"out" -- creative nonfiction

It’s sometime in the spring I turned eighteen, and I’ve been out all night.

When you’re young, the last place you want to be is home—home is where your mother asks you where you’ve been and your sister is always stealing your hair products and your father insists that Star Trek is the family’s show of choice, regardless of its unpopular standing in a house full of women. Home represents people that you have to answer to, and an accountability that you will appreciate and long for when you’re older. An accountability that being out does not entail. When you’re young, and you’re out, your only responsibilities are meeting friends at a bar in the city, wanting to kiss a boy that you like outside in the dark while your friends erupt from the double doors, laughing, telling you to break it up. Then driving back into town to hang out in a neighbourhood pub, playing a game of pool for a dollar, eating greasy breakfasts at three a.m. and driving eight people home in your car while the sun comes up over the suburbs.

Dawn in Sherwood Park in the springtime is light grey, cold. It is five a.m. and I’m turning my key in the lock that always sticks, jiggling the doorknob, making a racket. When I enter the house, it is a quiet Friday morning. It won’t be long before the rest of the household begins to stir. My parents will wake up, first my father who will shower blind without his glasses on in the bathroom next to my bedroom, then my mother who will make coffee, eat breakfast and put on her makeup. Then the sister that remains at home will come upstairs, use my hairbands and bobbypins to hold back her thick black hair, use my hairspray to set it all in place. Borrow my necklace and pair of my shoes, all while I’m still in the first hours of my night’s sleep—my lopsided schedule works well for her “borrowing” habits.
Once in my bedroom, I change into pyjamas and get into bed without washing my face. My mascara will leave little black smudge marks on my pillows and I have to sleep with my hair back in a ponytail because of the smell of cigarettes it has accumulated at the pub, but I’m young and I think that I’ll have this amazing complexion forever, so I close my eyes against the grey light that comes in through the window. As my mind slides towards sleep, I listen to birds singing outside and the first chirping alerts of my father’s alarm clock down the hall.

Home: a bungalow on Meadowbrook Road, a long driveway that I had to shovel the winter my father broke his leg slipping on a patch of ice while out for a smoke, a fort out behind the garage that my sister built with a hammer and nails and stolen plywood, my messy bedroom with yellow walls, green living room couches, one shower, a red kettle, and most importantly, the family that lived inside of it. Five women. My father, my mother, and their four daughters. We all lived there together, once, before marriages and babies, school and careers.
The room that was once the nursery, with its baby-bunny wallpaper and thick orange curtains is now a charming office. The room that belonged to my teenaged self, its yellow walls scarred by tape from posters I once adorned them with, is now a guest room with flowing white curtains that fall to the floor and a duvet to match. Five women no longer vie for the use of the house’s single shower—one could probably shower whenever they pleased, now. When everyone lived there, it was not uncommon to find someone sleeping in the hallway in the earliest hours of the morning, staking out the bathroom door, ready to wake up and jump inside the moment anyone in the house stirred. Of course, my sisters had their permed eighties hair-dos to worry about; these shower stakeouts were necessary steps taken towards maintaining their public images.
The bedroom where I fall asleep in the early morning to the sounds of birds chirping and water running in the adjacent bathroom: this is what I think of when I think of home. I painted the walls yellow with the help of my mother and eldest sister, Sherry. Sherry painted green ivy along the ceiling with a stencil to match the ivy-patterned curtains my mother had sewn for me. We tore down flowered wallpaper, painted yellow over blue, replaced the stained brown carpet, made the bedroom mine instead of that of the sister that lived in it before me.
The screen is torn from when I used to crawl in through the window after stacking up all of the patio chairs and using the gas meter on the side of the house as a foothold. If asked why the screen had never been fixed, my mother would probably roll her eyes and mention the fact that all of the basement windows are now single-paned—evidence of the sneakings-out of my two eldest sisters. Or she’d tell you about the time that Melanie, her second child, had thrown a wooden kitchen chair out of her bedroom window, thinking that it would land upright and that she could use it to climb down. The chair broke, she got caught, and for the next several years she would sit on that very chair at the desk in her bedroom, studying to become an engineer. The leg of the chair was repaired with several layers of packing tape. She graduated and became quite successful.
Home, where my mother reads books, crochets blankets for her grandchildren, makes tea, works on cross-stitch projects, continually loses her glasses in the couch (she must have twenty pairs, half of which are broken from being sat on). Home, where my father eats dinner, drinks a diet pepsi (sometimes two), smokes cigarettes on the front porch (one after work, one after dinner, one before bed), reads the newspaper (section by section, throwing them on the floor when he’s done) and watches TV (if not a sci-fi show, then it’s Law & Order or CSI or other such crime dramas) on the same schedule every day. Home, where my sisters and I have told each other secrets, said spiteful things in moments of anger, laughed until we cried at jokes that only we would find funny, created memories that contribute so wholly to my sense of self, belonging and heritage.

