ON THE PARTICULARITY OF PLACE AND PRESENCE (2018 IN REVIEW)

It occurs to me, as I sit down to write my 2020 year in review that I haven’t done a new year’s reflection for the last three years. Something has always felt stuck.

And so, while I will write the 2020 year in review, I thought that - as the pandemic has me currently in my third lockdown - that I would take a long view of time. A short peruse through the last trifecta of years. After all, they say that to accurately see where you’re going, you need to understand where you’re coming from. It’s been helpful, for me, to look back.

Even as I start to write this, I remember 2018 as a quiet and beneath the surface kind of year. It had a lot of movement but was lived quite privately, a survey of sorts for the kind of life that I wanted to live. It had dawned quiet and bright and cold and I remember being sad. There had been many “little deaths” in 2017 as poet Robert Wrigley says and I came into 2018 carrying the weight of this sadness. The death of a newborn during advent, the ending of a beloved church community, the backing away from some relationships on the realization that those people were not who I thought they were. I spent much of the year gathering back the pieces of who I was in anticipation of the following two that were to become some of the most whole and beautiful, vibrant and brave that I would ever experience. But I didn’t know that then. 

I rang in the new year in one of my favourite ways - with my aunt and uncle and a quiet but a quiet but lovingly poured glass of champagne just down the road from my parents. There were some themes that emerged.

I let myself begin to fall in love with home…

I read poetry. So much of this love for home was birthed in the middle of snow, ordinary tasks, whisky tastings, and leaning hard on those I had come to trust most in my new home. We got snowed into a small Ontario town on our yearly cottage getaway. I looked around the table and gave thanks that I had carried some of these spirits with me for years now. I read Persuasion. I met members of my sisterhood for late night drinks and others for halal brunches. I babysat my favourite puppy and defended myself from my cat’s disapproving gaze. I had friends remind me that I was strong. I celebrated Valentine's Day with friends married, single, dating, and remembered that love was something we can be gifted even when we don’t have words to name its fullness accurately yet. 

I made a new friend and I remember what it was like to try and find a spot in a pub during a winter’s evening with him, his inability to leave a place without running into someone who adored him. I danced at the nature museum down the street for a dear one’s 25th. Wednesday nights at Neighbourhood Group continued to save me. This Wednesday night family taught me about fierce and enduring love, warmth, and belonging. I call them my “unselfconscious friends” even now. Our beloved Spanish neighbours moved. I took a calligraphy class at the community center on the corner. I realized that sometimes life needs to be lived small, gently, and close in. We hosted one of our famous Canada Day bashes with people we didn’t even know inside our front doors. We welcomed friends from across the country who we had not met in person yet, our only connection the love of a shared adoptive Jewish mother of ours. E moved in for what felt like a summer camp like experience just before her September wedding. And so many times that year, I stopped to reflect on the physicality of Home and how the older I get, the more entrenched the smell of the sea, mountains, forests, and the wide open fields in BC become in my spirit. I walked almost every evening past the laminated poem on the street behind us that says, “love her but leave her wild.” 

This was a year of ordinary grace. All baby showers, baking, book sales, snack runs, book club, helping people move, dinners, drinks, out of town guests, volunteering, house repairs, and finally working through the backlog of emails. These are the gifts of digging into Home as a particular place. Presence.

I was loved well…

Friends mailed me bags of coffee. S came to visit and explore what a new season of life might look like. E and D got engaged and told me that very night. I spent time at the youth shelter and they righted my frame. I took a train ride to attend a wedding where I knew not a single person except the bride, where a nun made me laugh, and gifted me something I carry with me to this day. A tucked me into the car with him en route back from Toronto one particularly snowy day because he didn’t want me driving with a stranger. M and I shared beers as we got to overlap geography and I gave thanks for the mums of dear friends who have loved me well, though I am not their own. L and M woke me up one morning...they had found me a bike! B told me, “Isn’t kind and patient the whole goal? ... the point of life every time.  For ourselves, and for each other?” She was right.

