January in Kispiox Valley, BC

January.

The slow dawns of northern winter wake us gently, the twilight place between light and not-light stretching long and spreading thick over the valley. These days I become awake in stages; with the first rooster call, with the dogs beginning to shift, with the light that begins as a detectable difference emitted by the mountains, with the cold making its way between wool blankets.

These are the good old days, as my brother likes to say – a play on how our Japanese-Canadian grandmother talks about her childhood during the Great Depression and WWII years in Vancouver and in internment camps. These are our good old days, as transient as they are overconfident. Hers contained moments of sweetness in a daily uncertainty; for us, these are the moments (years? decades?) we have left to soak in the absurd abundance all around us, despite the hair-raising awareness that it simply cannot last.

We are facing the end of an era, the collapse of the empire of humanity. Finally it is part of our everyday conversations, the news we see on our handheld doom devices. But it isn’t here, not here, yet. We have all this bounty and all this destruction and we hold it all in our tiny fists, in our pale palms, and we pray for some kind of redemption as we go about our small, mundane, miraculous lives.