The Dishwasher Post

I've been about as active as a tree these past couple of weeks. Swaying a little in the wind, but mostly staying rooted in one spot. You want me over there? You'll have to literally chop my legs out from under me and haul me over in a wheelbarrow.

To be fair to me, because it's important that we're fair to me, it's been kind of a busy fall. Barclay went to Louisville, I went to Toronto, we all went to Saskatoon and Frontier. I had my book launch events and parties, I did interviews. The book was published in Canada in September, then hit First Reads in November, and will publish everywhere it hasn't already been in less than two weeks (this is by far the most prolonged publishing experience I have ever had). Behind the scenes, I've been working on other things, pitching other things, hanging out with my family, and trying to keep the house clean. 

But I've also been thinking about how much I would like to write about the things that have happened this fall. It's been special, stressful, weird, fun, terrifying, miraculous, challenging, exciting, etc. Good. It's been very good. And I've learned a lot and grown a lot, and after 16 years of using this blog as a place to process life events, it feels like I haven't fully learned something or experienced something until I've written it down. But every time I sit down to write it out, I think, what first? Where do I even start?

Maybe it's like cleaning a house. You don't (or at least, I don't) start at the beginning of the house and clean it in order. I pick the most manageable thing and do that first. I load the dishwasher. An easy, small task that has a big impact and clears the counter off and helps me to see what needs to be done next. 

Okay, so this is my loading the dishwasher post. It's not the first thing that happened this fall, or the most important, or the biggest. It's just the first thing I'm going to write about because, oddly, it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about Fall 2024. Ahem:

When I travel to a different city, my brain short-circuits with enthusiasm. It screams, LOOK AT ALL THIS NEW STUFF. IT'S SO SUPERIOR TO ANYTHING YOU HAVE BACK HOME. I just love everything so much. I think, Why don't I live here? Look how beautiful these people are! The buildings! The trees! Their strangers are so kind, their sunsets are so pretty. Even their squirrels are better than our squirrels! 

Rose-colored glasses, they call it. I always pack my rose-colored glasses.

So, okay,

I was landing the plane in Toronto—like, I wasn't landing the plane; I don't know why I wrote it like that but I'm leaving it because it's fun to imagine that I was landing the plane—but anyway, the pilot was landing the plane, and I was looking out the window. I saw the CN Tower and all of the lovely skyscrapers, and some tiny baseball diamonds and sweet little trucks doodling along that I could imagine plucking up off the roads and throwing right into Lake Ontario. As we got closer still, I saw rows and rows of what looked like lawn chairs, just perfectly lined up, a whole field of them, and I thought, what's this? It looks like an outdoor music festival! An outdoor music festival, on a Wednesday? In October? Amazing! I was so proud of Toronto for that. In Saskatchewan, we keep our outdoor music festivals to the summer months, because as soon as September 15 hits, everyone goes into their houses and starts complaining about the weather on Facebook. Oh,Toronto! I gazed down at it with my rose-colored glasses.

So I was sitting there in the sky, just thrilled that Toronto was holding some kind of outdoor music festival, and I was wondering who was playing and what I was missing and I was kind of marveling at how neatly the people had lined up their lawn chairs—maybe the festival planners had spray-painted lines on the ground so people would know exactly where to sit—when the plane dipped just a tiny bit lower and I noticed that all of the people seemed to be holding bouquets of flowers and I thought, wow! Everyone has flowers! That's just so lovel—and then I realized all at once that what I was seeing was not a music festival, not shiny happy people sitting in perfect rows holding bouquets of flowers and enjoying a concert on a Wednesday afternoon in October but actually...a graveyard. Neat rows of headstones with wreaths and funeral sprays on them. 

And if that doesn't perfectly showcase my rose-colored glasses travel situation, I don't know what does. 

Anyway. That's the dishwasher post. Tomorrow, I'll vacuum the floor. And I don't really know what that means just yet.