What remains

I’ve been revisiting a place that no longer exists in the way it once did: my grandparents’ house, set back from a quiet road in rural Ontario, with a river at the edge of the garden and a rhythm that belonged to another time. (Link to document.)

Writing these memories wasn’t about reconstructing the past accurately, or even chronologically. It was about noticing what has endured. Not the large events, but the smaller ones: how light moved through rooms, how time stretched in childhood, how care was expressed through routine rather than words.

I’ve come to believe that memory doesn’t preserve everything evenly. It keeps what mattered, often without explaining why. What remains are fragments: sounds, gestures, objects shaped by hand, and the feeling of being held within an ordered, attentive world.

This piece is a gathering of those fragments. It’s written for family, but also for anyone who carries a place within them that continues to inform how they see, move, and care.

Some houses disappear. Others remain, quietly, in the way we remember how to be.

Beautiful sounds: joyful anticipation

The flutter of butterflies in my stomach, knowing our children will soon be here for Christmas.

Waiting for Christmas to begin

Waking this morning

Wonderful smells of Christmas
Pine sap and coffee. 

Photo by Tony Litvyak on Unsplash

Leaving before arriving

Ice crystals melting
Populating tree branches
Sunrays on snowdrops. 

As I walk home

A stunning full moon 
Lost soul sleeping on the street
Juxtaposition.

A season of stillness

She gazes out the window at the thick grey skies. These dark, short, cold days weigh upon her. She, who once danced through the summer nights with her dearest friends in mind and spirit. The DJ and bar owners had pushed them out the door with a wink and a nod. Sweating and breathless, they’d wandered the early morning streets before dawn, before lights went on in the bedrooms of the homes they passed. All the while, they hummed together the last song of the night.

For weeks now, the dark winter evenings, impenetrable to any inner light, have thrown a thick blanket of slumber and dullness over her. She feels no lightness of being. It is as if all her summer zest has flown south, somewhere along the coast of Africa.

When she meets her friends, she wonders how she ever thought their company companionable. Now she can barely tolerate their chatter, irritated by their forced gaiety. Their evening plans scrape like sandpaper against the thin surface of her civility. Were they always so superficially jovial? Was she?

Winter darkness feels like a rewiring of her brain. Somber, serious, melancholic, these grey days let other thoughts rise to the surface. Somehow, this feels more real than the wild and reckless summer sprite she once flew beside. The question is: if she digs deeper into this current state, will she discover a treasure of profound recognition, or fall into a dark abyss?

A horn blaring on the street below shakes her from her reverie. She touches her cup of tea. It’s cold. Time to cook dinner.