Forever Tainted

I graduated last week.  My final project can be found  at: http://.chrystals.ca/connections, and a secondary site I built for Lars’ sister can be found here: http://chrystals.ca/bdivine.  I’ve also been working on my personal site which can’t be access at the moment as it’s password protected while in development.  I’m having a blast doing this – which is good, because I haven’t been feeling like work is going so well lately.  While at the start of this course I was thinking web design could be a secondary career, I’m now thinking I may have to make it my primary.  It saddens me a whole lot as I love my current company more than I’d have believed, but the passion that makes me so great at what I do there, seems to also be what’s breaking me right now.

~*~

It’s not supposed to snow on the west coast, or at least that’s what they say… It didn’t snow last year, but the year before that my father couldn’t bring his car down the drive for a month the snow and ice was so bad. So far this year, it’s been about 3 days that his car has been parked at the top of the driveway, on the street. My car, on the other hand has top of the line all-weather tires, thanks to my consistent trips to the often-snowy Squamish, and the legalities of driving on the 99 without them in the winter seasons. My car is the vehicle being used for most transport these days – even though I’m not in it.

This is the view from my office; a picture I took while working yesterday:



I’m not a fan of snow. And we islanders don’t know much about living in it and a little bit, means a lot of chaos. I’m thankful for the most part I get to stay home and out of it, if not for the snow, then for the idiots who don’t know how to act in it; you know, those people who think summer tires won’t cause their car to slide into mine…

Lars got rear-ended yesterday. He wasn’t driving my car. Almost immediately after he pulled out of that accident, he was almost in another. We’re not in Dubai; where major accidents are seen about any time you leave the house. Car accidents are so rare here, that little fender-benders have people stopping to stare for hours on end. At one point throughout his travels yesterday, it took him almost half an hour to drive a block – traffic was creeping so slowly. This feels a lot like I imagine hell freezing over would.

Again, I’m thankful I can hide from the most of it. And today is meant to be the coldest day of the week, before it heats up a little again. Hopefully, by the time I write my next entry, I’ll have a lot less ‘cold’ to bitch about.

She won’t let me work. She’s on my lap, demanding attention. The more I try to push her away, the more demanding she gets. So I finally let her up. She’s not content to just sit on my lap, she needs me to be cuddling and caressing her between calls. She purrs and licks my chin until I pet her, and then she purrs some more. The cat’s tongue feels like sandpaper – must be nature’s way of helping her clean herself?

Her name is Diablo, but we call her SnowPus because when we had that really bad winter a few years back, we discovered she adores the snow. She was my mom’s ‘vacation cat’. As in, my mother came back to Canada for a two-month vacation from Dubai one year, and couldn’t stand living without a cat so bought this pure white kitten, and trusted my brother to look after her when mom went home. My brother did take care of her, and my mom moved back to Canada a year or so later, bringing a zoo of animals including 7 cats with her.

When mom died, she left behind SnowPus, and 4 of the 7 cats she’d come back from Dubai with (the other three died before mom did – and my mom cried her eyes out every time). She also left us Max, the rat-like Chihuahua. At this very moment, Max is cuddled in bed with Lars who is getting some much-needed rest; SnowPus is on my lap purring away and the other 4 cats are up stairs or out in the yard doing what cats do.

Exactly a year ago today, or rather midnight tonight, is the exact time my brother called me to tell me mom was on her way to the hospital again, by ambulance. Less than 5 hours later, around 4:30am on July 23rd, she suffered the last of 7 heart attacks she’d had that night and died. On July 23rd, just after 3pm, I sat next to the hospital bed that my mom’s body was laying on – and through my tears, wished her a happy 55th birthday.

We later learned that the cause of her heart attacks, the cause of her death was Septicaemia (otherwise known as blood poisoning). A week or so earlier, she was diagnosed with blood poisoning, caused by a cat-bite she’d gotten while trying to save SnowPus’s life from the grips of Wrinky; the three-legged cat that came home from Dubai with her. Wrinky bit into my mother hard. It’s safe to assume through my mother’s binge drinking, blacking out, and pure lack of self-concern, she didn’t take any prescribed medicines and if she did, she didn’t take them correctly.

My mom lived her whole life catering to cats. She collected cats – both live and those created artistically. Every ornament she ever bought had a cat on it, every shirt she ever wore, and every set of dishes the ever purchased with glee. She was so obsessive about cats; she used to joke about whom she was going to leave her cat collection to when she passed. We contemplated opening a cat museum, or a cattery for people to board cats in her care.

