things where you want them, and it doesn’t have to make sense or be convenient for other people.”

“Exactly.” she nods back at me “it’s my home and it just needs to work for me.”

We smile conspiratorially at each other; generations apart but both reframing, again, what it means to live alone. 

—

Even though I want to believe that my space is my own, these three rooms and five closets of a couple hundred square feet I pay way too much for, I don’t know that it actually is. 

Last January I rearranged my kitchen shelves after two years of my friends complaining that my water glasses were “in the wrong spot”. There are mugs on my shelf that I never use, but that my friends hunt for every time they come over, and so they stay within arm’s reach. 

I joke that my apartment is really just a collection of everyone who loves me – the wooden furniture my dad found on kijiji, the office therapy plant re-homed by a favourite coworker, countless pieces of my sister’s artwork, my nana’s ‘spot of yellow’ in every room, a bulletin board dedicated to inside jokes, Dani’s regular efforts to help me decorate via throw pillow, Becca’s extra bookshelf because it didn’t fit in her basement apartment, the mattress under the bed, the rug Laura found on the side of the road, the tea shelf from 427, the coffee maker Jenette bought because she was so sick of me not having one, the table Papa found for me through his endless small town network, the poster for my town’s Musical Muskrat Festival that my mom hunted down for me five years ago, the collection of pigeons that came out of the never-ending international prank that is #ThingsBriHatesForBri. 

‘But this is what suits me,’ I think, looking around, “this is what makes sense.” 

I’m not artistic, but if I were to make a self portrait I’m pretty sure that it would be a collage made up of scraps of paper and shared experiences and traits and jokes and sayings stolen from the people I’ve been lucky enough to meet. 

—

We call my apartment ‘AirBnBnBri’ because until we weren’t allowed to go anywhere, my family and friends (and friends of friends) would regularly ‘book’ stays for days, or weekends, or weeks, or months. “You have to leave a review” I joked, except then it wasn’t a joke, because Morgan did actually leave a review and then Madi made me a book with a map of Toronto on the cover and now there are 65 reviews and it would be a perfect 5 star average except for the time Jenette gave me 3 and a half stars because I didn’t have a hairdryer. 

Between my couch, and the foam mattress tucked away under the bed, and the other half of my double mattress, I know that I have enough space for three people easily. More, if they bring their own  air mattress. Six guests, if it’s our annual fake new year’s party and it’s with people who have known each other so long that there are no boundaries at all anymore.

More often than not people’s stays would overlap and I started to feel for the first time like all of the separate parts of my life up until Toronto were slowly blending into a more authentic life where everyone knew everyone (and by extension knew all the different sides of me) and suddenly it was Christmas 2019 and there were 20 of us in my kitchen and we made 679 cookies and everything had been so hard that year, but that afternoon felt right in a million different ways and my three rooms felt like a home and there were so few parts of my heart that felt homesick because most of the parts were together in one place. 

—

The contrast between the cookie party and now is so sharp that it hurts. Because now I am, really, and truly, and undeniably, alone. 

“I have a new level of appreciation for you.” one of my dearest friends texts me on a Wednesday night. “How do you do all the things you do by yourself? This is HARD.” 

I’m glad the question is rhetorical, and that I can just send some hearts instead of an answer. 

“But you’re not alone, Bri” my friends say. ”You have me. You have us. We’re here.”  

And they are, and yet I am. 

Alone, that is. 

—

I don’t know how to approach this topic. I’m doing a lot more backspacing and editing and retracing than I usually do.  And, in a moment of authorial weakness, I looked up the dictionary definition of alone. 

It’s both an adverb and an adjective. 

A way of doing things, and also a way of defining something. 

Both are accurate. 

Synonyms include, but are not limited to: “just”,“unescorted”,“solitary”,“on one’s own initiative”,“single”, and“uniquely.” 

—

just.

“Just Me!” is what I say with my friendliest smile when someone asks me if the seat next to me is taken. if I live with anyone. if I’m waiting for someone to join.

After all, there hasn’t been a dramatic tearing away or a big reveal or a break up or a quest where I found myself at the end of a long and arduous journey. 

It’s always just been me.

The smile is also important. It’s so they know it’s okay. I’m comfortable with this, so they can be too.    

unescorted.

I have a spotify playlist called ‘Bachelor Girl’ and it was the soundtrack to the movie version of this portion of my life. They were the songs that I sang to myself under my breath on crowded buses going to and from work, when I twirled in my red high heels in the centre of Yonge Dundas Square after treating myself to a musical for my birthday, when I drove thousands of kilometres across the country with all of my belongings in a Ford Fiesta and the music blaring. 

the songs lose some of their power when I’m singing them in an empty kitchen at the beginning of an empty day. 

But. There is also power in knowing that some of my memories belong only to me, and that no one else will ever be able to give another perspective. The blueberry scone I bought from a bakery made out of an old bank vault and ate while staring at green mountains under a blue sky somewhere off a logging road in New Hampshire? It’s mine. And only mine. 

solitary.

Tomorrow I will wake up, and I will be the only person in my bed. I will be the only person at my bus stop, and sometimes I’m the only person on my bus. I’m the only person who uses the stop near the hospital and I am the only person walking north while everyone else walks south. 

I try to fill the space and the emptiness with phone calls, and video calls, and Twitter, and Jackbox, and texts, and walks outside and six feet apart, and the Netflix Party app. When someone else is experiencing time with me, it feels real. I feel real. 

but then the call ends, and it’s me and myself and I again. my resting state.

on one’s own initiative.