My then-colleague B saw that I wanted Suzy Q donuts and turned up at work with them. How I loved working with him. C came to town - what a great time remembering big pots of chai and our first year university selves. We wrapped up in blankets and celebrated L’s 30th birthday. We went away as a Neighbourhood Group. We crammed into too small rooms to celebrate C and M’s wedding in the rain. L came to visit and nursed me through the flu and a wisdom tooth extraction. More coffee arrived via mail. D came with L on his first Ottawa pilgrimage. My adoptive Jewish mother stopped through town and we hugged. S and I rehashed our interfaith work. J from my LLC days and his new wife came to visit. We crammed way too many women into C’s apartment to watch The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I fell in love with the Arlington 5 staff even more. My cousin S came to visit. I remember a very specific phone call with someone I love and heard these words, “Hannah, I can’t fix things but I can listen. I’m here to remind you of a very particular part of who I know you to be. I share these things with you as someone who also struggles and learns and rallies and does this thing called growing up.” I heard the I love you in those words come.

Both of my friends named Kayla came to visit. I had a private tour of the Canadian Ballet Company from tiny A, the cousin of a childhood friend. D flew in from Winnipeg and we made plans to host a Thanksgiving dinner in a small flat we’d rented. We chopped and stirred, enjoying being together in person - a rare delight. Over the course of the evening, the noise level was at an all time high. Honest conversations, hilarious memories, competitive games; the kind of ribbing and teasing and all talking at once that can only come from knowing each other well and fully. Two of my best boys came to town and we shared an early breakfast while reflecting on the human rights work that we got to undertake together. People said I love you in so many ways - the total stranger helping me off the ice field of a sidewalk, the off route gas station attendant yelling at me across the way to put a jacket on lest I get sick, a friend preparing hot coffee in a thermos for our morning road trip, a last minute meeting for coffee with new and old friends from long ago. I soaked it all in. 

I began to fall in love with church again and Matthew House too…

This was the year I let myself fall in love with my new church - it’s room for disorganization, hugs from the 85 year old who really runs our church, food items as tithe, spontaneous applause for refugee family application approval, people who notice when I’m not there. This was the first year I attended a Shrove Tuesday dinner and I will always remember the Canon kneeling near my seat telling me that he didn’t want my anxiety of getting his “title” right getting in the way of my talking to him. This April, I attended a Good Friday service, a Seder dinner, an Easter vigil mass, and an Anglican church service. And I thought at least I’ve sat fully in the marking of the point of it all - that He redeems and restores, that He makes all things new. 

I fell in love with Matthew House refugee shelter and furniture bank this year and they enfolded me, sharing their stories and making room for me around the table nearly every Thursday through the year. I remembered all over again that refugees are some of the most resilient teachers I could ever ask for. 

I spent a lot of time on the road…

This was the year that I cemented the determination to make my way to NYC each year. For better or for worse, it’s my thin place where I recover bits of myself. This time, I found myself again in the small streets and long blocks I have a love-hate relationship with and in the arms and conversations of my friend H and her mother. I got stranded in Toronto once again - as I always seem to do en route to and from NYC - and came face to face again with a moment of decision regarding love. I chose well, I think. I recovered God and generosity in the eyes of an old friend who rolled out of bed for bagels and then came to church with me in Manhattan. I stood in the UN as L told me to, “stand tall and let your heart dream big.” I attended a 60th wedding anniversary and 90th birthday party. They danced. We cried. I learned about finding God in the dark. L spoke the blessing of “being a returner” over me. 

I stayed overnight at Massey College in Toronto, unexpectedly timing my work trip with an evening of dancing at the college. I still remember being dragged onto the dance floor with total strangers and my friend D reheating dinner and gifting me his bed. Oh friendships from the road, how sweet they are. I stayed with my friend K and her husband who helped me breathe deep again. I brunched with E’s grandparents. I stayed in Toronto long enough to welcome baby H at my first aqiqah. I overlapped with two friends in Kingston for 24 hours, our hearts first knit together on a roadtrip through Poland. My cousin M and I agreed to meet halfway between the places we now call Home for some heart-Home time. I flew to Winnipeg with A to celebrate D’s 30th birthday. These women have taught me what it means to be a tribe across time and space. Mum and Dad came to visit. We went to Montreal too. I met up with R from Poland in Hamilton. We went on that boat trip in Sarnia. “Let’s talk about people who aren’t here. It’s much more interesting,” my favourite 90 year old said as he hopped off the subway for dinner and a beer with all of his favourite 20 year old friends one hot Toronto night. S and I had our annual date in Toronto. 

