I sit with my old friend, cradled in peace. We have known each other for sixty years. Sixty years is not just time. It is weather. It is road dust. It is grief survived, laughter restored, children raised, parents lost, bodies changed, lives taking different trails through the forest and somehow arriving again at the same clearing. Our friendship has weathered all the storms of life and all the changes that came with them. It has bent and held. It is sweet now. Easy. Healing. A quiet place to lay down the armour. We grew up in the Cariboo, she in a skid shack pulled from one logging camp to another, me on a ranch in an old log house. Both of us grew up without running water or electricity. We remember the inch of ice on the windows in the brutal cold of winter, waiting for the wood stove to be lit. Then standing in front of it, turning front to back, front to back, like little rotisserie children, trying to warm every side of ourselves. We remember the smell of kerosene lanterns in the long dark days of winter, and the hiss of white gas lanterns. We remember shadows moving on log walls, the cold floor beneath bare feet, the first heat blooming from the stove like mercy. We wonder now how our mothers survived. Cooking on wood stoves. Baking in wood ovens. Heating the three iron bottoms on the stovetop, clamping the wooden handle onto one to iron shirts and sheets, then trading it out for the next hot one when it cooled. The can of bubbling bacon fat saved for potatoes sizzling in the cast iron fry pan. The pans of water heated for a wash in the big galvanized tub once a week.
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