Tessellations

I'm quilted with images from the weekend. My last glimpse of my grandmother, cold and small and dignified. My ex's hand in mine, tight, so familiar and so foreign, in front of my grandmother's coffin. Taking my cousin's hand and leading her inside to see Grandma, her a little sister for a moment, her gorgeous children in her husband's hands. Stef strolling the graveyard in her cherry red hair with a sharpie, correcting the spelling of our name on the signs. Back at Grandma's, Em finding a fossilized egg, Tony 1982, solemnly holding it up. Issy and Seb dancing for the video camera on my phone. Em playfully dancing for the same camera. Jane's firefighter friend inspecting the plug on Grandma's toaster, the one I've always loved, before I took it as my memento. Jeff and Beth dancing in the hall, practicing for their wedding, earnestly playful.

My last Windsor image -- pulling off the expressway for a moment in Ste. Anne's cemetery, to see dad, leaving him a pink gerbera daisy I tugged out of the flower arrangement on his mom's coffin. His stone looks a bit lonely -- the ones around are obviously more frequently visited -- and it feels so ironic, given that he was always the centre force of whatever was going on. I find him there, though, always, just a brief connection, telling him where I've been and where I hope to go. Usually I bring him small rocks from where I've traveled, but I forgot to find something in Oregon. The single daisy -- his favourite flower -- sparked some vividness into the grey stone.

My drive home was far more floaty than my drive out, less time in the speedy zone with propulsive music, more intuitive but relaxed traffic flow. I hit a storm near London that plunged me into the familiar world of my childhood storm watching, the weird grey charged sky counterpointed the suddenly vivid greens of the trees, lightning flicking down all around me. I miss those overheated moments of heightened ions, where colours are stark, the air alive, my breath shorter and giddy. Storms always evoke the family nexus of the cottage, so distant now, my mother's entire family dissipated, my hours of staring at the lake stored in the place of fragmented dreams and dimly remembered novels.

This has been such a year of reminding me of the allotment of decades, the stacking up of history that is simultaneously part of the learned present and snapped suspended into an image that I need to peer at to remind myself of any resonance, struggle to remember. My split, the scattering of some friends of my life with A, the deaths of friends' parents, John, Grandma. No reconnection with my mother's sister. So many shifts, and here I am, made of all of this mosaic of life stories, looking where I want to go. With F, with my work, with my bio and chosen family. Living into as much vividness as I can.