Spring

This teenager is more of a challenge than the others were. I tell myself I shouldn’t get my feelings hurt by a 13 year old, but it’s hard. Somewhere along the line as I was growing up, I learned to deal with people being unexpectedly angry by quietly cleaning. It gives them space, and keeps me busy while I think, and having a clean kitchen makes people feel better. We’re still working on this relationship, she’s not used to having just one person to absorb everything, and I’m not used to having someone get mad at me for smiling at them or asking if they want pancakes. We’ll figure it out.

The head cold did not clear up after a week, so I used one of my sick days and called urgent care for an appointment (I’m still on the waiting list for a gp). I’m used to the packed urgent care clinics of the US, so it surprised me when they could see me right away on a Friday. I grabbed my purse and drove down the coast, along empty roads and through the fens, to St Lawrence - wondering why the only urgent care clinic on the peninsula was in a tiny rural fishing village, and why a Canadian medical center was named the ‘US Memorial’. The clinic was nice, with a large airy waiting room filled with windows, and I got my answers as I browsed the art and plaques on the walls while waiting for my name to be called.

On the morning of Ash Wednesday in 1942, a 15 year old boy who lived on the cliffs of St Lawrence went outside in a blizzard and saw lights on the ocean. He realized something was very wrong, because the lights looked like a ship, and it was way too big, so he spread the alarm, and the fishermen went out to find a United States battleship crashed in the cove, with hundreds of soldiers floating dead or injured in the freezing water and hanging from the wreck of the ship. The entire town mobilized, pulling hypothermic young men out of the water and creating a makeshift aid station to save them. The crisis escalated when word reached them that a second battleship had crashed in the next bay over, and the village scrambled to organize rescue. The soldiers were covered in oil, and the village women scrubbed them down and dressed them in every dry sweater and blanket they could find while the men gathered the dead. In all, the people of St Lawrence saved 186 young men in a disaster that killed more than 200. Dead bodies were washing up on the shore for months. A third ship carrying supplies, which the Navy had been escorting when they went off course, had gotten moored on the rocks but managed to get out in one piece, and they gathered up the survivors. 

The United States didn’t forget. After the war, President Truman gifted a hospital to the town of St Lawrence in gratitude. It’s still the main clinic for rural Burin.

I felt like that was worth the drive, and left with a prescription for steroid nasal spray. The nurse made me promise to get a neti pot (I have an irrational fear of amoebas, but I’m using the damn thing anyway - whispering fuck you amoebas every time I boil the water) and I picked up a scale while I was at it. Oh no. I refuse to rejoin Fitness Cult - which I only joined to be supportive, until I learned he was, in fact, using it to cheat on me - so I sighed, opened up my old calorie tracker, and picked up the pace on my walks around the pond. The numbers started ticking down again. These meat sacks are annoying. Leaky sinuses and creaking knuckles and wobbly cheeks and groaning joints. Better than not having one, though.

Suddenly, all in one day, the world exploded in tiny yellow flowers. They are growing out of rock piles, gravel pathways, scrubby brown hillsides. I saw a robin, and the blue jays have taken over the bird feeder. I scraped aside a bit of money from my editing gig to order an English rose, and lined up little cardboard pots of soil in a plastic seedling tray to plant anemone bulbs. I’m going to build a painter’s garden over the next few years, plant by plant. 

I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m busy, and at loose ends. I’m dreaming about my kids as babies, and about my grandfather dying. I’ve saved up enough money to buy tickets to Arizona this summer, even if I’ll be mooching rides and food and space in my mother’s hotel room the rest of the trip.

And soon it will warm enough to sit outside on the deck in the evenings, and see what the stars look like at night. Maybe I’ll be a good gardener, and maybe there will be apples on my trees in the fall. I’m looking forward to finding out.