This morning,

  I slept in. It is, after all, a holiday in Canada, being Thanksgiving Monday. We had had a hectic Thanksgiving Sunday (American and other non-Canadian friends--celebrating Thanksgiving in Canada offers two options: the Sunday or the Monday. Some people with immense appetites and/or large extended families do both), spent first at church and then home getting our cluttered, dusty yet homey apartment ready for guests and supper.

Our guests were a couple we've known many years, childless, without relatives in the city, and who have hosted us a bazillion times on holidays, and good company. Their spending this time with us had ramifications beyond the holiday.

 Anyway, cleaning up, which disturbed our cats Toivo and Sisu, was a tiring, though worthwhile project, punctuated by Joyce making two pumpkin pies. She made two because her pureed pumpkin ingredient comes in a substantial can of E.D.Smith pumpkin, not a "from scratch" recipe. Makes more sense to use the entire can, anyway, at once. Logistics meant, however, that she could only put the pies in to bake after the turkey was roasted properly. This took place shortly after our guests arrived, which meant the we could tuck into our dinner and conversation as the raw pies quietly became edible pies. 

Soon enough, the timer bell rang and we fetched the pies out of the domestic furnace--they were fine. As they rested, Joyce and I looked at one another.

"Can we take one of them over to S___?" 

We talked about it a bit more, and it was resolved. Our guests thought it a good idea, knowing something of S__'s circumstances.

"How about you come, too?" I asked one of our guests. He readily assented, and we put the expedition together.

 A little while later, we rang S__'s doorbell. After a moment, she answered, then started--turns out she hadn't originally recognized us, but was glad to see us nonetheless. 

At this point, a digression back in time: S___ and her husband J___ are old friends, and used to host us and a variety of people in all the major Canadian holidays. What we all had in common was a lack of the logical co-celebrants, nearby family, so these were special times, indeed.

However, life happened to our friends before and since we met them. S___ had lost her sister and mother to cancer, and other family members in a tragic house fire in BC. Then, in our recent memory, a major stroke, from which she was struggling to recover. And now, after several hits from cancer in his own right, her husband of decades, J___, had received what might well be a fatal prognosis from newly-discovered tumours. 

Ringing her doorbell that night, besides me, was the one who had been her counsellor after multiple tragedies in her life and who, in her words "put me back together". He is modest: "I just listened," is what he usually says about that time. She frequently, spontaneously mentions him and how he helped her. I had sensed that his appearance at her door was something she and the family badly needed just then. 

I think it worked. Between the proferred pie and a container of an incredibly flavourful potato soup (our guests had contributed that), and our short conversation, it seemed to us both that their mood was lighter. We couldn't stay, our own dessert having been postponed and with Joyce and our other guest waiting back home. 

We went back, had dessert and more conversation, then they left and we went to bed. Personally, I slept the sleep of exhaustion. 

This morning, having slept in, I managed a bike ride in spitting rain. It was all right. I could not shake the feeling of having been involved in something of tremendous importance but as something like, say, an extra in a film. The lead actors had carried the scene. Cut. Print. Thank you, everyone...

 

After a protracted absence, a sitter of cats...

    Shortly, I will be driving over to our daughter's house. There, once I have parked the car, I will take out the key, open the door just in time to see a grey flash whiz past my feet as Willow makes her escape to their back yard. Tail twitching, she will survey the scene for prey, a patch of ground for a toilet place, and any potential sources of trouble. Experience has told our daughter and I that she will also seek a place where she can vanish for an hour or two to a place with different prey, different smells, and perhaps a sense that the world is so much bigger than the space to which her humans confine her.

     Willow came to us about 10 years ago, an emaciated rural rescue cat at the bottom of a large cardboard box in the arms of our daughter, who hoped that we wouldn't be upset that she had brought home this small creature on a night in late November. Willow wound up staying with us, bringing a new level of trust and comfort to our home. In the early days, she would drape herself on the top of the back of my wife Joyce's recliner as she watched tv. Willow would lay there for long stretches, purring at the start, sleeping as long as Joyce didn't move.

    We learned the depths of Willow's profound hunger when, on our getting up of a morning, we would find a loaf of bread broken into and chewed--a loaf of bread on top of the dishwasher, well above the floor. We could feel Willow's ribs under her skin when we petted her.

