is now a good time?

I take our Great Dane out into pale sunshine. It is a little colder than I thought it would be. The Dane is unusually full of energy for a senior dog who has just finished months of gruelling chemo. She sprints down the sidewalk. Her, right at the end of her new leash, me, trying to keep up. Because of her three legs, one lost to cancer, she rocks when she runs, her long, soft ears flopping in the air like strange wings. When the Dane finally slows, it’s beside a perfectly tended flower garden. Immaculately landscaped and in bloom.

The Dane loves to smell the gardens. Everywhere I have ever walked her, if there is a flower in full petal, she buries her large nose in it and inhales. Once, she even braves the sharp spikes of a cactus to whiff its delicate, papery yellow flowers.

This morning, I don’t pull the Dane away. Yesterday, the chemo team sent a picture of her after her last treatment wearing a polka dot party hat. She’s looking right at the camera, grinning. I cried when I saw it. The staff is so rushed at the emergency centre. They did not have to take her photograph. Hang tinsel from a wall.

I let the Dane wander into the garden, right into the middle and smell everything she can. The Dane can hardly believe her luck. She keeps burying her soft, droopy mouth in a flower and then turning to look back at me, pollen on her nose.

Glory by glory we go.

*

Image is my own

*

I am currently in a whirlwind of a fire insurance claim, learning daily about processes and procedures that feel surreal. As I wait on hold with an agent, I remember my mother and my father who moved us from our first apartment into a house on a hill when I was ten.

I watched my mother on the phone, talking about what I thought of as adult matters of the house. I watched my father walk the property and assess it with the realtor. I thought, however unconsciously, that my parents had been prepared for this moment. That they had knowledge that I did not have. All I knew was that the back gate of our new backyard stuck a bit.

I imagine everyone has The Moment at some point, where you look around and realize that you’re the one who has to make the calls. You’re the one that has to answer when the hold music finally ceases and someone asks: is now a good time?

You’re the one who wonders: a good time for what?

*

This is the most stress I have been under in a long time, J tells me.

He is looking at me bleary eyed one morning. He has been sleeping on the couch, tending to the Dane whose stomach is tender and upset — maybe from chemo, maybe from the anxiety of being moved into a new space, maybe from something entirely other. I listen to the Dane whimper all night. To the sounds of J moving around downstairs. No one sleeps.

Every day, I have moments of grief for things I am still realizing are gone, and every day, the list of items that are deemed non-recoverable grows longer. It is already thousands of items.

Tomorrow, it is the four year anniversary of Kurtis dying. I dream impossible things. I wake and realize the fire burned my sleep medication. I add calling my family doctor to the ever expanding list of things I need to do. There is a lot unknown. A lot to bear.

I suppose there is never really is a good time for a house fire, one of my friends muses aloud.

She asks if I know when we get our things back.

IF we get our things back, I remind her.

The evaluation process is months long. J and I have four pairs of pants each and we don’t really know if that’s all we own.

*

Summer whistles down the lane toward the fall. The hydrangeas are huge and snowy but ours refuses to bloom. I check on the bush every time we check on the house, which is now only floorboards and framing. Our voices echo as we walk through it.

We are now in temporary housing and we keep running into the corners of countertops, the edges of chairs. My leg bruises are huge and black and tender. The Dane falls down the back steps because they are steeper than the steps at our house and she forgets. I nick the car door trying to learn how to park in an unfamiliar and narrow garage. J and I try to learn a new route to walk after work. At the end of each day, my brain is weary from all the new shapes it is learning.

*

Earlier, J and I talk about getting a puppy. We contemplate the decision in our sleepwear, each brushing their teeth.

It’s a bad time, J says reasonably and rightly. We have too much going on. Everything is hard. Margin is gone.

I nod. I rinse, I spit.

I’m not saying no, J says. I’m just saying.

He’s right. Of course, he’s right. We’ve both had puppies before. The lack of sleep. The razor sharp teeth. The question of how the Dane will adapt to a young one. The cost.

Let’s think about it, I say while J just grins.

You want the puppy, he says and laughs when I shrug, my hands in the air. As if to say: Who? Me? Who would be that lunatic?

*

Our new neighbours have only small furniture. J and I peek through their living room window one afternoon as we walk. The neighbors are gone but have left the blinds open. We marvel at the shrunken universe before us. Chairs, tables, bookshelves, books, shoes. Everything the size of their child.

There’s something about it — the inconvenient joy of an entire room made for a child. I think of the chemo team taking the time to put a party hat on our Dane and take a photograph. The cactus blooming. A puppy. All of it, it’s such inconvenient joy. You just have to make room for it.

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August’s paid subscriptions have been donated to the Rocky Mountain Community Relief Fund which is supporting disaster response for Jasper wildfire response and recovery. Thank you so much for supporting my writing. You make my dream of writing for a living possible.