I came home so many times this year. I remember sweet D picking me up to get 20 minutes in the car with me. A sleepover and 12 hours of honesty with A. I slept over at E’s. I remember 24 hours of Granville Island magic on a work trip. I felt completely enfolded in the love of my childhood as we celebrated D and Li’s wedding. “Sometimes your heart knows a truth to respond to before you do,” one of them winked, as the one who made me cry looped his hand in mine and the others rummaged for Kleenex post-cry. Uncle K spoke the benediction that would carry me through the next two years, “They will not walk this way alone.” I came back into town for A’s wedding. We laughed and danced and I looked around at the women next to me and gave thanks, not for the first time, to have been given people more extraordinary than I deserve. I stayed for the first time in L and D’s treehouse. We hosted a cousin’s float night and sang loudly in Italian. I headed home with eucalyptus and lavender in my bag and books and pottery from B stored for pick up on my next trip out. How lovely to know Home as a place that is hard to leave. 

That September I came back again. E and L made me a cake and met me at the airport with my favourite coffee in hand and balloons too. I had dinner with Mum, Dad, and B before waking up on the island, tucked in a row with the other crazy kids who had located for 48 hours to celebrate D and E. We laughed until we cried, told stories of those first years making our way in the world together, feeling grateful to know a bride and groom whose dancing so reflects the kind of love that shifts things around a little after it’s been in the house. And then we danced almost as long as they’d let us.

Before the year’s end, I managed to fit in a Seattle day trip with H and K - two of my best foodies. We stopped in for Mexican on the way back to celebrate my cousin S, at that place just over the line. I realized that this has been a year of learning how to bring the fullness of myself to each place I encounter. Of how to be present despite the suitcase I’m wheeling behind me. Of how to dig down in the place I am instead of focusing on the not-able-to-be-there parts.

I experienced a sort of furrowing for lives I couldn’t even imagine yet to come…

It’s funny, for a year of such movement and beneath the surface living,I was gifted a lot of wisdom that would serve as the bedrock for years to come. I remember being in Ottawa and having an Orthodox Jewish man pull me aside and deliver a piece of wisdom that would come back to me, three years later, exactly when I needed it. He said, “Everyone thinks love means leaning in and giving more of oneself. In reality, the first principle of love is to withdraw yourself to make room for the other. It’s the first principle of creation, making space for the other.” How right he was. 

Truth comes to us in all sorts of ways. One day, while waking in a cabin in the Quebec woods, I sat straight up from a dream with these words still in my mind that I quickly jotted down. “In this way, there is no room for big love. Only ordinary love in all of its tenacity...” I read Nina Rigg who reminded me that “we are made both of fight and float.” “There is no syllabus for the course you are now on,” L told me. I kept that piece of wisdom close. 

There were 24 hours in November when I saw the past 3 years of my life pass before me in surreal stages. For one singular evening, people and conversations and files that have deeply shaped who I am were all accessible to me over the course of mere hours. I was reunited with someone extremely dear that I’ve never hugged on Canadian soil before. I sat around a table for a briefing that reminded me of what makes me feel alive. I saw and celebrated people and moments I worked hard for and within one of the hardest and most precious seasons of my life. This opened me up to a future I needed to think through, though I didn’t realize it then. All in the span of one day.

2018 was a lot of reflecting on on the people who have made me who I am. My grandfather died and as we sang, shared stories, prayed, and walked him home, I gave thanks, not for the first time, for the privilege of getting to be on the life team he created. I wanted to live a little more like him. I stopped in at the farm market to visit X and left, determined to still be just like him when I grew up: Humble, Gentle, Deep-in-His-Bones-Kind with an unflagging work ethic. There were others too, who - mostly in their quietness and steadfastness - brought me back to myself, steadied me, and sowed the seeds for the me that I was going to become.

There were other things that can’t be neatly categorized but that I want to remember:  I voted, I read, I received an all clear scan that let me breathe again. I began to read and listen to podcasts widely. I missed my family quite a bit for the first half of this year - I can see it now as I look back through my writing. I volunteered in Holocaust education and had hard conversations. I did a hilarious scavenger hunt and was sick a lot of the time. My father turned 60. This year was, as it turned out, a gift - of movement and quiet and questions and answers and deep love and enduring loss too.