It’s been a long time since I’ve asked permission to do something. I talk a lot, but apparently only after my decision has already been made. My dad, frustrated when I retroactively ask for advice, tells me “we’re just trying to catch up, Bria. It’s clear you’ve already made your decision, and we’re going to support you, but we’re just trying to understand how you got here.” 

there are a lot of things I don’t know how to do, but I do know how to take initiative. new cities new jobs new friends new plans new adventures new experiences i can find them i can throw myself into them i can plan them i can live them, and i can thrive i am very good at thriving now, but most of the time i’m not sure how i got here either. 

single

I always thought I’d be the girl that someone ends up with, and it’s weird the ways that assuming that’s your future influences your present. “Well if I move in with someone in a couple years, it would be a waste to have two salad spinners, I can just go without”.

I can’t come up with a five year plan, because part of the plan has always been meeting someone and it turns out that you can’t actually plan on that. My (lack of) love life is one of the longest running jokes in my friend group, and has become (accidentally? on purpose?) a personality trait of its own. 

“I couldn’t have done [this] without [them]” my friends say about their partners and i know exactly how to do to do it, because i did do it, without a [them] to help me.

and sometimes when I’m especially frustrated I remind myself of all the things I couldn’t have done if a [them] had been around and it helps because I don’t want to rewrite any of the broad strokes of the story I’ve lived so far because I really like it and I’m really proud of it.

(but I bought a salad spinner last weekend). 

—

uniquely

“Okay but what do you want?” she asks me “outside of what you think you should want, outside of what your friends want, outside of what your family wants, outside of all this cultural noise, what is it that you, yourself, alone, want out of your life?”

I’m worried that after all this time, and all this practice, I’m still not sure how to do this on my own after all. That if I were to take my hypothetical self-portrait collage and pull away all of the parts of everyone else that I’d just be left with a blank page. 

But, truly, is there a life outside of my friends my family my patients my culture my expectations their expectations? If there is, I don’t think it’s one I’d want. This is my collage. It’s the context I’ve built out of all the people and places that have shaped me. 

It’s not something I want to be free of, it’s how I want to build the rest of me, too. 

—

I’m trying my absolute best to settle into this weird, abnormal, chapter as much as I can — fully recognizing that the hand I’ve been dealt (with a job, and a home, and people who love me just a phone call away) is hardly even a hardship. The one where every Sunday morning is, by necessity, mine and mine alone to do whatever I want (so long as it doesn’t involve being within six feet of another human). The one where I’m not performing, not hosting, not gathering, not reacting. The one where it’s just me, and I’m unescorted, and solitary, and single, and doing things completely on my own initiative, and it’s going to be uniquely it’s own chapter. 

So I turn off the music, and turn off my phone, and lie on the floor and just think for a while, and then I get bored of staring at the ceiling, so I type all of this out, and I’ll share it with the fifteen people on my twitter, and later today I’ll bake a loaf of my favourite bread, and put it in the freezer, and eat it two slices at a time without worrying about having to share it with anyone else. I’ll play the music I want, and go for a walk wherever my feet lead me, and I’ll call Davita and Madi and Aileen this afternoon and probably I’ll watch ridiculous Canadian television with Becca tonight, and then I’ll go to bed and we’ll all be one day closer to something that isn’t quite so alone. 

Hamster

All Becky ever wanted for Christmas was a hamster. It was at the top of her list when she was five. It was at the top of her list when she was seven. It was at the top of her list when she was eight, and got a fish instead. And, it was at the top of her list the year she turned sixteen. 

Mom and Dad were exceptionally pragmatic when it came to family pets. “We travel too much,” they said. “I’m allergic,” Dad said, feigning a sneeze at the very thought. “Maybe you can have a rabbit outside when you’re older” said my Mom, conveniently forgetting about the six months of winter our snowbelt town experienced like clockwork.  “If it can live in a tank, we’ll consider it” they said. 

Given the above restrictions, I went through a preteen phase where I really wanted a newt. Mom and Dad never directly said “no”, they just never said “yes” either. One year, for my birthday, I got a twenty dollar bill taped to a card and labelled “newt fund.”

Newts cost $12.99 according to a Google search I just did. Conveniently, I was never provided with a car ride to a store where I could spend my $20 bill. So, I just accepted that mine would be a pet-free existence, and slowly learned to cope. 

Becky refused to give in.

After several years of begging, and a set of persuasive skills and stubbornness known only to younger siblings, Becky was driven to a pet store where she was allowed to pick out two goldfish (named Bubbles and Daisy), an algae eater, and a fishbowl. Over the next five years (and five additional fish), the entire family became very involved in the life and times of her goldfish. 

They were all we talked about during family lunches at the kitchen counter where their tank was located. Family legend holds that Mom put her medical degree to work by learning how to diagnose and treat diseases including “ick” and “swim bladder”, and once performed fish CPR when Angel the fish choked on a pebble. Dad, occasionally feeling left out, would sometimes resort to flopping on the tile floor of the kitchen like a fish out of water until someone paid attention to him. 

Dramatic? Our family? We’ll deny it.

Now that Becky had demonstrated our family could, in fact, balance high-needs fish with our fast-paced lifestyle, she began her second pitch. She wanted an animal she could cuddle. One that didn’t have scales. One that would love her back. Becky wanted a hamster.

