Spring

These are the days that make me miss home. The blue sky, the sun, the smell of damp grass as the snow melts, the overwhelming brown of dead grass, mud, and last year's leaves.

I've noticed in the past few years that my depression worsens in the spring. Winter has always been my favourite season, and with each passing year I despise its departure more and more. I hate the mud, I hate the brown, I hate the slush and the damp and the receding snow. And I hate more than anything the fact that everybody gets so darn excited about it. Everybody everywhere suddenly starts celebrating the drab brownness everywhere and the mess and the fact that you can't take one step outside without getting covered in mud. How is this something to celebrate...? It's like they're rubbing the horribleness of the season in your face. Just when you thought you'd forgotten it's not crisp and clean outside anymore, someone comes up to you and says, with eyes brighter and wider than any human's should naturally be, 'ISN'T IT SO NICE AND WARM OUT TODAY BOY I THOUGHT WINTER WAS NEVER GOING TO END DON'T YOU JUST LOVE THE SUNSHINE THEY SAID IT'S SUPPOSED TO GET UP TO PLUS FIVE TODAY I'M GLAD I WORE SHORTS.' It's like a firehose of fake cheer in my face, trying to drown me. Have you actually looked outside? It's BROWN. No colour. No life. There's nothing beautiful about it. Don't tell me spring is when the flowers bloom, Martha, that happens in June. This is March.

And the statistics bear me out. Suicide rates spike in May. Not November. Not February. May.

For me, I realised today that one of the reasons my depression bottoms out at this time is because for whatever reason, days like this remind me of home. And I'm not home. And I won't be for the forseeable future. Ach, der mich liebt und kennt / Ist in der Weite.

Time Bubbles

Moving to another province and entering a public schooling system for the first time in my life was... surreal. It felt like I was in a bubble -- that my life in Alberta was 'paused' and I had picked up a life in Saskatchewan that existed in linear time, but not on the same track my time in Alberta had been. (Believe it or not, this is the best way to explain it.)

They were so separate, so easily. In fact, so much so that when my mother and my sister came to pick me up on Thursday (to take me back to Alberta for reading week), it was very jarring to see them in that context. I'm used to my dorm mates walking around the halls and in our room, not my mother and sister. My brain was flashing 'incongruency detected' at me throughout dinner and then as we left the college campus. In fact, it didn't really start feeling normal until we stopped for fuel at Rosetown.

Saskatchewan and Alberta are so different. Saskatchewan has no trees. Even the towns are tiny and they're few and far between. I feel like the town I'm going to college in is one of the larger ones (maybe it's just because you see more people there though), and even their population doesn't reach a thousand. Once you cross the border into Alberta, the difference is almost instant. There's almost this sigh of relief -- civilization! In Saskatchewan, Subway is pretty much the only chain-anything you will see (outside of farm equipment dealers). I spent two months in Saskatchewan and I have yet to see a Wendy's. In Alberta there's one in nearly every town.

But enough about the social/geographical differences.

Coming back home after a two-month absence was kind of odd -- we parked in front of the garage, like we always do, and I grabbed some of my stuff, walked inside and dropped it all on the same spot at the table as I've always done. And as I did so, there was this sense that no time had passed. It was as if the 'Play' button had been pressed, and things were picking up where they had left off. It was like my entire time in Saskatchewan, all those classes and tests I've taken and the people I've met... it was like it had all been a dream, and this was my reality, here, now. And it was odd because I expected these once-normal things to be more foreign to me.

On one hand it was a relief... I was terrified that I would come back to Alberta and nothing would be the same, and I'm glad that wasn't the case -- nothing drastic has changed. But on the other hand it's a little frightening. Two months have gone by (almost). Two months. And it feels like nothing. This calls up the question: how much time has to pass before it feels like something? How much time can be wasted before we start to feel it? The answer scares me... two months between leaving the house and returning to it was as if maybe a couple of hours had passed. What if it's several years before you feel like time has really passed? Or several decades? You could spend decades wasting your life and not feeling it. You could conceivably spend decades inside a certain bubble of time and not realise it until it pops too late.

Seriously, it feels like I never left. Four days after leaving Saskatchewan I'm having a hard time remembering my dorm mates and all the classes as something that really happened, not just a dream I had. It feels so normal and 'right' here. I get the sense that leaving Alberta to finish the semester will be much, much harder than the first time I left...

What I Miss

You know what I miss the most about being at home?

All the driving.

No, I'm serious. It's always mystified me how much people whine about driving -- be it commuting to work/school, going on vacations, or doing errands. People hate driving. I've never understood this, but it's become even more weird to me now that I haven't driven anything in nearly two months.

