From Anna's Diary - How do I love thee?

I don’t know how this is possible, but I find myself drawn to this man, this priest, Christopher Dryden. How can anything whole and healthy survive between us? I have led such a life that, even to tell it would shock him to the core. As for him, he leads a life I would find dreadfully boring. It’s all routines and ritual and sacrifice.

But still, I must admit to an unavoidable attraction. It has something to do with his pure convictions, and the way he looks at me, not as a woman so much as a work of art. I’m tired of being looked at as a woman, as an available woman, as a woman that miners can resort to when their passions must be relieved. I do want to leave this life of bondage to men’s crude lusts. But if that were my sole attraction to Christopher I would squash it underfoot.

The odd thing is, despite all his talk of creeds and salvation and eternal damnation, he has already forgiven me my sins without my having bowed to any of it. I can tell by the way he looks at me that Christopher cannot bear to condemn me to perdition. I am a torment to him, and a balm, and love being his perpetual contradiction in the flesh. In a peculiar way his perplexity delights me because it makes him fallible as well as pure. I do not want to destroy his faith, but am not content to leave it unchallenged. For in my heart I know he desires me as something more than an ideal, and I think he will be a lover such as I have never known.

Sketch: The Shard

It sat in its cradle of wood, transubstantiating the crisp white light of a fall afternoon. Grandmother had placed it on her kitchen windowsill, which faced southeast, looking out toward Newcastle Island and Nanaimo Harbour. I had never noticed it before, but it had been there all along, refracting the brilliance that poured in on sunny days; dimmed somewhat, when scudding clouds roiled in off the Strait of Georgia; inanimate after nightfall, when the only available light was the crass effulgence from her kitchen fixtures.

One day Mother would inherit this heirloom. But that was a long way off. And it would be an even longer time before I took any serious interest in the shard. As a child I didn't really recognize the image of Mary Magdalen etched into the fragment. I was more interested in the unformulated patterns of light that played tricks with my eyes, and ended up splayed on the scuffed linoleum of my Grandmother's kitchen floor. Pretty, was the only word I had to describe the sensations that light caused. But even then, it meant so much more to me.

"That belonged to your Great-Grandmother Anna Dryden," Grandmother informed me. She knew just how meaningless her concatenation of genealogy would be to a four-year-old, so she didn't press the matter. Now, when I think of it, I realize that Grandma was Anna Welland's daughter-in-law, and that her husband Cameron was Anna's only son, and that the tendrils of relationship extend back that far. Farther than I ever could have imagined, before Mother told me more about that remarkable piece of glass.

I had hoped to own it someday - but Brenda has laid claim to it too.

Funny to think a shard of glass would become such valued treasure that it would be contested article in Mum's estate. But neither Brenda nor I are good losers, and even though Mum's not dead yet, we're already scrapping over it. I think it's rightfully mine because I did the research that added a historical dimension to what was, after all, merely a shiny object. Brenda believes it's hers by some feminist variant of logic that adds up to a quasi-legal birthright. She's not at all interested in sharing. Which is just as well, because I don't want to share it either, even though I made the suggestion. "You'll just have to come over and visit more often so you can have a look at it when it's sitting in my kitchen window," was her last word on the subject.

Actually, the kitchen window reference is anachronistic. The Shard of Mary hasn't sat in Grandmother's kitchen window for almost 20 years. When Dad inherited it Mother placed it on top of the piano in their living room. Neither of them seemed bothered by the fact that it would never be activated by direct sunlight as long as it sat there. They seemed content to leave its luster dulled by the drab, brown wall behind. Didn't bother me much, either, until later. Truth is, I experienced an evanescent epiphany when I first saw the stained glass fragment on Grandmother's windowsill, then I forgot about it. It became a glittery part of her world beyond reach or significance.

Further Notes:

• There will be analogies drawn between the coloured glass and hallucinations brought on by Kyle's use of drugs in his hippie youth;
  
• The fragment was picked up by Anna Armstrong after the window in St. Saviour's had been shattered by the opponents of Rev. Christopher Dryden.
• She kept it as a memento her entire life, having the edges of the shard capped in copper and a little stand built for it.
• Mary Magdalen's profile along with a glimpse of halo is captured in the fragment.
• Anna and Christopher were left alone in the church after Madame Blavinsky and her girls fled the window's dedication service - they and a few miners had been the only ones in attendance.
• Christopher continued with the service even after the newly installed stained glass window had been shattered. After the service he sat with Anna alone in St. Saviour's to pray.
• She had not accepted his proposal for marriage at that point. She knows after that service that she will, and that they will have to leave Barkerville.
  
• The shard symbolized all that for Anna, and Kyle is the one who will rediscover the story in the glass.
  

Sketch: Scattering of Ashes

My father's ashes sat in a cardboard box up on a shelf in his bedroom for almost a year. What do you do? Mum couldn't make up her mind where to scatter them, and it's not the kind of thing you make suggestions about, is it? So they sat up there with the old scarves, and hats, and sweaters that nobody wears anymore. Stuff that had been set aside, and forgotten.

Every once in a while Brenda would call. "What are we going to do with Dad?" she'd say. She wanted Mum to bury the ashes. Mum and Dad had actually purchased plots years ago, but for some reason Mum put off the idea of actually interring Dad. "I don't want him stuck in the ground," was all she'd say about it. "But Mom, he won't just be stuck in the ground! There'll be a service," Brenda argued. Mum would want a place where she could go and visit her husband of sixty years, Brenda told the rest of us.

When my mother-in-law Esther died, Frank snuck into Beacon Hill Park and scattered her ashes in a little grove, where he'd also purchased a plaque on a bench right beside a pleasantly burbling brook. "Esther would have liked that," he said. And to hell with the civic bylaws. Actually, he accomplished the deed in shifts, bringing pockets full of Esther to her final resting place and scattering her. It reminded me of The Great Escape, where the POWs would carry dirt from their tunnel out into the yard and spread it around right under the noses of the German guards. Frank didn't send the contraband materials rattling down his pant leg, though. He transported Esther in zip-lock bags, which he emptied ceremoniously, then carefully folded and reused.

Like Frank, Dad had served in World War II. Dad as a bomber pilot. At one point I'd wanted to write a book based loosely on Dad's life. This would have been a couple of years before his heart attack. I asked him to go with me to the Canadian Air & Space Museum in Toronto to look at a Lancaster bomber they have in their collection. But he always begged off. I thought it was his reticence about the war that held him back. Mum told me later that it wasn't reticence at all: by the time I got around to asking him, a mild dementia had set in and Dad was afraid he wouldn't be able to remember anything about the plane, or how he flew it. He didn't want to go and gawk at something that had been part of his own story and not remember a damn thing about it.

When Mum told me that, it was like she'd fastened a lead ball to my heart. I felt like an asshole.

Anyway, something had to be done with Dad's ashes...

To be continued...