She launched an all-out campaign that lasted the better part of seven years. From the time she was nine until the time she was sixteen she spared no opportunity to remind our parents how much better her life would be if only she had a small rodent to share it with. 

As the oldest child, I scoffed at her efforts. I remembered the newt. I knew this mission was futile.

Imagine my surprise, when on a day in early December my parents furtively motioned me into their bedroom. They had the hospital Christmas party that evening, and were dressed to the nines.

“We have a job for you.” my dad whispered, heading into his closet. He came back out with a small cardboard box. “This is Becky’s Christmas gift. It was the last one at the store. We need you to keep it alive until we come home tonight.”

My mind went blank. Surely they hadn’t. It would be an upending of the cardinal rule of the Marshall household. This was madness. This was unheard of. The very foundation of my life was crumbling. 

I stared into the cardboard box and two small, beady, hamster eyes stared back. 

“We have its cage in the basement, but we don’t have time to set it up before we go tonight. Just, keep an eye on it, make sure it’s okay, and don’t tell your sister” my dad instructed.

“Also,” my Mom added with some obvious anxiety, “it’s also likely best if you don’t tell your Grammie anything about this. She’s staying in the basement and the hamster is up here. They never have to meet each other.”

(Family lore also has it that Grammie was once singing along to Sunday afternoon opera in the Shediac cottage kitchen when a mouse appeared. The opera singer hit a high C, Grammie’s shriek hit an octave above that, and the mouse expired on the spot. Mom’s concerns made sense for everyone’s well-being).

“Thanks Bria.” said Dad. “We know we can trust you.”

And then they swept off to the party in a flurry of sparkly scarves, shined shoes, and anticipation.

I was left staring at the hamster. “Clearly they didn’t trust me enough to facilitate the newt,” I thought grumpily as I returned the hamster to its spot on the closet floor. But as I stared a final time into the tiny eyes in front of me, my heart softened a smidgen. “We’ll get through this, little guy.” I promised. “Becky is going to love you so much.”

Becky and I spent the evening entertaining our grandparents by watching, if my memory can be trusted, Ratatouille. Grammie clutched at her chest every time Remi the rat appeared on screen. “GIRLS. can you IMAGINE. a RAT. in the KITCHEN. my LAND of GOSHEN I think I’d just about DIE if I saw a RAT in the KITCHEN.” Becky was offended on behalf of all rats everywhere, and as she began an impassioned defence, I took the opportunity to run upstairs and make sure that her rodent was safe and sound. 

Looking at the cardboard box, I noticed a small hole starting to appear in the bottom corner. “It’s probably fine” I thought to myself “Dad would know if a hamster could chew its way out of its carrying case. He trusted the cardboard, so I can too.” But, feeling uneasy, I put the box inside a smooth metal garbage can, just in case.

After the movie was done, I circled back to my parents’ closet before heading off to brush my teeth. I looked in the garbage can. The hole was now the size of a toonie. I laughed and started talking to the hamster in a low voice, “Good thing I put ya in here, you little. . .” I trailed off. There was no hamster in the box. The hamster was gone.

Overwhelmed I sat on the floor, staring at the empty garbage can. I had lost the most precious gift in the house. If Grammie saw the rodent, it might die of fright. She might die of fright. I had ruined Christmas. 

I called my parents in tears.

“Brianna! What’s going on!” Dad shouted over the noise. 

“I. . . I . . . I can’t find it. It’s gone.”

“. . . By “it” do you mean the hamster?!? Brianna?!?”

My sobbing grew louder.

“Bonnie!! Bonnie!!” I heard my Dad call “We need to leave right now!! We have to get home!. Bria, don’t panic. We’ll be right there.” 

 Becky was confused when Mom and Dad rushed right by her in the hall when she ran to greet them. She was even more confused when the three of us went into their bedroom and closed the door, leaving her on the outside.

Mom and Dad looked at the empty garbage can. They looked at my tear-stained face. They looked at each other.

“Well, shit.” said Dad. Without another word, he strode to the door and opened it.

“Rebecca, can you come in here a minute?”

Becky came in, expectantly. 

Dad looked at her seriously, and began speaking in a solemn tone with his hands behind his back. “Rebecca, what is the one thing you wanted more than anything else in the world for Christmas? The gift you thought we’d never give you in a million years?”

Becky’s large brown eyes looked at all of us searchingly, somewhat confused by the heaviness of the air around us. 

“A. . . .a hamster?” she responded, her voice shaking, barely daring to hope that her wildest dreams might have come true. 

A huge smile split across Dad’s face as he whipped his hands out from behind his back, holding the remnants of the small cardboard carrying case

“Well kid, if you find it, you can have it!”

“This is the best Christmas ever!” Becky said, her eyes filling with tears

“No, no really, honey” my mom added “we don’t know where it is.”

Forty-five minutes of frantic searching later, a small ball of grey fluff was found contentedly sleeping next to my mom’s socks. 

Never was an almost-sixteen year old given a better Christmas gift. Never was a hamster loved more than Sherbert.  Never did Sherbert lose his sense of adventure. And never again was anyone in our family given a living thing for Christmas.

Well, except for the jade plant. But you already know how that turned out. 

walk

At the beginning of 2020, our family gave Papa an Apple Watch to settle Nana’s anxiety about being unable to reach him when he was out of the house. By January 15th, Papa had figured out that if he didn’t hit a certain level of activity in a given day, the watch complained. The watch also tells him to breathe, which is intended to be a mindfulness reminder but instead frustrates him to no end; “Your Nana is the only person who’s allowed to remind me to breathe” he says to me on the phone, indignant. 

