Return

When you're young, returning home after an extended trip feels like entering a new space, as if the house too was on vacation, and has rushed to settled back into its role as it hears you approach the door. The home, that cradle of comfort and reliance, has shifted in your absence. The house is empty, the hallway dark and everything quiet and still, the rooms being filled again with voices and footsteps. You aren't disappointed. You're charmed by the unexpected strangeness. Nothing physically has changed in the home. You've just forgotten familiarity, having become accustomed to brief stays in foreign places. Knowing that the sheen will soon dull, you walk through every room, and you turn on each light and look at the objects and their formations in the room in a curious way that will vanish with the scrub of morning light.

A-L

And that's how I see her -- fading into everything. She makes the intimidating sky familiar, and imbues a well-known room with the energy of chance. Spaces conflate, and I never feel anywhere but with her. The peak of a pine tree; the threshold of a den; the mercurial land above us -- your love blends.

Photo by Kristian Jordan: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/9232333467/

Tooth-Fairy

Alan had misheard his father when he first told him about the Tooth Fairy. He had heard "truth" instead of tooth. This led him to believe that truths, rather than teeth, were taken from him during the night and replaced with money. As he grew older he wondered what specific truths were swiped by this mystical barterer, and if the absence of these truths was worth the pocket change that he had received in exchange. "I'm not lying on purpose!" he would say to his dad after getting into trouble. "The Truth Fairy took that one from me!" Alan's father didn't find this amusing, and scoffed at what he considered mediocre word-play. Alan spent many nights awake, well into his adult life with a dollar fifty in his hand, waiting for the Truth Fairy to appear, ready to bargain for the truth back.

Winter

Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons- Gaston Bachelard 

I'm at my most nostalgic during the winter months. Darkness squeezes out the light from the sky as the cold air sends us inside the house. True, our homes are shelters, but they are also, in the winter especially, spaces of confinement. The freezing temperatures force us behind doors, while the diminished day-light steals our sight and we're made to look elsewhere, sent to search inside ourselves for things to see and do, for outside the world is dim. I find myself thinking back to past winters. As the season brings us indoors, I cannot move forward. I'm compelled to reflect on how the wind whipped my cheek that year, or how I chased a young love through the hard months, only to have her feelings thaw and dry up when the warm weather came. During the winter nature does its best to hold us hostage. We feel safe in the warmth of the home, but we miss the freedom of outside space. Instead of exploring nature, we retreat into the confusing cavern of our minds where memories peak out with glowing eyes, shy, but ready to be seen.

Waste

He wished that there was a way he could collect everyone's wasted time -- a technique to trap life's misused and discarded moments before they were lost amidst the day's coming attractions. "Well, that was ten minutes I'll never get back," people would say, disappointed by their use of time. He wanted to profit off this negligence, to take their time and spend it better. A scavenger, he swung in like a pendulum, hoping to save what seconds he could. His home became a landfill of squandered days, a midden of missed chances and regret. There was so much that he could do with this extra time. He could repair the broken moments, filling the cracks with imagination, the holes with vigor. Soon there would be so much time. "I could give it all back," he thought, "give everyone another chance." So he opened all the doors and windows in his home and let all that fixed-up wasted time back outside where it could be found waiting in a conversations and parties, lovemaking and celebrations.

Car Crash

There are two memorials in Winnipeg that I drive past regularly -- a cross with flowers by a set of train tracks; you can see the flowers dead above the snow in Winter. The other is a tree where the bark has been shaved off for people to write their names and notes. I know the stories behind these shrines, but there are many similar displays that I see on highways across the country that have no meaning for me but to alert me of the tragedy that now owns that stretch of road. Are the memorials erected for the deceased or for the mourners? Likely both. But what about those that wander by, unconnected, yet curious, even bothered, by the roadside shrine? Driving always bears the possibility of death, and these markings only reinforce such thoughts. A stare into the prairies is interrupted by a highway crucifix. Other people's tragedies are sad distractions on the way to where we're going. Are these spots the places where lives were taken, or the final place where life was lived? Perhaps the flowers, candles, and crosses provide a seal to this space where grief ripped through. I don't want to understand the tradition. Still, the memorials are forever seen by us all, and we always know what they mean. The vagueness of the symbols to a stranger's eyes ignites the worst skills of the imagination.

Day

He sometimes wondered when a day was done, or if it ever could be. He knew that in some northern cities, there were months when the light never left the sky, and months where the days were mostly dark. The sun gets stuck in the high up places. Some days never finish, and others never begin. How can they sleep, those northern people, with the light pressed against their eyelids? Time is not felt the same in every place. We judge the passing of seconds, minutes, and hours by the brightness of the sky. But the sun never rests; it just leaves to go somewhere else. A slow, beautiful exit that makes us stare. And then, our weary eyes bring an end to the day. Far away, other people's eyes are pulled open by hooks of light thrown in through bedroom windows by the same sun that has left us.