Wishful kindling.

We take fire safety very seriously around here. You know this. It's been decades in the making and today was our annual brigade. Since we technically have five complete divisions (five households if you count the main house, Duncan and Dalton's apartment downstairs, August above the garage, Sam and Matt in the grey house at the edge of the cliff and Batman's monolith, six if you branch out to Ruth and her husband but we gave them the supplies and they know how it goes) it's a large operation and no one gets a pass. There's no maybe later. No opting out. You show up and you show up ready to roll. Ready to get the job done, as it were. I'm strict but Lochlan's stricter. 

Each house gets 2 fire blankets and two current fire extinguishers per floor for the larger spaces, one of each for the smaller. They are wall-mounted in easy to grab places and everyone knows where they are-not told- they must independently tell me where they are and then are confirmed to be correct. 

No one has ever failed my pop quizzes, if you wonder. 

We test the smoke detectors and the carbon monoxide detectors. We check the lights on the detectors and make sure they flash. Our phones get alerts. This is the way when one of us is deaf. 

We make sure everything charging is done and unplugged or out in the open. Batteries live in battery bags or boxes. Compromised batteries live in the driveway and are taken to the recycling depot to their special boxes within days of failure.  

We make copies of up to date insurance policies, new digital wallets and investments and put current bank statements in the safe(s) along with coins, cash, stored media on hard drives, really expensive jewellery, passports and birth certificates. The safes are fireproof and bolted to the floors in hidden locations. I would gut the contents into a bag and go. If I couldn't get to it I know I could come back later and I know where it would land if it fell through burning floors. Even so, stuff is always replaceable. 

We moved the cat carriers to the foyer to the top of the closet, with a bag that contains food and treats and litter and a spare litter box. a few toys and blankets. 

We each have a go-bag of clothes and toiletries with room for devices and shoes and a blanket. Another three bags live in the butler's pantry on a shelf with water, electrolytes, and food.  The food and water gets rotated out and replenished regularly. There are jackets for all and shoes too by the front and the back door. 

Not to mention we are semi-off-grid and full-time preppers anyway, with rain barrels, solar and wind power, a fortress of a property, truth be told, and enough supplies to live on for months here. The issue each summer is what if it all burns down? 

We cut all shrubbery away from the porches and the trees away from the roof. We're plotting to get rid of the remaining cedars and we choose rock and concrete next to the house. Any fence that touches doesn't touch and is 4-6 inches away. It will buy us time. 

The attic has been checked and is in good condition. Nothing is up there save for fireproof insulation. The gas shut offs are labelled clearly. The gas fireplaces are off for the season and so are the wood ones, inspected, cleaned and closed. The outdoor firepit has a moat now but outdoor fires of that size are banned anyhow. We're down to tiny campfires on the beach if at all. We all have the wildfire app on our phones and we have an evacuation plan that we're working on as well as a meeting place away from home should we need it.  

If it does all burn to the ground I'm taking my boys and my children and moving back to the East Coast where summers are brisk and windy and there's nothing to burn on land already destroyed by salt-air. I'm going to call all of this a wash and start over, more simply this time. Less stuff. Less headaches. Less risk. Less heat. Less expense and less worry. 

It's not supposed to happen but you should always prepare as if it's about to. Then you can sleep at night knowing you're prepared.

Favoured by the fairies.

And just like that it's ten days later, I've had three whopping hours of sleep and the lilacs are finished, orangey-burnt purple petals forming a carpet extending ten feet around the diameter of each bush. The largest one is too big for me to cut on my own. Ben will do it easily and I did the general sides and underneath. The ones that are only a few years old are smaller and easier. I lamented at chopping them but it must be done. They're already spindly and tall and I'd like them to be full and solid, but the backyard ones are full south facing and the front ones are mostly shade so it's a bit like growing apples (which we do) and oranges (which we can't) in that they grow and behave fairly differently based on the amount of sun they receive. 

Kind of like your Bridget. She grew up in darkness so she's stunted and spindly and small and weak. Someone should have hacked me back years ago and tried again. 

I'm waiting for the postman-threeish packages coming. I'm waiting for dinner, though I don't even know what to make tonight. I'm waiting for the rain to come in heavy and soaking like last night as I lay awake, eyes open, brain racing, legs restless, breathing laboured. It's been sporadic and after I cut back everything I could this morning I gave everything a little water in case the rains don't actually hit. We've got so many huge trees and a network of shade via pergolas and gazebos and roofed areas that it's difficult for rain to reach the ground now. It's fine. I'm all but allergic to the sun, as I said I'm a child of the dark and I meant it. 

I watched Thrash this week on Netflix. Some gorgeous VFX work. Some predictable plotlines, some funny twists and really clever dialogue and cheering I didn't expect. I love creature films like I love slasher films and small-set films and stop-motion films and vintage films and well, any films, honestly. This one was a good way to kill a couple of hours and hell yes it could happen in real life, especially as storms get worse. These sharks weren't supernatural or vindictive, they were just sharks being sharks, after all. 