By January 18th he’s figured out that the watch keeps track of how many days in a row he’s closed his activity rings, and that he’ll get an extra award if he hits 365 sequential days. He also figures out how to ‘friend’ me and sees that unlike his impressive 18 days of activity, I forgot to charge my watch last night and am back at a zero day streak. 

“I’ve got a plan, Bria.” he says on FaceTime one night. “I’m going to get that award. And you should get it too. After all, if I can do it, what’s yer excuse?”

It is very hard to present a compelling argument against maintaining the same level of fitness as your grandfather, but I would like the record to show that this man considers a 10 kilometre walk “nothing special” and casually walked twenty-two kilometres on the 22nd anniversary of his triple bypass for no reason other than the satisfaction of muttering an internal “told you so” to the surgeon who told him he’d get seven years out of the intervention. 

Rain, shine, snow, sleet, Papa walks, wearing circles in the streets of his hometown.  And because I share the part of his genetics that makes it impossible to turn down a challenge, I’ve been walking too. 

I’m at 334 days. Papa’s closer to 350. He’s told me that “I don’t need to” but he’s “actually going to try and hit 400 days because it’s a nice, round number.” After that? He’s “going to take a day off and figure out what’s next.” 

When I said yes to Papa’s challenge, I knew what my walks would look like. I pictured myself weaving around downtown Toronto – my favourite kind of long Saturday afternoons exploring shops and neighbourhoods and bakeries and cafes. I pictured myself speed walking through hospital halls – easily getting five kilometres as I ran back and forth between my desk and the exam room during Tuesday clinic. I pictured myself on the trips I had booked – finally getting to show Madi all my favourite views in Nova Scotia, convincing Davita I needed another chance to stare at the Blue Ridge Mountains, and rambling through the streets of New York City with Morgan to celebrate both of us, finally, being done grad school. 

Thanks to the plot twist that is 2020, I’ve accomplished none of the above and spent a lot of time wearing circles that a look a lot like Papa’s in the streets of my hometown instead. 

The thing about walking around here is that my feet know exactly where they’re going. We’re walking to school. To Becca’s house. To the park. To the good park. Through the woods. To the soccer field. Around and around the Wescast trail.

I try to be mindful. Try to remember to smile and say “Hi, how’re y’now?” to the not-quite-strangers I cross paths with so that they know the city hasn’t made me rude. I try to focus on the birds, the trees, the sky, the light, the present. 

But mostly, I set my feet to autopilot and tell myself stories to pass the time.

Sometimes, they’re stories about what life was Before; stories that almost feel like fairytales, now that we’ve been in the Present for such a long time, and I catch myself telling these stories to remind me of who I was, and who I might be again someday, if the curse is lifted. 

But more often, it’s me trying to figure out how I’m going to tell the stories about Now. I don’t like telling stories that are sad. I don’t like telling stories that are upsetting. Honestly, if I have a choice, I’d rather forget those parts. But I don’t want to forget an entire year. So I rehearse these soon-to-be stories, over and over, trying to wear down the sharp edges into something that might be comforting someday (or that, at the very least, won’t hurt to run my fingers over). 

I think, when I’m looking back, in the After (that we talk about like it’s its own kind of fairy tale), I’ll tell stories about my walks. Even though they weren’t the ones I was picturing, they’ve been the ones that have held me together.

There were the walks with my mom in April and May, where she patiently listened to me work through the sudden implosion of my adult life over and over and over. I’d walk her to work, or we’d walk through the woods, and she’d point out her favourite birds, and then we’d come home and she’d make tea out of elderberries and whatever other anti-inflammatory ingredients she could find in the cupboard. One part comfort, one part good for me. Exactly mom’s style.

There was the walk I went for late at night after we came home from Jackie’s wedding in July, skin buzzing with electricity from spending a day that was so full of joy and sunshine that it almost felt normal. I walked until I silenced the voice that reminded me I couldn’t hug my friend on her wedding day, and fell asleep smiling that we’d been there at all. 

There were a couple of awkwardly cautious walks with boys; their lack of endurance told me all I needed to know about how well they’d fit in with our family’s vibe. I left them at subway stations and then walked home. 

There was a walk down Ossington in August with Laura and her neighbour’s over-excited puppy – the entire city was smiling and it felt like a normal summer afternoon until we had to put our masks on to grab the pizza we’d ordered. 

There were walks to get ice cream – everyone who was even kind-of local converging at our new favourite shop and then sprawling on the grass at Wychwood Barns in a large circle, trying to eat our cones as quickly as we could – hyperaware that licking melted ice cream off our hands was no longer an option. 

There was a walk around the hospital grounds in September – fall leaves drifting peacefully as the three of us tried to shed our frustrations and anger and helplessness after an especially tense meeting so that we could smile on our 11am video call with a patient. We didn’t find an answer, but we did find a dog park, and that was enough for the moment. 

There were walks on the phone with friends far away – distances as remote as Yellowknife and Wolfville and Edmonton, but also as close as Lindsay and Etobicoke and Barrie – distances now somehow equally as impossible to reach. We talked and walked each other through all the unfathomable changes in our lives – if I kept my eyes straight ahead, I could imagine we were walking side by side.