See, my mother decreed that the rattletrap was not coming to Saskatchewan with me. It eats coolant and the vital systems of the thing are slowly failing. She didn't want me to wind up stranded on the side of the Trans-Canada highway in the middle of December with nobody within a nine-hour drive able to come rescue me (this was before we got here and found out several people in my hall did bring vehicles and probably do care for me enough to come rescue me from the side of the road).

I miss a lot of little things about driving. I miss watching the sunsets as I cruise down the highway. I miss seeing the streetlights stretching out before me on the way to tap class. I miss slowing down to forty and studying the buildings in the small town near my home out of the corner of my eye. I miss feeling the steering wheel under my hands and the solid click of the turn signal.

I miss the peace that came with driving... of not having to do anything else, just drive. And think. And maybe sing. You don't have to pause what you're doing to change over the laundry, or write something down, or check your email, or any other combination of ten things at once. You have one task and one task only. Just drive. I miss that assurance of knowing that if you keep going, you will get there all in good time.

But I think if I'm honest, most of all, I miss the music.

I miss JAG on the way to Bible study. I miss Daniel Amos on the way back from my friends' house. I miss Prodigal on the way back from ballet (Electric Eye) and the other Bible study (Just Like Real Life). I miss White Heart on the way to tap class and dance team. I miss Crumbächer on the way to get groceries. I miss listening to Michael W. Smith's Christmas whenever the heater's running and the snow is dancing in the high-beams.

Basically, I think I mostly just miss music. And streetlights. And dusk. And home.

Going Home

This will, according to my current plans, eventually be a part of a novel, compiled of a series of 'essays' (for lack of a better word) written by the characters. However, for the time being it only exists in bits and pieces. This is one of those bits. ~ Kate


Why I drove that route home that night, I don't exactly know. Nobody's ever really frequented that road, not as long I can remember. It's what's known around here as the 'scenic route' -- country code for 'pretty much abandoned.'
Suddenly I saw a fox out of the corner of my eye along the side of the road. I slowed, but the crunching of the gravel under the truck's tires scared it and it bolted off the road onto a driveway.
I watched it run up the driveway's gentle curve to the the house. My truck's wheels followed.
The house was formerly baby blue, now a sort of washed-out grey. I could almost see the geraniums that used to add a bright splash to the paint near the foundation. Now though, the geraniums were gone, leaving in their place brown stalks nestled among frost-killed weeds.
I parked the truck, took the key out of the ignition, and got out. The bang of the door closing seemed like an explosion ripping through the undisturbed air.
I walked up to the front door in slow motion. The thick stillness around me seemed to prevent quick movement.
The white paint was peeling, the handle blackened by years of children's grubby hands pulling at it. I reached out my hand, now much larger and toughened from years of work, and gave the handle the lightest of touches. The door swung open.
Dinner was cooking. Roast and potatoes, if my nose could be trusted. Two of my younger brothers wrestled on the living room carpet, then my older sister came in and reprimanded them. I took off my coat and took a hanger from the closet.
The rusted wire nearly dissolved in my hands. And suddenly I was plunged back into a phantom of something only vaguely familiar.
I put my coat back on and hung what remained of the hanger back in the closet. The step forward raised a cloud of dust and dead flies that fell back to the ground almost immediately as if too tired to hover.
I went to the kitchen. One cupboard door lay on the ground, like a chameleon in the greyness. In the corner of the room was the staircase, the pantry beside it. Next to that was a window.
A nearly-black curtain of age had been drawn across it. I blew on it, but it did little to move the dust that had died there. I unlocked it and tried to push it open, but time had taken the lock's place. It wouldn't budge.
I went back outside and stood on the porch. The stillness in the house was beginning to smother me.
There was a sizable garden plot across from where I stood. Once my mother would harvest zucchinis, carrots, radishes, peas, potatoes... but now there were no vegetables, only weeds too disillusioned to attempt survival. Even the dirt was grey.
Wait. There was something growing along the garden's edge.
A marigold.
Bright orange against the grey. My father's hands were tending it, watering it, gently patting down the soil around it. And suddenly one of those hands was sharply snatched up.
A flash of metal in the summer sunlight... my father's hands pulled up until he was standing. The pure steel was so out of place against his tanned weathered hands.
He looked up into the face of a cop, who rattled off the rights in a serious tone as he handcuffed my father. I saw his mouth moving; I heard the drone of his voice; but the words were lost to shock. I heard Rosa sob behind me and instinctively put a hand on her shoulder.
"It's probably just a mistake," I said. "They're not arresting him for real, you'll see. He and Mom will get it straightened out."
Another sob escaped her. I couldn't be sure, but I thought I heard her say something. I was just about to ask her what when she said it again. And this time I caught it.
"She did it," she whispered through her tears. "She really did it."
I looked at her.
She was smiling.