Coming home at five a.m., I am still in that in-between stage in my life. I am still free to stay out all night on a Thursday and to sleep all day on a Friday. I have a mistaken sense of responsibility, it seems. Being home represents a responsibility that I’d rather shirk by committing all of the usual teenaged acts of revelry. I am only hazily aware of the water running in the bathroom next door and the birds chirping outside of my window with its torn screen as I slip towards sleep, but I am not at all aware of the way I will later feel about home. About the escape from responsibility that I will find in it once I’ve grown up beyond the novelty of being out.

lost

I have so much to write and nothing to say. Or maybe the other way around. Either way, the work is just not getting done. I'm so bogged down in the practical things: magazines for woodlot owners, job ads for recruiting clients, research papers, analyses, blah blah blah.

I can't find you, creativity; where did you go?

A: enter, working trot.

Dressage goals:
1. So far we've achieved a lovely, soft, forward, sane, awesome trot prior to cantering. I'd like that same trot POST-cantering (specifically to the right).
2. Better lateral work. I have not seriously worked on any kind of difficult lateral work since Tanya was my coach and as a result, Sebastian has some straightness-issues and sometimes he bends from the neck, not from the poll/body. I'd like to start getting the following things nailed down: leg yield (which he's already pretty decent at, but he needs to keep his body a little straighter), travers and renvers (also somewhat good at -- his haunches are easier to move on and off the track than his shoulders) and of course, shoulder-in (not so good at -- he overflexes, gets frustrated, snorts and tail-swishes belligerently).
3. Collections. Better collected trot (right now his collected trot is really just more of a stuck trot) and canter (his collected canter is actually not that bad -- he is quite balanced at the canter and surprisingly light -- it's easier for him to lift his withers and use his ass at the canter than at other gaits, but it's still not perfect).
4. Extensions. I feel like if I could just teach him how to really give 'er and then COME BACK AFTER, our canter-trot transitions would improve. Plus he has a lot of potential for a great extended trot. I've seen it when he's at liberty and I've ridden it now and then, but never consistently.
5. The ability to do a dressage test in a 20x40 arena.

Jumping goals:
1. I need him to respect the smaller stuff. The problem with trying to event in the lower levels is that the wee little jumps are just "in his way." He canters around, pausing briefly to pop over them, but he doesn't rock back and actually TRY, because he doesn't HAVE to. As a result, we take rails.
2. As always, working on him not submarine-diving between fences. He has improved leaps and bounds at this, but he needs to learn that just because he's tired, doesn't mean he can just lean and lean and lean and lean on me until my arms finally give out.
3. He could stand to be a little less strong in the bridle. I do like that he takes me to the fences, really goes for it, has a lot of power and is really bold and brave. But sometimes, it's like, okay... WHOA, for crying out loud.

And notes to self:
1. Umm, put your shoulders back, you big collapsing potato-sack.
2. You have nice, long, dressagey legs. USE THEM.
3. Don't be grabby when trying to pick him up while jumping. It looks bad.

All of that being said, I want to mention that I am enjoying my horse more every day. I always thought that the problem was that without Tanya, I was a shitty rider and he was a sucky horse. That's not true. What IS true is that I just need to take lessons every once in a while. I need goals. I need someone to tell me every three seconds what I'm doing wrong. It's not that I'm shitty or he sucks. It's that we've got each other's tickets and we need someone else to keep us accountable.

Everything has been improving so much. He is learning to calm the eff down, and I guess, so am I. Plus he's just so cute.

hearing the horizons endure

The Horses
by Ted Hughes

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird - A world cast in frost.
I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging -
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays -

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

"diverging paths" -- creative nonfiction

Diverging Paths

The Saskatchewan horizon is a golden line that cuts starkly against the blue sky; you can see storms coming from miles away; you can see deer picking their way delicately through ditches in the spring dusk; you can see birds diminish into tiny specks before they disappear into the thick blue.

We are travelling across this flat expanse of gold in a rented van. It’s the eighth hour of this cross-prairie trip, and we’ve already played every car game we can think of, and asked every “would you rather...?” question conceivable.

Two are sleeping in the back. Two are staring out windows in the middle. One, in the front, is fiddling with the radio dial, working her way through the white noise, past oldies stations and western hits. One drives the van, both hands on the wheel, sunglasses still on despite the fact that the sun has already slipped past the sharp line of the horizon.

This moment: six of us inside of a rented van somewhere in southeast Saskatchewan – this moment lives inside of me; our togetherness lives inside of me. And our destination: later; we are sitting at a formica table in the farmhouse kitchen, cradling cups of coffee. Smiling, answering questions about ourselves, asking questions like
how many horses?
how many foals?
how do you do it?