Wrinky bit into my mom, while my mom tried to save another of her cats from her. Wrinky herself, coincidently, had been saved by my mother’s pure heart years before, when my mom asked for her birthday gift only to be that Wrinky get the surgery that cost thousand’s of dollars and left her a leg short, after being hit by a car. The three-legged cat still lives with us today, but she’s kept separate from SnowPus at all times. And when in err the two do cross paths in the yard, they immediately start off where they left off - trying to kill each other.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a greater irony. The very creature she’d spent the majority of her life trying to save helped induce my mom’s death...

Yesterday, the road report said the temperature was 2 degrees, at noon. I find that hard to believe because the chill of the breeze seemed to slice though my clothing and into my skin. I was almost sure I’d wake up this morning to find a coat of white snow covering everything in sight. The mountains surrounding this little town have been capped in snow for a couple of weeks now. It’s creeping in.

I hate the cold. And it doesn’t help that the sun seems to start setting around 4pm. By 5 you feel as though it’s about 11pm – time for bed; when really, you haven’t even had dinner yet. Winter is depressing for me. The next few months will not be easy.

It was just before midnight when I snuck out the front door for a cigarette. Giddily talking on the phone I obliviously sat in the chair just next to the small garden and listened to the pouring rain in the background. “If I get eaten by a bear I’m blaming you,” I told him. If he hadn’t have called, I’d have still been snuggled up in my bed, a cigarette the furthest thing from my mind. To my left I heard rummaging, “There’s a coon, bear or cougar in the neighbour’s garage. I can hear him thumping around the garbage bins in there.” In the pitch of the night, I couldn’t see a thing beyond the car port just 15 feet away. As the thumping and rummaging continued, I stood starting to worry about what unseen creature was so close to me going about his business. Stretching my eyes as far as they could go, I peered into the darkness. After a few moments of silence my nerves got the best of me. I crushed my full cigarette in the garden and stepped back into the door frame of the house, one hand on the door ready to close in a moment’s notice.

Within seconds a black bear appeared from behind a car. “There’s a bear! Oh my god, there’s a bear and it’s the first time I have seen one this close up,” I whispered in a hurried voice into the phone. He must have weighed just 350 or so pounds. He was a little bear, the size I like to think of as a teenager. In his mouth he carried a small sandwich bag. The neighbours must have left the bear lock on their garbage undone. As I stood in the doorway he casually sauntered across our yard, not 6 feet away from me, stopping only next to the tiny tree in the yard to our right. He sat down with his prize and pawed at it for a while. Deciding it wasn’t what he wanted or devouring the contents, he picked himself up and this time walked back to his treasure chest of goods. He made his way back into the black of the garage and disappeared for a moment before the thumping and rummaging started again. Something spooked him, and he dashed out of the black and up behind my parked car, proving how quick he could be if needed.

With a bear that spooked and that close I decided it best to go into the house, closing the door behind me. I made my way to the balcony on the second floor where I watched as another neighbour switched on her balcony light and shot a flashlight through the streets. “He’s in Mike’s yard,” I shouted. Once she spotted him, she let me know and started calling her kitty. I watched the bear make his way back across the streets, and behind a house, certainly on his way to the comforts of his woodsy home.

I wasn’t sure if the boy on the phone believed me. And since he was driving across Canada at the time for work, the phone connection wasn’t all that great. Eventually, while I still gazed at this majestic wildlife in our front yard the phone had disconnected. We didn’t talk to one another until he was a few hours from visiting me here, yesterday.

So last night before dusk we sat on the porch eating, drinking and enjoying the company of a few friends. “Oh my goodness you guys, the bear is back,” Emily pointed to the apple tree in the back yard just 10 feet below us and a few feet away. We closed the balcony gate and watched as an even larger bear then the one I’d seen the night before, perhaps 500 pounds of him, swiped up an apple off the ground and put it in his mouth. He casually made his way across the yard where the real treat was left for him. We’d left a bucket of raked apples meant for the compost next to the green house. All the children in the house watched through a window as the bear sat with the bucket between his legs and feasted on the sugary treats. There was no disbelieving for the boy on the phone now.

Being this close to nature at its finest is one of the blessings of being here in BC. It truly is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And there’s nowhere else on the planet I’d rather be right now.