There was the walk to get pastries in a November downpour – a celebration of an engagement, an excuse to eat croissants, a physical need to see each other in person for the first time in months – smiles shining through masks and raincoats and umbrellas and huddling in a closed store’s doorway where we drank our tea six feet apart.

And now, December. Walks around my hometown again, with the air cold, and the ground covered in snow, just like it was in March. The ground beneath my feet is stable, solid, my hometown, as always, exactly as I left it. Everything else has changed so much. 

Papa calls me while I’m in the middle of this piece. “When are ya dropping by on Friday?” he asks. (It’ll be the third time I’ve seen him and Nana in person since restrictions were announced; a separation that would have been unthinkable in any other universe). 

“I’ll be there around noon – do you have have a big day planned?” I ask, tongue in cheek. Does anyone have big days anymore?

“Well, I’m just making sure I can fit my walk in. I’ll have to go in the morning before you get here. We’ve almost made it, you know.”

We’ve almost made it.

And I can’t wait to get there – to the other side of all of this – and to have that literal and metaphorical day of rest Papa keeps promising. 

But I know him, and I know the part of me that’s also him, and I know that the day after all this is over, we’ll lace up our shoes

and we’ll go for a walk. 

pretend

This one doesn’t feel done or done right or something, but it’s writing class tonight so it has to be enough for now I didn’t even mention the tornado.

“You haven’t written about meeeee” Becky texts me, out of nowhere on a Wednesday afternoon. 

“I have so!!!” I type back, immediately falling into a conversation that’s punctuated every day of our lives, no matter where we are or what we’re doing. 

It’s a new topic, but a back-and-forth rhythm between sisters that we’ve been following for years, and I’m halfway through an indignant text listing out all of the times she’s made an appearance when another texts interrupts me. 

“I’m in the stories but I’m not a MAIN CHARACTER,” Becky clarifies “and I think that that’s a waste of my potential.” 

This text stops me in my self-righteous tracks as I realize she’s right. 

I want to clarify, though, that I’m not the only one guilty of absentmindedly inserting my sister into projects she didn’t consent to. I write about Becky the same way she uses my face, or posture, or hair, as a generic placeholder for paintings and sketches and photographs.

“I’ve spent more time looking at your face than anyone else’s,” Becky argues “it’s fair game.” 

Likewise, when I’m writing about anything before the age of twenty, or anything about family as a whole, I find myself using “we” and “us” in the place of “Me” and “Becky” because I can’t tease us apart, and it seems impossible to separate our experiences from each other.

I flounder while I try to explain this. “Well I don’t write stories about my left foot, either. It’s just always there! I can’t imagine life without either of you! I just. . . don’t know how to write about us as separate entities!”

“Both me and your left foot have been a lot of places with you, Bria. We deserve a story too.”

---

When we were little, Becky and I were very good at stories. We had a box of costumes, a bookcase full of inspiration, and very strict limits on the amount of time we could spend on the computer. So we spent hours upon hours playing pretend.

We had a roster of specific plots that we’d switch between depending on our moods, our friends, and our recent obsessions.

We’d play house in the woods with one set of friends, and spies with another. We had games loosely based on characters from Anne of Green Gables, and would re-enact favourite scenes from Mulan and Sleeping Beauty over and over again. We would dance around the living room to our favourite songs, and line up all of our stuffed animals in a row for veterinary visits. We’d host radio shows and design newspapers. At our most intense, we had an elaborate Playmobil town with a functioning bank system, post office, and soccer league (as well as relatively frequent sea monster attacks). 

One of our favourite games to play, though, was called “going off to college.”

I don’t know if either of us really knew what that meant, but we knew that someday we were supposed to go there. And so we’d pack up all our important belongings and fanciest dressup clothes into a plastic suitcase and move to another room of the basement where we’d unpack and plan out all of the glamorous activities and decadent dessert-centric meals we were sure to have in our new lives. 

It was second nature for us to assume that, just like every walk to school, dentist appointment, car trip, and extra-curricular, when the time came for us to grow up, we’d do that together too. 

---

Growing up, we had a polite and unspoken agreement to divide our town’s opportunities between the two of us. Anyone who knew us as kids will tell you that Becky is the artist. The athlete. The one who always has chocolate within arms’ reach. Always surrounded by friends, and always ready with a smile, she charms everyone she meets. In contrast, I was serious and dramatic; academic and independent. 

We might have had to share everything, but we refused to share an identity. Where one of us was strong, the other would stand back – letting us each have our own successes without the awkwardness of competition. We also had equally polite but equally binding rules about how to divide potential friends based on age, birth order, and hobbies. 

These rules sound intense, but we’ve always taken our sistership overly seriously. I blame this on the many dramatic lectures we got from mom and dad on a loop – “No matter what you girls are always going to be in each other’s lives. You need to find a way to apologize and move on, because life’s going to be a lot easier for you if you’re friends.”

---

They were right, of course. Even life at home was easier as friends. Our Dad picks up hobbies like some people pick up groceries — one year we’d be a hiking family, the next year we’d mountain bike, the next year we’d ski. As well, being the only grandchildren on both sides until we were teenagers meant hours squished next to each other at holiday dinners and on long car trips, or in hospital waiting rooms late at night. Having a built-in best friend for inside jokes and sarcastic comments, a shoulder to fall asleep on and strategies to get twice as many mid-trail chocolate breaks meant everything on days when the world was just too much to handle alone.

