When Catherine died in January of 2020, she left her studio–a room in the basement of St. Paul’s Parish Hall, right across the hallway from my office–much intact, thus leaving me to confront a lifetime of her tools, materials, supplies, finished and half-finished art and craftwork. It took me more than a year to whittle this down, to sort and box and bin, to find new homes for things, to empty the room for them who would come along next. I did it.

But what remained was a cache of the unsortable, tucked away in the back corner of my office: artwork, tools I thought I might use, things I couldn’t bear to throw away that I found no takers for. Over the last 18 months this cache started to feel unwieldy: it was both a psychological avatar for the unresolved, and a physical mountain that was preventing me from opening the back door to my office and letting the air circulate.

On Monday night at improv class one of our exercises was a “rant,” a prompted opportunity to let out a helping of latent rage. The timing was right for me: I found I had a lot to unleash, and the effect was healing, purgative. I greeted Tuesday morning with a fresh spring in my step, and decided, on arriving in the office, that I would, at long last, tackle the mountain.

Doing so required a leap, letting go reverence for Catherine’s things and, in the process, letting go of the resentment I’d long held for her leaving me as custodian of her lifetime accumulation of stuff.

Over the course of 4 hours I sorted and boxed and rolled and triaged. I broke a glass jar (by accident, although it felt good). I ripped to shreds a painting that I’d never ever liked. I committed small acts of artistic sacrilege, and in doing so I took agency, and stopped feeling weighted down by stuff mountain.

I dropped a big collection of things off at the thrift shop, a dozen pairs of Catherine’s eyeglasses frames off at my optician for donation to the Lions Club. I left some zinc and copper at the metal recycler for pricing, and a bunch of old digital cameras and cell phones of Catherine’s at the electronics recycler. A few bags of garbage in the black bin.

If you look carefully at the photo of my loaded car you will see one of Catherine’s spinning wheels there, a treasured object of hers and one that, despite two years of trying, I’d been unable to find a new home for.

I decided I’d done my part, that I was no longer responsible for treating it as a sacred object, and it too went to the thrift shop, where I hope it will find a new home.

The effect of all of this was important: I feel unburdened by my custodial obligations, by the need to revere Catherine’s things, even in the absence of true reverence. None of this means that I seek to cast out memories of Catherine, that I don’t have an permanent and important place for her in my heart. But being able to admit that, co-resident inside me, was an unhealthy knot of complicated feelings, feelings that found physical manifestation in an immovable pile of objects, that’s been very helpful.

And it’s left me with a cleaner office, and an open door.

I’ve been buying Oasis brand fruit juices for Olivia’s breakfast for years now.

There are two variants in the shelf at Sobeys, one labeled 100% and one labeled 60%.

Reasoning that something that’s all-juice is healthier than something that’s only 60% juice, I’ve always bought the 100%.

But.

It turns out that the percentages are about different things.

The 100% is “100% juice” while the 60% is “60% less sugar.”

Neither have added sugar. Both are “all juice” but for the first ingredient in the 60% being water (and not, as I’d imagined, Lucky Charms or lard).

And the 60% has less than half the calories, and the same vitamin C.

So now I buy the 60%.

Three days later than last year.

Two months to the day earlier than last year, I got my bicycle out of the basement, pumped up the tires, and got out on the road. It was glorious.

My ride was short, to MacQueen’s for a tune up (now is the time! no wait!). But the bike isn’t going back into the basement. Game on!

Archdeacon John Clarke at St. Paul’s is one of my favourite writers. While the way it manifests is different, we share a fundamental belief system. I like what he had to say about God this week:

Sometimes we need the comfort of a mother hen and sometimes a judge or an immovable mountain. Sometimes we need the rest found in a gentle breeze and it’s a clear path that helps the most. Either way, the Church shouldn’t limit our use of metaphors, similes and images for God. And, of course we shouldn’t limit our use either. By using masculine and feminine images for God, as well as other ones, we deepen our understanding of God and the potential of human beings.

Gallant’s is one of my favourite local businesses, and they’ve a staff of go-above-and-beyond people. Great work for someone who wants to work in a happy, cooperative kitchen.

L’s child L (yes, the initializing is going to get confusing) celebrated their 11th birthday last week, and my gift was a tiny handwritten, hand-bound book of advice. 11 pieces of advice to get them from age 11 to age 22. L¹ took photos of the pages of the book and posted them to Facebook; I’m posting them here for posterity, and so L² can visit ruk.ca/advice when needing a refresher. Or, for that matter, so I can visit for advice, as I’ve found it equally useful when applied to my own life, most especially pages 3, 6, and 10 of late.

Prince Edward Island has a fleet of electric school buses, one of which stops near our house every afternoon.

I swore that the sound effect the bus emits was the same as the the Montréal métro’s dou dou dou sound, so I called the company. 

It is!

It is disconcerting to hear the métro doors closing outside my house, especially when waking up from a nap. 

I was saddened to learn of the death of my longtime neighbour Dorothy Forsythe last weekend.

When we moved into 100 Prince Street, we became neighbours to Dorothy and her late husband Bob at 108 Prince Street. We’ve benefited from good and generous neighbours all-round, and Bob and Dorothy were certainly that: helpful, caring, supportive. Dorothy was a great friend to Catherine over the years on many fronts, and to me especially after Catherine’s death.

I will never forget running into Dorothy and Bob at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market one Saturday some years ago and finding them excited by the impending visit of their nephew. I asked what their plans were: perhaps they’d go to Rainbow Valley with him, or Sandspit, or the beach? “Well,” replied Dorothy, “he’s in his 50s and he’s a lawyer…” It was easy to forget they were several generations older than me.

