Shimmering Memories

It’s winter.
I don’t think this is a premature pronouncement for given last week and the forecast for the next, temperatures are hovering at freezing or below with wind making it feel colder.

We have snow.
It is not melting. As is the way, I went to bed last Sunday night to wake Monday morning to the balcony lip edged white while our laurel leaf willows remain fully leafed. A seasonal oxymoron.

Those three days of outdoor pickleball that helped me land after a month of summer, being outdoors all day, every day for thirty days, are a memory as nets are now down and indoor courts filled. I went back to aquafitness last week. While I love how I feel after the workout, I’m not sure how I’ll fare wet in winter. In twenty plus days it’s lovely. In twenty below that’s another story. I missed Friday’s class… just too damn cold after having walked 8 km on Thursday in a deceptive wind that chilled me to the core. Cold hands, the bells palsied side of my face especially impacted. It meant I didn’t walk with my Camino group on Saturday. But yesterday the sun shone, the temperature rose a few degrees above zero with little wind, so I ventured forth.

Intent to do my best to maintain the fitness I gained this summer and trekking in Italy, I knew I needed to resume walking in the neighbourhood. Without Annie. I’d been avoiding this all summer, using my river valley training as a necessary though convenient distraction. Yesterday I woke up feeling sad. Met my dear grieving friend for breakfast and once home, after a couple more hours’ avoidance, I took my grieving self by the hand, ear buds and downloaded poetry podcasts at the ready, and walked one of our favourite routes through the golf course, now void of golfers and geese, with ponds frozen and fairways white.

For the first while I listened to Padraig recite a poem, interview a poet, and then recognizing this, too, was a distraction, I listened to myself, my heart, the wind, my grief. I remembered all the spots Annie would sniff, and how she’d wait for me to capture a photo. I wondered about a photo this time, to mark the day, the occasion, but nothing shimmered. Except my memories of walking with Annie.

Tonight, I’m on the docket to read several poems at Edmonton’s Stroll of Poets monthly gathering. I remember years ago attending to listen to a now deceased friend read hers. With ten minutes allocated to each of four readers, I’ve chosen four, one recently composed as tribute to Annie and my realization that in an ironic twist of fate, her sudden passing in June gave me unfettered time to train for walking the Via di Francesco. Another poem, inspired by a dream, tells the story of the grandfather I never knew.

The veil is thin. I find myself thinking of friends who have passed…friends who are grieving the passing of mothers and sisters…ancients and ancestors…angels…Annie. Wars that continue to devastatingly claim thousands of innocent lives…thousands of children.

A friend enquired and I can say that yes, my molecules are settling, integrating, recalibrating. I’m grateful to be picking up life’s threads that needed to be put to the side, that the words I felt had died with Annie’s passing are now returning.

And with this poem I am further consoled:

BLESS ALL BRAVE THINGS

the prayer I cannot pray.
the words that rest unspoken.
the feelings that can’t be named.
the grief that bursts wide open.

the cry that turned to laughter.
the smile that broke the ice.
the pain that was cut off.
the poem I couldn’t write.

life, bless all the forming things
that escape or remain in me;
those resisting to be seen,
and the ones that risk coming out
as brave beginnings.

Susan Frybort, Look to the Clearing

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.