---

Long after make believe, I left home first. A year and a half older than Becky, but three grades ahead, I didn’t know what I was in for, trying to be myself outside of our shared context. Playing “Going off to college” didn’t feel as fun alone, and I was terrified of doing things on my own. I found myself in a new province meeting new people who didn’t even know I had a sister; in introductions I’d catch myself trying to explain everything she was so that my new friends would understand what I was not. 

Becky came to visit my dorm in Quebec that winter — experiencing her first solo train ride, train delay, bus ride, and bus breakdown. After she finally arrived, we were shocked when my new friends gushed over how similar we were. They couldn’t tell us apart, they said. We had the same mannerisms. The same voice. The same humour. The same expressions. We both loved skating and reading and chocolate and romcoms. The same, the same, the same.

Instead of feeling like we were competing with each other, it felt like a gift. Like maybe in each other’s absence we’d found parts of ourselves that could fill in the gaps. Not completely, but just enough to tide us over until we were together again. 

—-

Last year, Becky came to visit me, and my left foot, in Toronto. We met up in glamorous dresses and ate chocolate crepes for dinner before going to see the orchestra perform Sleeping Beauty. 

“Can you imagine?” I asked at intermission, both of us staring out the glass walls at the city moving below us, “how surprised our little-kid selves would think if they saw us living like this on a Tuesday night?”

“Honestly,” Becky replied “I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be surprised at all. This is what they were counting on.”

She’s absolutely right, and I start tearing up as we head back to our seats. Becky sees me crying and hands me a chocolate egg that magically appears out of her pocket. “Don’t worry,” she adds, patting her coat, “there’s more where that came from. 

crochet

I learned to crochet twice. Which means that, on two separate occasions, someone who loved me looked at my tendency to hyper-focus and habit of taking on projects too big for me and thought, “Yes, here’s a hobby that will intermittently take over Bria’s entire life. This is a great idea.”

In childhood summers, when Mom and Dad were travelling, my sister and I would be sent to stay with our grandparents. And when they’d had enough of us, they’d send us straight across their backyard to our great-grandparents’ house, where we’d run up and down the stairs between Nana Hope’s drawer of cookies in the kitchen and Papa Len’s never-ending patience with our games of “going to the hospital” (aka covering him with toilet paper bandages) and “going to the office” (aka using up all of the paper in his adding machine). 

One afternoon, in a desperate attempt to keep me occupied (and save her paper products) Nana Hope brought out a small ball of white yarn, a silver crochet hook, and a 1941 pamphlet with a green cover called “C is for Crochet.” I sat next to her on the loveseat in her spotless living room, and Nana Hope spent half an hour teaching me how to hold the hook. She was left-handed, and I was wriggly, and so all I learned that afternoon was a simple chain stitch.  But that was enough for me. Fueled by my ladylike accomplishment, I crocheted the entire ball of yarn into a single, long chain on the car ride home, put the finished product in my nightstand drawer, and promptly forgot everything I’d learned. 

—

The second time I learned to crochet was when Leah came to visit, the summer I was ten. Leah was a nanny to my sister and I when we were babies in Newfoundland, and even though she was no longer part of our everyday lives, we adored her with every part of our hearts. Everything Leah did was magic to Becky and I, and I wanted (and still want, honestly) to grow up to be just like her. Leah knew how to crochet beautiful things like doll dresses and sweaters, and I bothered my mom for weeks asking if Leah would have time to teach me to REALLY crochet on her next visit to Ontario. Thankfully, Mom gave Leah the heads up, and she stepped off the plane with a ball of red cotton and a blue crochet hook for me to use. Sitting on the hot sand while her babies played next to us, and the lake waves washed in and out, Leah taught me how to turn my chains into actual stitches, and how to turn those stitches into a dishcloth. Leah also taught me there are consequences for not counting your stitches, but that she’d still love me fully even if I, or my accidentally-triangular dishcloth, wasn’t perfect.

—

After Leah and her family went back home to Seattle, some of the magic went out of crocheting again. I’d mostly forget about my yarn, but pull it out whenever I needed a Christmas gift for people who had to love anything I invented, even if it was half the size it should be. 

—

But then, the summer I was thirteen, I went to summer camp and met Madi. She was from several hours away, lived in a town big enough to have an entire store full of yarn and fabric, and, even more impressively, she knew how to read patterns. While I was still haphazardly racing through rectangles of various sizes, Madi was intently following complex patterns to crochet intricate flowers. I was incredibly jealous. Thankfully, Madi showed me how to read patterns, and shared her expensive blue yarn with beads in it, and five of us girls banded up together that week and spent beautiful summer days crocheting hairties under a tree.  

When I went home after camp, I was determined to make a square bag from a pattern, but it ended up as a lumpy circle. Frustrated by my limitations, and aware that crocheting wasn’t a path to popularity in high school, the pattern ended up in the drawer with my silver hook, red cotton yarn, and the 1941 pamphlet.

—-

In the summer of 2018, after six years of university, I didn’t know how to fill my time without studying. The old proverb holds true that idle hands are the devil’s playthings. . . and when you’re a single 20-something in a big city, the devil takes the form of dating apps. 

One day, sick of catching myself swiping left endlessly while watching Netflix, I made a spontaneous trip downtown and called my best friend Dani from the yarn aisle of a Michael’s. 

“This is it, Dani.” I announced, “I’m making a deal with myself, and you’re my witness.”

“What, exactly, are you doing?” Dani asked blearily, “I think you should know that I’m not a reliable witness right now, I have a fever, and I’m half asleep.”