Earlier in COVID times, I started a newsletter for my neighbours in the C1A 4R4 postal code; Dorothy was an enthusiastic reader and, in the last issue, a contributor: she wrote a piece about her home at 108 Prince Street, and her lifetime association with the house:

108 Prince St., where I live, was built in 1878 as a single home by M.P. Hogan. The builder lived here for four years until it was sold to W.W. Wellner, a well known Charlottetown jeweller. 

In 1913 it was bought at auction by my grandfather, John Bell Andrew, who owned a farm and carding and grist mill, “Belmont Mills” at East Royalty. 

My grandparents never lived on Prince Street and it was rented to a large family. There were eight bedrooms, some with sinks. The depression years followed and the house needed extensive repairs and often the tenant wasn’t able to pay the rent. 

In 1914 World War One began and in 1915 my father enlisted at seventeen. He was wounded three times, the last time only three days before the armistice. As he was recovering in England after the war he got the Spanish flu and was very ill. Now we can identify with what was like then! 

In 1940 my dad, Frederick L. Andrew, reenlisted and his first posting was to organize an army Basic Training Centre at Beach Grove. It had been a summer hotel owned by the Sterns family. The hotel was used as a barracks and many more army buildings were added. After the war the hotel became a nursing home until a new home was built on the same location. 

Our home in East Royalty was sold and, at that time, my grandfather turned the house at 108 Prince St. over to my father. Dad immediately had renovations started: James Harris was the architect and Neil Blank was the contractor. 

The apartments were ready to move into in the fall of 1942. I started grade VII at the old three-story brick school in the present Prince Street School location. I had previously attended the one room school in Central Royalty. 

In January 1942 my father was transferred to Halifax to take command of № 6 District Depot where soldiers left by ships for overseas and returned home for discharge when the war ended. He was there until 1947 and during that time Mother and I were living at 108 Prince Street. 

Mother and Dad lived the rest of their lives here and my husband Bob and myself moved here from Saint John in 1984. Bob died in 2014 and I’m still here at age 90. 

I’m very grateful to have great neighbours keeping an eye out for me. 

In the fall of 2018 we helped Olivia organize an epic 18th birthday party for herself, so epic that we needed to rent the St. Paul’s Parish Hall to host it. Dorothy was there, and at the end of the night, with only a few stragglers left, it was Dorothy who grabbed a broom and swept the floor, something captured by the livestream camera: 

The generosity of spirit in that act is how I will forever remember Dorothy: a kind-hearted, curious, engaged woman. A great neighbour. 

She will be missed.

We held a birthday party for my mother last night. Looking over the photos of the night, I see that everyone is smiling.

It’s nice to see smiling; it’s been a long time since conditions, griefy, COVIDy, and otherwise, have allowed space for that, but we got here, together.

Gathering the people I love around a table to share a meal has seldom felt so wonderful.

I have been thinking a lot about happiness, and about family and relationships, and about writing.

Regular readers will recognize that I haven’t been writing as much here of late, and that’s been due a number of things, primarily time and license.

The time thing is easy to explain: since the beginning of December I’ve been inside a new relationship, something that’s captivated me deeply, and filled my hours with togetherness, coupled and familial.

The license thing is a different but related beast: this blog isn’t a confessional, but it’s also not not a place where I write about my life, my feelings, my challenges, my projects. I made my way through Catherine’s illness, and death, and the grief that followed, in no small way, by writing here. I’ve written here about autism, and mental health, and the challenges of parenting.

But what of the new people in my life? 

This is trickier.

Privacy for all concerned.

The challenging forces of public vulnerability shining bright on a fragile, newly-hatched thing.

Fear of writing, in full view of people who loved Catherine deeply, about my feelings for someone else.

Fear of writing about forces mysterious; I’m much more comfortable writing of the concrete.

These, and other things more deeply-seated, have me skittish about writing in public about my life these days.

And yet writing is so important to me: this practice has been integral to the way I process things. And as much as I’m skittish about writing about everything new and delightful, I’m also aware that not doing so leaves a dark ages in that process; I need to have a way to helpfully kerfuffle things through my brain, and I’m learning what happens when I don’t have that.

Here’s a goofball selfie I took this morning. My tousled hair! The smile on my face! I’m wearing a T-shirt! I don’t recognize this fellow, and I’d like to learn more about him. The way to do that has to run through a jungle of words; it’s just how I work.

I’ve confronted this notion before, most recently when considering how to write about Olivia’s transition to identifying as a trans-woman. The challenges and joys this has brought with it, the things I’ve learned, the new friends and allies I’ve made, are all things I could have written about here but didn’t: this wasn’t, isn’t, my story, it’s hers. And yet, as with autism, it’s also something I’m involved with, affected by, supportive of. Surely that’s something I could be writing about, if only because there’s almost no writing about life supporting an autistic trans daughter, which can make one feel really, really alone.

And there is a similar additional reason for me to write about my romantic exploits, and that’s that there’s so little that’s helpful when one Googles “widower dating mid-50s.” And yet so much that one wants to know as a widower in ones mid-50s thinking they might date (most of what is written is of the “10 reasons you don’t want to date a widower” variety, which is unhelpful).

I know from experience writing about the travails of cancer caregiving, about grief, about parenting, that writing is purgative for me and, by times, helpful to others; I’m a man in my mid-50s who, through a lot of work, patience, creativity, determination, and luck, finds himself in the arms of a delightful woman. To know that such a tale is possible would have been a great salve to the mired-in-grief version of me, and, I presume to others. “There is hope, younger Pete,” I want to write back into time.

So, I will keep writing. I will need to figure out a new way of doing so, one that allows me to be honest, to tell my story, while at the same time figuring out a way for the other voices around the table to be present, but not appropriated.

Tricky. But worth it.