Twenty-five years ago my grandmother was planning a visit to PEI for the first time. She’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, so was operating under “if not now, when?” rules.

My only significant failure as a human being, in my grandmother’s eyes, was that I didn’t have a bed.

After leaving my room at Champlain College at Trent University I slept on a series of (admittedly lumpy, uncomfortable) futons for a decade. In her eyes she hadn’t worked through the Depression for 25 cents an hour to send my father to university to raise a child who didn’t sleep on a proper bed.

If she was going to come and stay with us, in other words, a bed needed to be secured. She could sleep on it during her visit, and then it would become our bed.

I procrastinated.

At the last minute I called up the bed place in Cornwall and ordered up a Queen bed with a split box, the only bed that could be navigated up the tiny stairs of our small house in Kingston. The bed delivery truck arrived on the morning of the day that my grandmother’s flight arrived in the afternoon.

She was impressed. Her efforts had not been in vain. We had a delightful visit.

She returned home to find that she didn’t have pancreatic cancer at all and was, in fact, perfectly healthy.

The bed remained. Olivia was conceived on it. It moved to town with us. It was a good bed. Solid. Comfortable. It served us well. Eventually it became the guest bed, as we acquired a larger king-size bed for ourselves. And then it became Olivia’s bed.

It started to get lumpy. The frame collapsed underneath it (something Olivia forgot to tell me; she slept at a 10 degree angle for months without me knowing) and it got set in the floor.

Another two years passed.

“You know, Olivia could really use a new bed,” L. told me a few weeks ago (her fresh eyes are proving helpful in so many ways!).

And so I ordered up a new bed, an exploding bed from Endy, the same model I bought last year that’s proved comfortable to all who’ve slept on it.

The new bed arrived. We set it up. Olivia has been sleeping well. Better.

What of the old bed? Too big for the Kia Soul. Removalists wanted $75 to cart it to the waste depot.

And then a friend with pickup truck appeared. I crunched the mattress and box springs down the stairs by myself, using gravity to good end. Loaded them up in the truck.

And off went the bed.

It’s been a week of much unburdening.

I’m running one small cell in a global COVID testing panopticon, part of history’s greatest biosurveillance operation.

Olivia needs to be COVID tested twice-weekly as a condition of participating in the day program at Stars for Life. On top of this, our off-Island travel last week brought with it a days 0, 2, and 4 testing requirement on return.

So there’s been a lot of swab, dip, swoosh, squeeze, drip, “Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes“ action here of late. All of it negative to date.

As a student of design and communications I’m fascinated by the test kit variants: the different ways of providing the testing medium, the different swabs, the instruction sheets (varying from a single badly-photocopied sheet to detailed multicoloured booklets). Some kits use three drops, some four, some six. Some instructions show the swab painlessly tucked in the nose, some in contact with the brain stem.

I’ve been trying, so far in vain, to make contact with the Korean provider of beautifully-designed silica gel packs in one of the variants. I just want to laud their attention to detail.

And these kits need to be usable by anyone, regardless of literacy level, mother tongue, disability. What an enormous challenge.

With the world’s testing literacy increased by all this flurry, I wonder if we might ramp up parallel citizen-science operations on other topics: water quality, shoreline erosion, traffic counting.

In the meanwhile, more swab, dip, swoosh, squeeze, drip, “Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes.“

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.