2025 wrap

"I'm doing my 2025* wrap up blog today," I told Eva.

"Try and find something positive to say," she replied, almost dared.

Yeah, it's been that kind of year.

We knew at its beginning that it would involve upheaval. Eva's mom had passed away in October 2024* and she left us her century old overgrown doublewide trailer three hours to the east. We had structured our lives such that moving made the most financial sense (we'd been paying the mortgage on this place for some time, reducing its carrying cost)...but that didn't mean I had to like it.

I moved a lot as a kid. My parents were all about the "fresh start"; they were the kind of people who could move into a new house on Saturday and be out Sunday looking at farmhouses for sale. Mom and John achieved their dream of country living after I'd left home.

It was never a dream I shared. For all my babbling about community, I confess I LIKE the anonymity of urbanity. I prefer worlds in which strangers never ask me what I do for a living. I must have been asked that question as regarded my parents fifteen times on my first day of grade nine at Oakridge S.S. in London, and the answer didn't pass anyone's vibe check. Preppy high schools are just like small towns. I shouldn't have to go back to high school at the age of fiftymumble, damn it.

And the move itself was the hardest of the more than twenty I've been through. We got here just in time for a massive ice storm that killed our power for most of three days; a tree had fallen across our driveway, trapping a family friend here. Not an auspicious beginning. 

And it wasn't a week before a woman I'd never seen before in my life was asking me what I did for a living. Sigh. She's now a Facebook friend, so maybe I'm growing up. 

We made the best of it, the three of us. Winter slushed into spring simmered into summer, and we found much to appreciate here. Darkness, quiet, space, an agreeable sense of being hidden from the world. A lack of steps to trip and fall on. A bidet attachment I wish I'd bought thirty years ago. We bought it mostly to save the septic tank from toilet tissue; but what it really does is -- you know how on those days when you're peeing out your bum, the softest asswipe feels like coarse sandpaper soaked in acid? Yeah, that's gone. Now my bean-blowing starfish is caressed by a gentle blast of warm water, air-dried, and told "you're a good boy".

We were all enjoying the country, and then Mark died on the morning of August 21 and changed everything.

Eva and I were married fourteen years before Mark arrived. We've always had the comfortable sort of marriage that gives each other space, so losing Mark didn't affect us  (no THEM, only a lesser us). We just picked up the threads of our tapestry, but it's now missing Mark's colour, a colour that had permeated our world before. Mark's absence is a daily presence, for us and our animals both. You pick up the pieces and go on (what choice do you have?) but you feel it, all the time.

His ashes rest in a framed memorial with a picture of him surrounded by Dolly and Bubbles and Q.T., right beside  the television. We apologize to him when we put a show on that he hated.

Eva and I are alive, but neither of us have been in good health this year. Eva has lost thirteen teeth, to her great upset. Her oral hygiene had always been perfect, but when you take sixty (!) pills a day in a (futile) effort to maintain nutrition balance, shit happens. She has dentures now, but eating is still a struggle for her.

My own mental health has not been the greatest and it's had numerous ugly physical manifestations I'd just as soon not get into. As the year ends, I'm starting a new job, which will get me out of the house and in contact with other human beings. It's been a decade since paying bills involved physical effort, and let's just say I can tell. After a mere 24 hours over four days, my feet needed a day of nothingness, Which is kind of pathetic; if you'd seen me at the end of each shift, hobbling and wobbling, you'd scratch the "kind of". But every day has been a little bit better. 

We've joined the local YMCA entirely for the therapy pool, which is kept almost at bathtub temperature. In fact, I went swimming in the middle of writing this blog. Eva had a small town moment of her own: a pair of women her age singing George Michael in the change room. One of them admired Eva's ink and out of nowhere pointed to her bikini line and said "I used to have a little mouse tattoo right here until my pussy ate it."

Stay classy, Campbellford.

The highlight of my year was modest: a day in Kingston seeing the S.S. Keewatin, a Titanic-era steamship I'd crossed paths with before but hadn't toured. A wonderful, if beastly hot, day. 

______

Most years I blurb a bit on books, movies and music I've been exposed to. Little point in that this time: I've seen all of one movie for the year (on any kind of screen): The Long Walk, a brilliant film I'll never watch again. Eva wants me to go on record: we both loved the novel, the movie is traumatizing. Music has been almost entirely classical as I seek to lengthen my attention span; I'm quite sure nobody cares. Joe Hill's King Sorrow has been my favourite read this year.

There's really not much more I can say. This year more than most hollowed me out.

All the best to you all in 2026. 

*There. This is fixed now. I had every single year wrong in this without noticing. Ken, you dumbass.