And the first time I see him: a tall, large-boned chestnut gelding splashed here and there with white. A wide, white blaze down his face. Four white stockings. He is trotting around the arena, he is not the first one we’d looked at that day. He stops, walks over to us, examines us with his neck stretched out towards us, sniffing carefully. Blowing puffs of foggy breath on my hands. Cautious and curious. Outside, an unseasonably late snowfall blankets everything, coats the rented van.

The first day of years together, he and I. The first greeting. The first time he rested his soft muzzle in my hands and breathed the scent of sweet hay onto my skin.

Still, what my mind picks out of that whole trip is the six of us for hours and hours inside a rented van, cutting a path across Saskatchewan’s long, straight highways. Being together and living completely unaware of the way things would change in the future.

Even near the end, I still stubbornly refused to believe that my life would take any other course than the one I was on. It was a lost cause; I know that now. I was running headlong through a life that I enjoyed – I had goals to accomplish. It would all change, every last part of it, but I still thought that I had one path in life: to ride horses and be a writer. Nothing else mattered. Then, one day in early summer, though the sun felt strong and hopeful, my single-minded path suddenly disappeared from beneath my feet and before I knew it, I was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t take any more steps forward, because it hurt, I was scared and everything around me was unfamiliar. I was stumbling over my new landscape. How did I get there?

The best summers of my life were spent at the barn on her parents’ acreage just outside of town. We spent so many long summer days there: riding, doing barn chores, sitting in her living room eating freezies and chatting until the sun slipped below the horizon behind the back pasture. We rode six days a week, never missing a riding lesson, traveling to horse shows every weekend, driving rented vans across two provinces to look at horses for sale. More important than our combined passion for the sport was our friendship. And she was the glue that connected us all. Tanya was not just our riding coach; she was a best friend, mentor and confidante. She was the driver of that van, all those years ago – sunglasses on, miles ahead of care. We talked about our lives from the backs of horses, or inside her beat-up truck, or sitting on her kitchen floor for hours. We were all so dedicated to riding, then. We were a part of a team. We were determined, on a path to accomplish our goals. We were all on that path together.

When she finally succumbed to cancer’s menacing pulls, that path disappeared and we found ourselves groping around in the dark for some direction. The last time I saw her, she was emaciated from chemotherapy, her body abused by her disease. She was just a ghost of her former self, lying thin beneath hospital sheets. When she opened her eyes and looked at me, unable to speak, I wanted to say everything she needed to hear. I didn’t know what she was trying to say. I just held her hand and fought back the burgeoning tears. I thanked her for being my friend and I told her that everything would be okay. I promised her that I would continue riding. That I would continue down the path we had been on together. This was an impossible promise to keep, but I was stubbornly grasping onto the hopes that nothing would change – that she would be there forever.

Tanya was the cornerstone of our goals. She was the common denominator for something that had previously consumed our lives – riding and showing horses was all we did. Without her, this huge part of our lives meant something different. Riding was no longer easy and was barely enjoyable. Our shared love began to fray at the edges: some quit showing, some quit riding altogether, some sold their horses. I just struggled along, trying to make things the same as they once were, but I could never find my way back onto that same path. It was like watching her disappear through the trees in front of me and suddenly realizing that I was lost. I wondered where this path suddenly branched off towards. Could I ever go back? Did the destination change without my consent?

I am not the same person that I was before she passed away; anyone can tell. I am not the same, as a person, a friend, a rider or a writer. All of these things are a part of who I am, and that was drastically changed the day one of my best friends passed away from a short and gruesome battle with cervical cancer. For a long time, I tried to pretend that my trajectory was the same as it had always been. I tried to pretend that the unfamiliar path that I traveled was the same as the path I’d been for all of those years. I ignored the tears forming behind my eyes while I swung up into the saddle, gave my horse a confident pat on the neck and rode into a future without her guidance, but it didn’t quite work. It was like riding in the dark. I tried hard to make myself fit within my new landscape, but this was an unachievable task.

Two-and-a-half years later, I still wish we were back in that rented van, oblivious to the ways in which we would change, but I can look around at the path that I’m on and start to recognize myself. This used to be impossible. I constantly wonder how far I have been flung from the original trajectory of my life, and I still grapple with the fact that I had no choice in the matter. That I would become whoever I am becoming regardless of whether or not I actually wanted to. I wonder what my life would be like if she had never been sick at all. I wonder how different I would be from the person that I am now. I wonder if I was ever—if any of us are ever—really on a particular path at all.

He and I are still together; he still puts his soft muzzle into my hands and lets me pretend for a while that we are heading somewhere planned, even though the future is a wild and terrifying place. He is willing to trot boldly onto new paths, encouraging me to come with him. It’s what she would have wanted. We have to get out of that rented van eventually.