I wake from a disturbing dream, bringing some of the burden with me, and feel the need to orient myself. It’s Thursday (though it feels like Monday after yesterday’s Canada Day holiday). The person in my dream hasn’t been in my life for decades. I have to go for blood work today. I listen to…
A Conversation About Being Busy, Broken, and Beloved
“My copy of Linda Hoye’s The Presence of Absence is studded with bookmarks so I can return to some of my favourite passages in her wonderful new book. I had to smile when she buys a new Moleskin notebook—then decides she needs a new desk to go with it! (87) I recognize myself both in…
A Day
Gerry brings home two flats of plump, sweet raspberries. I wash and crush some; cook and stir and sweeten them; fill jars with jam and set them in the water bath canner to process. It’s ridiculously cool outside for late June but in the kitchen where I work you’d never know it. While the jam…
Lean in. Lean hard.
“Do you think you’re falling into a depression around this COVID thing?” he asks. ”Yes,” I respond. But the weight is about so much more than the pandemic, and depression doesn’t fully describe what’s happening in and around me. When things get loud I tend toward quiet; these days I lean in even more to…
Stones
I tune in online to watch the summer solstice at Stonehenge. It’s cloudy at Wiltshire, England and there isn’t much to see. The only sound is the wind. I watch for a while, remembering what it was like when Gerry and I stood on that ground in the cordoned off area looking at the stones,…