Maiden's Blush

Jule took this photo on the train last summer, in the dining car, travelling to Vancouver.

I made and chugged a "Maiden's Blush" while getting ready for the hospital Christmas party this evening: gin, triple sec, grenadine, and lemon juice. Rather blah, not much to it. One to forget. Much like the hospital Christmas parties. We have dinner at the Legion, perogies and cabbage rolls and turkey, all very fine, but not amazing like when Berdina Bingham was alive and baking buns - no one can match her buns. Then it's usually a live band. One year the band played The Red Hot Chili Peppers quite competently, which was exciting, and another year we skipped out early to go to the Nite Club, and that was rather fun too. It could have been a small town bar anywhere, only populated by Atikokanites! This year the band was In Denial, four fifty-somethings playing Men at Work and The Rolling Stones, and the old people bopped up and down, and that was that.

Driving home I thought about how lovely it is, though, to live in a town, how there are so few of us here that we keep showing up in each others' lives, at work, at the grocery store, everywhere. I could lose my job, my spouse, whatever, but I'd still be part of this town, if I cared to stay. I could get old here, check into the Extended Care Wing at the hospital, lounge all day in my geri-chair overlooking a snowy field, swallowing pills delivered by kids whose ear infections I once treated. I'm sort of looking forward to it, actually.

The forest, snow-tipped spruce and pines and bare-branched maples, glows against the black velvet of the sky on cold, clear nights like tonight. There is depth there. There are lakes beyond, and islands, black bears, moose, wolves. We are here in our cave, warmed by wood fires and feather duvets. Really, I'm quite lucky.