Touch You Last

The term "rope-drop" has become a weirdly ubiquitous phrase in our family. I didn't realize how commonplace it was until this past summer when we were at a waterpark and Teddy suggested we rope-drop the lazy river ride.  If you've never heard the phrase before, it's essentially a Disney thing where you arrive at the park before it opens so you can march directly to your ride of your choice once the staff drops the rope. You typically target the most popular ride, and by rope-dropping, you have a 15 minute wait for the ride instead of a 2 hour wait if you get there later in the day. Sarah was a pro at this for our first Disney visit, and has perfected the art over subsequent trips. We've rope-dropped Seven Dwarves Mine Train, Radiator Springs Racers, Rise of the Resistance, Test Track, Web Slingers, Big Thunder Mountain - I won't attempt to do the math, but I can safely say she's saved us 25 hours of waiting with this skill (not counting subsequent park...

  Earlier this year, Sarah and I had a rare experience: a long car ride without the kids. It was just the two of us in the car for over four hours – with no kids shows playing in the background, no interruptions, no little ears nearby.   And we spent four hours just talking about us. I don't quite remember how it started, but it became this moment-by-moment retelling of our relationship from the very start – from back in high school as we were just becoming friends. For decades she has been my favourite person in the world, my best friend, the heart of all my best memories, and you'd think there wasn't much more we could learn about our story. But maybe through complete honestly, new perspectives earned over time, and Sarah's still shockingly good memory for details, we both learned things we didn't know. When we got home, I pulled out a box of old letters and it became this archeological dig. The words I’d written, I'll admit, were shockingly juvenile at time...

Understatement: Sarah is a reader. True statement (which may sound exaggerated but isn’t): Sarah has read over 200 books so far this year. She’s the voracious reader I wish I was and imagined I’d be when I was younger. Real books, e-books, audiobooks – she eats them all up. The area beside our bed is a minefield, where she’ll have 30 or so books within reach. (She only reads two or three at once, but she likes to have options.) Her interests are broad , and it’s easier to list off what she doesn’t like: sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She also doesn’t love depressing fiction, but she has read some of the most depressing-sounding non-fiction that you’ve ever heard of. Falling Home: Creating a Life That Catches You When You Fall, If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging, Invisible Women: Data Bias In a World Designed by Men; What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resistance, and Healing . True story – one night in bed, I rolled over around three in the morni...

My first draft of this began, "Sarah is not afraid of having difficult conversations." And from the outside, that seems very true. When she argues with someone who's being deliberately ignorant, or when she tells a friend or family member something they need to know but don't want to hear – she does it with  confidence and conviction. These are the conversations that most people would rather dive off a cliff then have, and she marches right into them, seemingly without fear. But that’s only the way it appears. She feels the same deep discomfort as you and I do, but pushes through that to say what needs to be said. About half the time, it’s the choleric in her that makes her speak up. When someone is promoting a mistruth, especially a dangerous one, she’s all over them. Anti-vaxxers beware because (in her own words) vaccination is the hill she will always die on. She regularly takes on relatives (of mine, sadly) who post White Lives Matter-style garbage on social media...

Day six of the cruise is Halifax, and we make no plans other than to see frieeeeeeends! I’d emailed Pat two weeks before (because I’m a disorganized piece of crap) to let him know we’d be in Halifax for the day… and would love to see him… but we understood that it was crazy last minute so no worries if he couldn’t… but we would love to see him, and further easygoing yet pleading statements followed by ellipses. Supercool guy that he is, he cleared his schedule for the day so he could be with us. It had been eleven damn years since we’d seen each other, when he’d passed through Ottawa on a road trip, and we were beyond overdue to meet up again. He met us near the dock, looking unaged in a way that was criminal (which did not surprise me in the least). I hugged him until he pooped, and then we went for a walk. There’s a very nice public park near his apartment and we started there, catching up a little bit on life and career stuff. Emerging from the park, he drew our attention to the...

I love the way Sarah moves. She’s a hand-talker, but none of her motions are wild or flailing: she’s precise. If she’s talking about a sequence or an order of things, her hand does a dicing-vegetables motion. If she’s talking geography or anything spatial, she’ll drape her hands over imaginary items, moving them from place to place. If she’s not doing that, she’s plucking things from the air, spreading her palms over the expanse of something, or chopping both hands at the sky in unison. When she overhears strangers talking and realizes she can help them out (with directions, facts, or general knowledge), she’ll literally tiptoe over to them, put her wrists down to her hips with her hands spread parallel to the floor, and she'll tilt her body the one side as if she’s peeking out from behind a curtain. It’s her delicate approach where she physicalizes her awareness that she’s been eavesdropping, and she’s sorry to interrupt but I have knowledge to share! When she dances, ...