Cathrin Bradbury - The Bright Side: Twelve Months, Three Heartbreaks, and One (Maybe) Miracle

MY HOUSE IS SPITTING ON ME. This bright home with four sides of windows that bring light from every direction, my doted-on Number 9, has turned against me. Id like to spit on it too.

Im lying in bed watching the holes in my ceiling. I dont trust the holes. The way they yawn (up, into the ceiling, an unsettling sight) into what shouldnt be empty space. The way they pockmark my house. The way their existence creates the piles of rubble I live with, like lumpen dinner guests who wont go home.

A van rattles up the street, and the hole above my head drops mushroom clouds of plaster dust onto my face. The hole in my ceiling is spitting on my filthy, fuming face. I think Ill close my eyes and picture fields of blooming red poppies turning toward the sun, or maybe those metallic Alexander Wang shoes I feel I badly need, but decide not to risk it. The plaster dust that coats my bedroom might stick my eyelashes together if I close them for too long. Better to keep my eyes open.

Im having the house rewired. It was necessary after I took out a massive mortgage on an uninsurable, knob-and-tube-wired fire hazard, and now the massacre that Ive invited in provokes and frightens me. Sixty-three holes in the walls and ceilings, thirty heaps of plaster, and one narrow swept path, the kind you should never follow in a fairy tale, to a single connected light dangling from a long black cord over my bed. Its not only the damage the rewiring has done to the house Ive wrested this past fall from my husband as part of our divorce settlementhe didnt want it, but he didnt think I should have it eitherbut because as Number 9 becomes rubble, so does my life.

Im a masterful, multitasking woman; arent we all. I book the kids dentist appointments, plan a dinner party, rip out the front page of the newspaper I runSwitch out Justin Trudeau for the stink bug invasion!while biking home from work in my sensible helmet and less sensible shoes. Im too busy for much self-reflection, and not inclined that way anyway. (Nothing good ever came of too much thinking, Mom said whenever she caught me staring into the middle distance, drifting toward some inward call. Go out and play.) I prefer to do, rather than be; Im with Sartre on that one. Except for the occasional 3 a.m. whir down a drain of non-specific dread, I hurtle forward. Or I did until 2015 began like a hammer to the head.

Fifty-nine is late for a divorce, and not the wisest time to become the sole owner of a 1940s house badly in need of a lift. And its not just the house thats falling apart. My parents, both in their nineties, barely add up to one semi-competent person. My brother, lost to alcohol for thirty years, has come back from the dead, and were panicked by his improbable return, my mother most of all. My oldest friend has been gone from my life for twenty years, and the absence feels final. Ive met a Promising New Man, but the plaster dust makes him sneeze, and suddenly hes become hard to find. My son has moved across the country to Banff to launch his postgraduate life, and his texts are as fleeting as trilliums; my daughter comes home less often than she might from her nearby photography school, and when she does, she finds me wanting. Moms sister Helen, the aunt I most resemble, the one who was meant to go on forever, died a week before Christmas. Even Pierre, our fourteen-year-old family poodle, is on his last legs. I keep finding him staring into corners, trembling. Its as if everything in my orderly and familiar existence has crowded together at once, only to be smashed apart. The wrecking ball is working overtime, the walls are crumbling, and I dont have a new blueprint. The best I can do is lie in bed as the hours tock from 2 to 3 to 4 a.m. and keep my eye on those holes. Who knows what will come out of them next.