“Okay, but do you think you can be awake enough to help me pick colours?” I pushed, unrelenting. 

“Colours for what?” I can’t emphasize enough how sleepy Dani sounded. 

“A blanket! I’m crocheting a blanket! I’m sending you the pattern right now. It’s beautiful. And I’m deleting my dating apps until I finish it. I’m not allowed to swipe anymore. Not until it’s done.”

I sent Dani the link to the pattern I’d saved on my phone. 

“Bri.” I heard Dani shift to a sitting position, and her voice no longer sounded lethargic “This blanket is beautiful, but you know how complicated this is, right? This is going to take you forever, and you hate following patterns! Please think this through before you buy any yarn! This is almost definitely a mistake!”

“I’m sending you two pictures right now.” I respond, completely disregarding the concern in her voice, “tell me which green you like better.” 

—

By the summer of 2019, I’ve completed six of the twelve squares and come to an absolute standstill (I’ve also re-downloaded the dating apps, and Dani teases me relentlessly).

But a June phone call brings a plot twist from our friend Rae, and things are very, very bad, and suddenly we need something to talk about that isn’t chemo or symptoms or pain or medicine or doctors, and above all else, we need something to do with our hands. 

Dani calls it crochet club.

Crochet club drives to London every other Sunday afternoon that summer, and we set ourselves up in Rae and Sydney’s room and cover the bed with bright tangles of yarn. I sit on the walker with my feet propped on the end of the bed and lose track of where I’m at in my pattern trying to commit the scene to memory. Rae has finished yet another hat and is modelling it for us, and Dani is cuddled up next to them on the bed, pulling out her phone to show off a new stitch, and Syd is leaning in the doorway laughing, and the yellow yarn in my hands blends with the yellow sunlight streaming through the windows and there is laughter and hugs and stories and friendship and apple pastries from the market, and bread tags, and sketches, and love and love and love and I try to stitch every moment we have together into the yellow square, saving it for a later that none of us want to acknowledge. 

Everything goes quiet for several months, and I’m too sad to look at anything that reminds me of them, especially when the bright yellow square reflects back echos of sunbeams. I put my eight squares into the closet, and close the door. 

—

“2020 is my year to be an 1800s debutante”, I tell Dani in January. “I’m going to have lots of dinner parties, see 20 plays, go on 20 dates, learn French, move up a level into Adult Ballet for the Advancing Absolute Beginner, and finish The Damn Blanket.” 

I can hear Dani roll her eyes through the phone.

It turns out, the blanket is the only 2020 resolution I have a hope in hell of accomplishing. 

I sew my blanket together while the world falls apart, and count stitches under my breath while the news stations count seemingly endless cases. 

I’m jobless, and feel purposeless and futureless, but the blanket is a comforting weight on my lap and it holds me to the present while I find a new kind of rhythm in empty days as my hook moves back and forth across the rows. 

—

In the summer of 2020, the blanket is finally done. I’ve chain-stitched, and counted, and followed a pattern, and objectively I’ve accomplished bigger things in my life, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been more proud of myself than I am right now. I spread the blanket across my bed, even though it’s too hot for a heavy wool blanket, and even though no one can come over to admire it. Alone in my room, I run my hands over the thousands of stitches, imagining that I can feel the curses and prayers and tea stains and laughter and sunbeams woven into these knots of thread. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and wrap the blanket around my shoulders like a hug. It’s a Sunday afternoon. Time to call Dani. 

427

“I won’t know anything about my life until May 11th,” I tell Madi on a Skype call stretching between my shoebox apartment in Nova Scotia and her dorm room in Chicago. “That’s when acceptances come in.” 

I’d spent the last three months obsessively tracking my GPA and anxiously babbling to anyone who would listen about the exact criteria for the graduate programs I’d applied for. Despite having spent the last two years tailoring every part of my life to meet the requirements, I was convinced that I didn’t have a chance. 

“That’s okay!” Madi replied with uncharacteristic peace in the face of uncertainty. “I don’t know anything about what’s next in my life anyways. Wherever you end up, I’ll just start my next chapter there too.” 

Becoming roommates seemed like a snap decision, but it was actually something we’d been planning since we were thirteen years old. Turns out, two kids at summer camp really can promise to be best friends forever and follow through. The process involves thousands of hours spent on MSN, a weirdly specific overlap of life experiences and interests, and some very patient parents willing to spend hours driving across Southern Ontario to swap kids at a bookstore in Cambridge. 

“When we’re older, like, in university or whatever, we have to be roommates.” Madi typed, back when the idea of being old enough to be in university seemed outrageously glamorous and mysterious. After all, the books we read and the movies we watched ended with people going off to college and never coming back. Who knew what happened after that!? Not us. 

We planned out our hypothetical roommateship with the intensity and focus we usually reserved for planning out dramatic lives for our Sims; dreaming up outrageous story lines, and bickering over the colour of the pixellated furniture.

“We wouldn’t have to buy matching clothes anymore! We can just share a closet!” 

“Yessssss! And we can wear beautiful dresses to parties and concerts and dates!”

“Yes! Because we’ll live in the city!”

“And eat ice cream for dinner!” 

It was a really good dream. And our Sims were all very happy, so we figured we had a high chance of success. 

