recently

I found this photo today over here. She found it here. It is a cabin in France, of course, where everything is perfect, but when I saw it I was rushed back to a small home that my grandfather built, after my grandmother died, on Saltspring Island, just off the coast of Vancouver. He lived there with his partner at the time, the one none of us could quite warm to, but he built a room to house my grandmother's piano and in this tiny cottage that felt like an act of worship, so I forgave him. I took the ferry over by myself once and had him meet me at the dock. We ate soup at a small restaurant in town and then I read and napped on his porch for hours, waking with the windchimes, watching the raccoon he fed as it hooked its front paws on the rung of the top stair and peered at me across the deck. There is something so intimate in my memories of that place, which makes sense, I suppose - a small carving of land that he claimed, built, and cared for until he couldn't care for it any longer, a whole world in miniature. Like a Russian estate, if we were landholding Russians in a Chekhov play.

My grandfather had surgery yesterday morning. They put a screw in his fractured hip. Outside, it snowed, real snow in a city where that is a rarity. He had fallen in his bathroom at 3:00am. He had to use his panic button. I try to imagine the nurses with their small hands trying to lift my rapidly-disappearing grandfather off the floor of his bathroom. Then I try to stop imagining this.

This year has been a bruiser. All 19 days of it.

Recently a guy told me he stopped responding to my emails because he "couldn't find a deeper connection." This made me sad, and then really, really mad. My feeling is, if someone is looking for a deeper connection, they should really tell you first. I've got whole depths unplumbed, buddy. But there are things you have to earn, I believe. You certainly don't earn them by behaving like an asshole. It is strange to be found wanting without the awareness that you were being judged.

Which all goes back to making myself the smallest I can be.

My baby brother was born 24 years ago today. Tonight he will eat short ribs with his girlfriend after driving carefully through the snow to visit our grandfather in hospital. He doesn't really read books, or care about art, or think about his place in the world. And yet he's probably a better person than I could ever hope to be. I wonder how that works.

I run my body on Vitamin C and Zinc. I live off hyphenates: Cold-Eeze, Thera-Flu, Emergen-C. I curl the cats deeper into my lap and I ask them to be still for a moment. I ask everyone to care just a little bit more about each other.

necessary journal here.