 I wonder if sharks like lilacs. I wonder what else is on Netflix to entertain me that I don't expect to and then am pleasantly surprised by. I wonder if I'll sleep tonight. Or any night, for that matter.

I left there on purpose.

  The snapdragons and lilies are about to open. The lilacs are fully resplendent and Ben and I take long walks around the property sticking our face into everything that doesn't currently contain a bee. There's a giant house spider living in my little stable studio and we have an agreement-he goes away while I clean and then later while I work and I let him live. I'm not a fan but after almost two decades here on the coast I'm not super afraid like I once was. It's like I tell the kids growing up-once you've been through worse, or have a little perspective, the scary things don't seem so scary after all. Insects are just doing what we're all doing-just trying to live. 

 Ben and I have a long history with lilacs and I will never pass one without stopping to breathe deeply. I did attempt to bring in some big bouquets for the tables but they were quickly re-relegated to the patio due to the overwhelming perfume they brought into the house. So my love for them is contingent on an equal does of petrichor and I just realized that now. 

 Today is a day off. A respite day, a plan booked going into the long weekend in order to facilitate rest after a very long and tense winter. 

I don't much like change in place or change in routine and I found solace in the smallest of things over the darkest of months. The boys remain vigilant and understanding as always as I fling myself wildly about my own life, bumping into once-sharp corners now rounded smooth from years of blunt connection. I listen to Drag Path play through my head like a piper's lament only for modern times and it never fails to strike me how my brain will cling to a melody until it loses its white-knuckle grip at last, falling back into the void below. 

I gained weight again, the inevitable result of eating on the run. Airports and convenience shops have little in the way of fresh fruits and vegetables and everything is too much too big too costly for what you're getting. I once asked for a plate of seasonal fruit at Reign in Toronto and it was $15. Now I go to the grocery store (not the creepy one, the big one further out) and pay that much for a bag of apples. Not a berry to be seen for that price but I don't complain. I wonder how we would have done it back in the day when Cole and I couldn't pay the electric bill without parking the car for the month because we had to pick heat and lights over gasoline. We lived up the hill from our grocery store back then and walked. I budgeted eight dollars a month for food back then and he stole from the restaurant he worked in to fill in the gaps when we got too hungry. 

We lived like spiders in the dark, skittering out when it seemed safe to get done what we needed to do before retreating back into the shadows in order not to scare people with our present-day ferity. 

You think I was feral. You never got to meet Cole. 

He did grow out of it, eventually but not enough to change his fate and that's okay. I watched from my shadows and decided never to take the chance and so I remain here hiding in the lilacs and negotiating with big spiders for real estate. Paying a kings ransom for some tree fruit and remembering every time I get a hint of it that rain is the most beautiful smell on earth. I thought it was flowers. I didn't know I was wrong.

Can you can you can you

Happy Mother's Day. This song has a chokehold on me.  

Beltane arrives with a whisper amongst the ten-foot-tall lilac hedges.

 That Sunday after I wrote that I moved a little over two-thirds of the soil myself. I could bury a body, or at least I need to stay strong enough so that if push came to shove, I could do it. All by myself. I was going to leave the small amount that remained for last Monday but then I think the boys felt sorry for me and came out and all but finished it, thanking me profusely for doing the lions share. I didn't tell them as a lion I would most likely mangle them and I also didn't tell them about staying limber in order to murder anyone who gets in my way. 

It's implied though. I'm sure of it. As much as they want to keep me locked up in a little box and leave me on the shelf, they're afraid of me. It's a mild fear, much the same as the fear of the brain freeze you get from the first ice cream from Bridge Drive-In once the floodwaters recede, usually around right now, which is just before Mother's Day. 

Raise your hand if you feel like the child-

Oh, just me? Fine. But at least I'm not afraid to admit it. 

The lilacs are indeed beginning to open. We've got three whites and a purple out front and the mother of all loaded purples out back and I keep sticking my face in them and inhaling deeply. Ben and I go for strolls every twelve to twenty hours, light or dark to check progress. The rest of the neighbours have wisteria but I love the lilacs even though the rest of the year they don't look like much. If I could create some kind of ever-blooming version then that would truly be heaven, along with a little ice cream and moonlight. 

It is a flower moon tonight and its slated to be warm overnight. I planted sunflower seeds. Maybe hasty? Maybe right on time. We're going to swim after dark tonight to mark the change in seasons and I can breathe without checking myself finally. Things feel normal again and less emergent. Things feel good. It all smells like lilacs and it's my favourite time of spring. 

Spring is not my favourite time of year, though, in case you thought it changed but lilac season is so close it's almost tied for first.