    She was deeply fearful of the outdoors for a long while. Perhaps she remembered the cold and hungry times from before she came to us, and feared being swallowed up by them again--she couldn't tell us. And yet one day when spring heated toward summer, she gave us no uncertain signs that she wanted out. We went through a collar and leash for her before her Houdini-like abilities asserted themselves, and we gave that all up for simple careful watching. She learned (as did we) that a simple bound cleared our fences, that she could explore safely other places beyond our yard, yet be secure in knowing that our shelter and food supplies were always there for her. More darkly, squirrels and chipmunks and birds were accessible prey--she was a successful hunter several times before we realized that her survival instincts had not been left at the doorway of our house. Sometimes, she dropped her kill in front of our daughter, her rescuer. Willow had a long memory.

    When my daughter from a previous marriage died, Willow became a furry therapist. Her presence on my lap was comforting in the grief time, when I was ready for comforting. I wasn't always. I was frequently, unreasonably angry. Willow was frequently, unreasonably on my lap or rubbing against my legs, whatever my mood. Eventually, with time and therapy (beyond Willow), and Grace, I got back on the horse of life and rode on.

    Now, I am about to drive over and see that Willow gets her supper, honouring her feline addiction to habit (very like mine). And some outdoor time in our daughter's back yard. 

    Willow's tail will twitch, her sign of profound interest in her surroundings. Her tail is maybe 10 centimeters shorter than it would be if it had grown without injury from her birth. The tips of her ears would also be present, as they are not. Frostbite. A kitten unprotected early from life, who bears her scars as an adult.

    As do I. What's left of my psychological tail twitches as I breathe in the peace of our daughter's yard, and my ears, though failing, seek all that is alive in my surroundings. Willow and I are at home in life...

 

 

Untitled

 Rain turning to snow

horizontal to the ground,

trees bent, rebounding, bent again,

soaked songbirds snagging sunflower seeds

from the feeder.

We are warm, dry, lucky.

It never rains in here, 

or suffers the wind to blow.

The deer with the injured leg

is still alive, my daughter tells me.

 

It does not get any better than this.

The Question of Remembering

His obit followed an e-mail: he had gone by choice.

Would I see to a newspaper clipping on the 

pool room bulletin board? Yes.

 

As I tacked the paper up, they laid their cues 

against the wall, gathered, read, talked 

in unusually soft voices-- they are middle-aged 

and mill-worker half deaf and often

bellow like buffalo to one another--

aware afresh of their own future obituaries

tacked to the board, aware of the voices of those left

reading the newsprint over ensuing days, 

remembering, perhaps shivering some inside, 

wondering how people will talk about them, after.

 

I have seen to the newspaper clipping on the 

pool room bulletin board, knowing that at some point

it will be my photo and my life story, and that,

every time beyond the first few days of reading and

pondering, only those who grieve will remember. 

  

The Return

isn't possible, never was, never will be.

The same sun, though older by a fraction,

shines on the streets that bore my footsteps,

the same school, though older, shabbier,

larger and now shrinking again

as families have fewer children,

stands indifferent as it was then--

it was only my anguish that resonated

off the walls, lending it character.

The confectionery is long gone,

the Lebanese family that owned it

through my childhood and teen years

long sold off—what happened to

the oak floorboards and glass display cases?

The dump or some hoarder of

the trendy nostalgic perhaps.

In my mind's vision, I wander

those streets and alley-ways--

there were alley-ways, then--

gaze into the faces of people I knew,

strangers ultimately.

The Return is impossible

to a place where I never really

took root. Thus, never was.

Sometimes you have to walk away

 

The offer was good, decent pay

and a job I knew I'd like.

But for the exhaustion

and failed employment before,

I'd have stopped in at the cafe

where he told me he'd be.

I looked up at the trees

in the sunlight, my mind

shut down like my prospects,

debated not whether I'd go

and shake on the offer,

but whether I'd drive east or west

until there was no sunlight left.

 March always has the last word:

a flick of the paw, claws out

in the form of snow burying joy,

leaves us remembering the winter

amidst the hope of its death.