This is Nanaimo in the snow. This is one of the many bear-frequented trails that run above and below and alongside our little temporary Yew (tux wa’culhp) cottage on the campus of Vancouver Island University, where I’ve somehow found myself working. I get paid to put the ass back into assessment.
This is not Saigon. This is not Vietnam. Nope. This is the unseasonal winter in the far, far, south-westernmost corner of Canada. I have returned home at last, the inevitable prodigal daughter slinking back to her home island after a few decades out in the densely populated urban wilds of Asia major and Asia Minor, with husband and small boy in tow, ready for trees and emptiness and silence and duvets and log fires.
About three months ago, after just over four years in Vietnam, we journeyed from the suddenly beachless beach town of Mui Ne (global warming, typhoons, etc), where we had been hiding out since we quit our jobs and flat at the beginning of December, to the airport in Saigon to Japan to Vancouver to Victoria, and set off a chain reaction of a very unseasonal season of nearly constant rain, snow, wind and storms. Since we arrived, we’ve manage to drive up and down the island endless times, ferrying me between my distant job and my family two hours south, repeatedly outracing the worst XYZ storms in the past XYZ decades. Rain, wind, snow. We beat them all.
In a week or so, we will be moving into my long-empty childhood home in the forests of the Cowichan Valley, an hour southwest of Nanaimo, where cell phone signals still cannot reach. Michael and Thwack are busy priming and painting and tidying and my father is rebuilding the bathroom (burst pipe, wet walls) while I work away at academic matters at the university. The air is warming slowly and slightly, and the warning bells of imminent springtime are tinkling away- hey, birds and buds and rays of sunshine! The storms of the past few months have stopped (for now) and the promise of a massive new adventure looms curiously on the horizon. Our Masters degrees are finally done, we aren’t stuck in an exhausting huge city, and we have all the time and space in the world to do…something.
We’ll let you know what that something is as soon as we’ve figured it out. It’ll be massive, I tell ya.
For now, the Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai is at its most impractical, ever.
Waves hello after a ridiculously long absence.
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