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Le passé n’est jamais tout à fait le passé. N’avez-vous pas senti comme il rôde partout, Et tangible? Il est là, lucide, clairvoyant, Non pas derrière nous, comme on croit, mais devant.
The past is never entirely past. Haven’t you sensed it prowling around, Tangible? It is there, lucid, clairvoyant, Not behind us, as we believe, but out in front.
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IT MUST HAVE been around the time of Diana’s memorable visit to the library, give or take a few months, that a new and unexpected happiness found us. Who knew that True Love could walk up to your door, ring the bell, and take a seat at the dining-room table? As it happens, it was the very table where a few weeks earlier I’d sat alone and clipped an ad from the Companions column of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. “To enjoy travel, the arts, books and other pleasures,” the ad promised. “For a relationship based on equality and love.” Yes, please, I’ll have one of those. And now, here he was, that “friendly, attractive professional man, mid-40s,” in our dining room, serenaded by the splash of Diana’s pet turtles, the rustle from her cage of white mice, the miasmic wheeze of our smelly old dog. If he’d made a run for it, who could have blamed him? But he didn’t run; he lingered. In fact, when he headed home that evening (and wouldn’t you know it, this being Saskatoon, he lived just down the block?), we’d been tête-à-tête, in conversation, for six entire hours. Where does the time go? Twenty-six years later, we are still at the same table, still talking nonstop, and Keith is father, by adoption, to Diana and an adored grandpa to her two little daughters.
Back in the 1990s, nothing spoke of love like moving in together and getting the kitchen done up. And so one day, after Keith’s sleepovers had morphed imperceptibly into permanent occupancy and our search for a place to call our own had brought us back, again and again, to this very house, we realized that this was it. It was time to call in the contractors. Out went the battered old kitchen cabinets and down came the kitchen walls, choking the room with dust, splinters of lath, and a volcanic outpouring of wood-chip insulation.
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