Magnificent Driftwood

I can’t believe I’m related to her. I can’t believe she used to be my best friend. I can’t believe that Nana is still controlling us from the grave.

Kathy – It’s Katherine now please! – is my cousin but Nana had to explain that to us. We believed and acted like twin sisters whenever we were in the same place, which was every summer at Nana’s cottage down the road from Sandbanks.

Races to the end of the dock, melting sneakers on the bricks by the fire, singing along to Uncle Mike playing Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box on his guitar. “What’s a squeeze box? What’s a squeeze box?” we’d shout. Mike would say it was an accordion, but he’d laugh in a way that made us think he was lying, so we’d ask again every time he played the song.  We might have felt we were missing something about the squeeze box but never about each other. 

We’d hunt and hide treasures: odd-coloured rocks, a robin’s feather, the perfect piece of driftwood. We told each other stories in our own language. We stayed awake for hours listening to mosquitos trying to breach the screens on the porch where, upon begging, Nana would let us sleep on hot nights.

September brought salty tears to sunburned cheeks when our “real families” came to take us home – me to Kingston and Kathy to Windsor. We saw each other at family gatherings – Christmas, weddings, Uncle Mike’s funeral – but nothing matched the sisterhood of Nana’s little house by the lake. 

When we hit our teens, the days of spending two months together ended. Summer jobs and boyfriends beckoned, but we did our best to eke out a long weekend to jump off the dock together or fall asleep in the sunroom. Campfires were never the same without Uncle Mike.

I was thrilled when Kathy and I were accepted at Loyalist College. We got a cheap apartment together in Belleville and it was there that cracks appeared, first in the walls, and then our friendship. Kathy hung around a group calling themselves the Young Conservatives and started calling herself Katherine. I found her politics uncomfortable and her righteousness rigid. Before the tension had time to boil, she dropped out of college and married Dick from Detroit. Really his name was Richard, but I kept the nickname and my opinions to myself.

Her parents did not. They were appalled, and said so, when Richard announced over dinner: “There’s no such thing as homelessness. Hobos have been around forever.”  Eventually Kathy – sorry, Katherine – ditched the dick but kept the dual citizenship, and the emotional distance from her parents.

She moved to the County to be closer to Nana and, she claimed, to me.  I was pitching local stories to the Globe, or the Whig Standard, struggling to make a living as a journalist – a profession she referred to as leftist, granola-eating, tree-hugging fabulists. She claimed she got all the news she needed from Facebook. The Bay of Quinte might as well have been the Pacific Ocean, the gulf between us grew.

It’s-Katherine-Now-Please married a goat farmer with a confederate flag waving from the gate. Nana, who’d taken her side in the Detroit Dick dispute, accepted Bert the Bigot without question. She even switched to a new optometrist when Kathy complained about “coffee colored complexion” of her long-time eye doctor.  When Bert died in a motorcycle crash, Kathy became a rich, right-winged racist – one who reveled in her opportunity to cast a vote in the American election.

“Doesn’t it bother you that he brags about assaulting women?” I asked her.

“A minor character flaw,” she insisted. “He’s going to do what needs to be done – fix the economy, stop all these immigrants—"

“But it’s not even your country!”

“Girls, girls,” Nana called quietly from the porch. “No time for politics when the sunset’s as beautiful as this one. Come sit.”

There were glimpses of Kathy-before-Katherine. When my own marriage imploded, it was Nana who I turned to, and Kathy who raced to be with us, a bottle of comforting Pino Grigio in hand.  She’d turned the goat farm into a winery and removed the confederate flag.

Concessions to kindness were few and far between, though. When the pandemic hit, she was the first to stockpile toilet paper and canned goods. What she did not do, was take any precautions when visiting Nana. She alternated between excuses: the government’s trying to control us – “it’s a fake virus” – or it’s justified under the public health guidelines – “we’re a bubble.”

She railed against governments and health units. She refused to wear a mask, refused to keep her distance, and refused to listen to reason, spouting instead, the words of her favourite politician: “It’s going to magically disappear by summer!” When it didn’t disappear, Kathy raised the stakes of her wilful ignorance. By the fall, she actively campaigned and attended rallies in Michigan, ignoring advice not to travel, ignoring warnings to avoid crowds, ignoring Nana’s worsening cough.

Rather than chasten, Nana’s death seems to have strengthened Kathy’s belief in things that cannot be true. The virus is a hoax! The American election was stolen! Trudeau is using vaccines to microchip us all!

I can’t believe I’m related to her. I can’t believe she used to be my best friend. I can’t believe Nana is still calling for us to sit together again and watch the sun set.

We meet at the cottage that held so many happy memories. My face is masked, and mascara streaked, Kathy’s bare and bitchy. Each of us has a key. We enter and move through the house wordlessly. On the dusty floor in the sunroom, a piece of paper is weighted down and framed by a rippled purple stone, a robin’s feather, and a perfect piece of driftwood – two pieces, intricately embraced.

 

Girls

If you are reading this then I am with Mike. When he died, my heart became so heavy, I was sure it would stop beating. I never told anyone this, but I walked into the lake that night, certain that my heavy heart would hold me under the water, and I might die along with my son.

Two pretty songbirds came along and made me smile. When I saw you, holding hands at the church, I thought maybe I could stay alive for one more summer, just to see you girls scampering along the water’s edge or sleeping under the stars in this room.

You saved my life, you see. Yes, I am gone now, but thanks to you, I had a longer and happier life. You were always more than cousins. You used to insist that you were twin sisters, separated at birth. Curious, creative and oh so beautiful, together. You helped me find joy again.

Like this piece of magnificent driftwood – each branch is lovely on its own but wound together it becomes something more: a breathtaking work of art. Beautiful enough to make an old woman want to keep on living. See how special it is and know that you are that special to me.

I’ve left the cottage to you both in the hope that you will work together – keep it, sell it – I don’t care. Just work together. Lift each other’s hearts. Be magnificent driftwood.

Nana

 

I use my mask to dab my tears then hand it to Kathy who does the same.  She reaches for my hand and holds it. We sit for a while, listening to the rhythm of the water and our own breathing.

“Leave it to Nana to find beauty in warped things,” Kathy says.

I laugh and squeeze her hand a little tighter. Maybe she and I aren’t that different after all. I see the world as it is, and she sees the world as she wants it to be. I gather facts and make sense of them. She finds fallacies that make sense to her and she clings to them. She can call herself anything she likes, vote for anyone she likes, and spout any cockamamie conspiracy. Beneath the brittle bitchiness, she’ll always be my Kathy. We’ll move forward, focusing on the things that unite us: our love for Nana, this cottage and each other.

As for my feelings about her fallacies, I’ll keep them to myself.  I’ll wear two masks.