Tag: friends

Pondering Preppers

A few years ago, before the pandemic, I started watching Prepper type YouTube videos. I was looking for ideas on how to preserve food, make natural cleaners and self-sufficiency in general. What I tumbled upon was a buzzing community of people who were very busy preparing for when ‘shit hits the fan’. It took me down the rabbit hole of food storage, water storage, and how you can protect yourself and your family, living out of urban settings in the woods, keeping a bug-out bag with you at all times and always be a grey-man when you are moving in the masses, so people never look to you as a threat, or a leader.

This kept my mind busy for a few months, as I pondered how we could weather a disaster, and I had to accept that it simply could not work, for us. Having a seven foot picture window and a working fireplace, we would be prime targets, I gave up on ever being a prepper, although I still ponder moving away from the city.

The world is changing. I can see that communal living, generational living, is something that could become commonplace again, even as I yearn to move to my fictional forest. We’re not there quite yet.

We visited our friends in Muskoka over the weekend. They have a nearly off-grid home and 80 acres of forest. It’s a gorgeous property, on a dead-end road with very few neighbours. Geoff was saying they are thinking of getting a working gun, for protection. He says that the neighbours all have guns and that they could guard the road in the event of disaster. [We, of course would be homeless by then, evicted for our fireplace – best scenario]. I stared at Geoff, who grew up in inner city Toronto like myself, and was struck by how afraid we have all become.

Having already imagined how a disaster would play out for us, I imagine the great city exodus north to these isolated communities. To these 80 acre lots. I almost prefer to go out in the beginning rather than the bitter end.

In all the beauty surrounding us this weekend, our friends are now thinking about how to protect that vastness.

Shall I Begin Again?

I have been pondering my absent blogging world, after a three year silence. I wonder if I have words worth an audience, or whether my words should stay tucked away in my bullet journals and be recycled every year, as I have been doing.

I wouldn’t want family members to read of my middle aged angst when I die, or when I lose control over my privacy.

Since the pandemic I have been writing letters and making cards for my dear friend Randy, who I have known since I was seventeen and working my first full time job, at an art supply store in Toronto, before college. Randy was twenty-three and adopted me as a sidekick. He introduced me to falafels and I introduced him to eggnog. We have written through all the lockdowns, and I even made it to Toronto to see him last November.

I will go again soon.

So Randy has been my journal. He holds the timeline of my close-to-home day to day ramblings and worries and simple joys.

But I feel the need to express more than what I write to Randy.

I have also used Instagram as a journal. I can trail back over the years and I see our hikes, our gardens, our camps, our few gatherings and even the photos of clothes on the line give me joy. Satisfaction. See me, I am still here. I am still alive, maybe even vital.

Another old friend said that she was envious of my life, when she looked at my photos. Her life has been very taxing in recent years with parents dying, her husband is at the latter stages of MS. He is planning medical suicide this autumn. There were whispers maybe even in September.

I am thankful he has that choice.

We traveled north to see them in early August, and had a good visit. My friend is not sure if she will be disappointed if he changes his mind, because she is tired. Tired of living with MS. She is worried that she will die first – that her heart will burst, and what then will happen to him?

I have been posting less on Instagram. One post a month, and that is ok too.

My dear older sister Kathy lost her eldest granddaughter this past May, to cancer, and watching her family maneuver through all these levels of grief and anger and helplessness has been stark. I see her on Friday for a coffee visit. She carries on, they carry on. The little sister is now the only child. Her position altered.

But I am fine, we are pretty well. We keep on going to work, and laughing and finding things to feel passionate about.

Maybe I still have words.