Despite all of our enthusiasm and exclamation marks, I moved out of the province, and then Madi moved out of the country. Thankfully, we already had years of long distance friendship under our belts, so the hardest part was transitioning from MSN to Facebook Messenger. Four years later and sick of constantly packing, we didn’t know what came next, or how we were supposed to act as hypothetical adults, but we knew we needed a home, and we knew this was an actual chance to live in the same city for the first time ever. 

May 11th came, and it was decided. We were moving to London. The boring one.

The planning began again in earnest. We picked a main floor apartment in a century home because unlike the other apartments we’d seen that day it didn’t smell like weed, didn’t require sharing laundry with the landlord, and didn’t involve learning how to work a wood stove. In retrospect, I assume that when the realtor said that 427 Pall Mall had “character” he actually meant “characters” – including an ever-absent super named Paul, the two bros upstairs (who liked to party, but only on Monday nights), and the small colony of house centipedes living in the unfinished basement. 

Blissfully unaware, we curated a collection of furniture and dishes from our respective grandparents’ basements, and spent moving day giddy with excitement. After all, this was it. This was the beginning of the rest of our lives. This was going to be home. Our friend Jackie hugged us on the steps – “I can’t wait to come back!” she said, “we’re going to have so many adventures here!”

It was a little overwhelming, realizing that a childhood dream was coming true. Scared of messing this up, I stared at Madi over the pints of ice cream we’d brought home for our first night’s supper.

“I feel like we should be really intentional about what we want from this year. Like…. rules?? Not really rules? I don’t know. A list of goals? A manifesto?”

“Like, dreams? About what we’re hoping for?” Madi, as always, offered me a more positive spin on the idea. 

“No. More structure. Like a combination of dreams and rules. Drools.”

Madi didn’t even blink. “Ah yea. The house drools. Of course.”

We sat in the only fully unpacked room in the house – a not-quite-closet, definitely-not-bedroom we had labelled the tea room, because it’s where we’d put the hundred and eight flavours of tea we’d amassed by combining our separate collections.  Summer evening sunlight poured into the room leaving pools of orange across the table and floor. With my journal open in front of us, we quickly came up with the things that mattered most. 

“Food.” Madi started.

“Yeah thats a good one.” I wrote it down at the top of the page in capital letters.

“Friends. As many as possible. Everyone should feel welcome here.”

“They can sleep in the tea room!”

We looked skeptically at the eight by three box we were sitting in

“. . . if they’re short.” Madi amended. 

“Do we keep the F theme going?” I asked, liking the alliterative challenge. 

“Definitely.”

“Okay then. . . Festivity! Everything should be a celebration.”

“Yes. What about Fitness?”

“I feel like that should be a side effect of adventures. Not a drool.”

“Adventure starts with an A, though”

“. . . Freedom to Adventure?”

“Deal.” 

Other Fs quickly flew onto the page – financial security (a stretch for us both), future plans, faith, fun, focus, and finding time for creativity. 

We sat back and grinned at each other. This roommates thing was going to be a breeze. 

“Oh wait! We should probably have something about trying to get along. I know we’ve never fought. But just in case.” 

We thought carefully for a few minutes before adding “Finally, no fatal wounding” to the bottom of the page, and signing our names in cursive underneath. 

The drools were a hit. Madi wrote them out in calligraphy, then hung them on our wall as a constant reminder of what we were aiming for. It was far from the weirdest piece of decor in our home — other favourites included “the Dapper Gentleman” (an old photograph from a church rummage sale), Madi’s ever-expanding plant named Frederick, and an always-present tower of baked goods on the kitchen counter. 

I’m not trying to say that the drools were magical. Arguably, it’s possible they made things objectively worse on occasion – for example, the summer we spent lying on our floor in front of our single fan and wearing frozen shirts because we refused to pay an extra $50 a month for air conditioning.

But I will say that 427 is the only non-childhood house that I regularly get homesick for. The way the walls would shake every time a train went by. The way the cat from next door was always trying to sneak his way into our kitchen. The albums and playlists that were on repeat until they became a soundtrack to our everday. The way we’d declare nearly every night a “couch dinner” like it was a special occasion, and convince each other that we could definitely watch one more episode of Community before doing homework. I miss sprinting fifteen steps across the house to burst into Madi’s room any time I had a dramatic story to tell. And the way Madi would call “sleep well!” through my door when I was up late studying, no matter how grumpy I’d been when I closed it. The way we decorated for Christmas (but never before December 1)- proudly carrying home a full-sized tree like two very inexperienced lumberjacks and turning Dollarama decorations into magic.

More than anything, I get homesick for the feeling that happened when we combined food and friends and festivity together – merging friend groups and eras and hobbies into a rotating cast of characters that traipsed in and out of our tea room to stay for days, or weeks, or months. No one went home strangers, even if that’s how they’d started out. 

I’ve never done well with endings, and our years at 427 came to a crashing halt with the simultaneous announcements that our landlord was planning on selling the house (bros upstairs included) and that my final placement, starting in three weeks, was going to be in my hometown. I packed in a haze of papers, and projects, and final exams, and the day I moved out Jackie hugged us both on the step and said “you guys, we had a lot of good adventures.” 

Three years later, we’ve moved on from Facebook Messenger to iMessage, and I text Madi and tell her “The theme for writing class this week is hope. I don’t have much of that right now, so I’m writing about 427 because that chapter felt hopeful all the way through.”

“We lived so well and so fully there.” Madi responds immediately, putting a positive spin on my words like always. She’s in her apartment a few blocks from mine in Toronto, and we may not be roommates anymore, but we’re figuring out this chapter together too.