Narrator Voice: 
For those of you following along at home, when we last caught up with Mrs. Spit, she had easily and simply installed smart light bulbs, a smart security system and smart plug ins. She was going around telling everyone that true, the smart thermostat was a bit tricky, but if you were just willing to live with a minute possibility of a low voltage shock, and you were able to completely ignore the user manual, you could easily install a smart thermostat.  
Let’s just pop in and see how she’s doing, shall we? 

Script Notes: Mrs. Spit’s voice emerges as the camera steadies on her. She’s even wearing a plaid shirt. Her hair, is . . . well, it’s not a good hair day. 

Mrs. Spit’s Voice: 
Ok. 3 tools, 15 minutes. I can totally do this. I’ll even read the instructions first. (Rustling paper). Flip breaker. pull off switch plate. Match neutral wire. Wait. 

What?!

Narrator Voice: 
It turns out that there was a Lutron switch PD-6ANS-WH and a PD something else. Mrs. Spit needed the something else. She really should have paid a bit more attention on Amazon. Looks like Mrs. Spit is going to need an electrician. 

Script Notes: Next we see Mrs. Spit in a suit. She’s sitting in front of her laptop at the office, typing an email. On her screen we see the sentence “I’m working from home tomorrow. The electrician is coming to install some neutral wires. Fingers crossed that we don’t have to cut holes in the plaster!”

Narrator Voice:
It was clear that Mrs. Spit had really bought into the dream of being able to shout “Alexa, turn off all the lights”. This is important, because that dream is going to be harder to achieve than anyone thought. 

Script Notes: Camera focuses in on Mrs. Spit sitting at her desk in her office. She’s a bit chilly, since they’ve cut power to the house, and it’s a bit dim, because it’s a Canadian winter day. Her spirits seem to be good, although it’s a bad hair day again. The screen splits. One side shows Mrs. Spit writing an implementation plan on her laptop. The other side shows electricians. One is in the attic. The other is on a ladder.

Electrician 2 Voice:
wow, you have to see this. I had no idea they could do that. I’ve never even seen wiring this old. I had no idea you could *ever* do an open air splice. 

Electrician 1 Voice:
Yeah, it’s an old house. Knob and tube was common. The splice is kinda a problem though. Let’s put it in a junction box. 

Narrator Voice:
And there went the first bit of Mrs. Spit’s contingency. Throughout the day they worked. There was banging. There was whirring. There was a bit of swearing. At one point there were 5 light switches half wired. Mrs. Spit just kept breathing and working. 

Script Notes: Move to camera shot of Mrs. Spit texting a friend, on the screen we see “well, it looks like a mad invasion of gerbils with the dust and the wood shavings and every smart light in the house is blinking. So there’s that?” 

Electrician 2 Voice:
Ok, we are all done. I’m going to leave Electrician 1 here to finish cleaning up. 

Mrs. Spit Voice:
Great, thanks so much for doing this. He’ll make sure I have power in my office again? Then I can pair all of the lights and it will be done. 

Narrator Voice:
It seems something had happened. (Insert sad and expensive sounding music here). A breaker, a breaker that seemed to control well, pretty much everything it seemed had given up. The electricians headed back downstairs. They called out to each other. The lights would come on, flicker, go off. On again, off again. Mrs. Spit started unplugging electronics. This went on for 2 hours.

Electrician 1 Voice:
Ok, I’ve installed a new breaker. You now have power again. 

Narrator Voice:
But it was not so simple. As Mrs. Spit turned on the bathroom light, which was not a smart switch, all the smart lights started blinking madly. 

Electrician 1 Voice: 
Uhhh .  . . 

Script Notes: Freeze frame on Mrs. Spit’s horrified face. 

When the thieves who broken into my house finally opened up my jewellery box to see what they got, I wonder what they made of the odd things I kept. A very tiny shard of china. A single earring. A button. A scrap of paper torn from a poster. Things that have absolutely no extrinsic or even intrinsic value. They are nothing more than touch points. Small and visible pieces of a larger whole. The ultimate in intimacies – things only I know about. I couldn’t even explain to anyone why they had meaning. 

Rather like the jewellery box, which housed pearls and an engagement ring, my box of compliments houses both the obvious and the obscure. The incredibly smart and famous mathematician who called me a high energy particle. The friend who said “I knew you’d know to call.” And last week. 

The business partner on a project, as we wrapped things up on a project, who took the time to tell me “it goes better when we take care of each other, and you took care of us.” 

Not the obvious compliment about my competence or my ability to lead. Something more intimate. Something that matters in the very heart of who I am. So I carefully tucked it in the box as a thing that was precious. 

I thought of it yesterday, as I took care of myself. Was gentle, was kind. Didn’t wait or expect for anyone to do this. If we take care of others, surely we can take care of ourselves? 

Leucippus in 500 BCE was the first philosopher to suggest the idea of atoms – something which is uncuttable and cannot be composed of anything else. Lederman calls the Higgs bosun the God particle because it gives us all mass. We found it when we proved it could decay into other things. Atomism, not quite yet?

Lucretius, in 50 BCE gives us the first ontology – that nothing can come from nothing and nothing perishes into nothing. The physicists trying to figure out exactly what happened in the Planck Era are in search of nothing. Something from nothing, in a void?

And Einstein. Einstein of a multitude of universes where another you made the choice you didn’t. Where time goes backwards, forwards, swirls in a kaleidoscope of repeated choices and patterns. Physics and philosophy at once.

We are trying to see the smallest parts of ourselves. We are desperately trying to plot where we came from and perhaps then, where we will go to. We ask – ourselves, our loved ones, our gods, our galaxies and our bosuns – why?

And we hear. Thoughts. Voices. Hymns. The hum of cosmic radiation.

Today I will wake up in the eleventh year without him. 4,015 days.

I will ask why.

Having let go of God and hymns, I will let the background hum of radiation tell me – we came from a void into atoms. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. Einstein tells me – somewhere, somewhere a mother and a father and a son are together. As predictable as the speed of light.

Happy 11th birthday little boy. I miss you still.

******

Dear friends and loved ones,

At just after 11 PM, he was carried to Heaven in the arms of the Angels, where we will meet him again one day. At 520 grams (1 pound 2.4 ounces), and 33 cm (13 inches) he was wee, with 10 fingers and toes, and a full head of hair. He was a perfect, but very tiny baby.

For where your treasure is, there also will be your heart. Luke 12:34

On the edge of the U of A campus, just outside of the registrar’s office is a memorial to the murdered Montreal women. I went to school there for a long time, I had no idea it existed. A friend told me about it. It’s not even a memorial, not really. It’s a good sized rock with a plaque on it. 

I stop for a minute every year on December 6th, it seemed appropriate to stop there. They were engineers. I’m a management consultant who dabbles in technology and code. I was 11 when they were murdered. I have lived my entire adult life knowing of them. Women killed for having the audacity to do what a monstrous man thought of as men’s work. 

Someone had cleared the rock, lit a candle and laid some flowers. I suspect the friend who told me about it. It seems like the sort of thing he would do. I stood there and thought about where we are now. 

An hour before, as I was loitering outside a meeting room, in the middle of the computer science building, I watched a young man belittle and humiliate a woman. It was the tone. The tone women know well. The hectoring, the sneering, the air of smugness. They seemed to be working on a project – or rather she seemed to be working and he seemed to be criticizing. I wanted to kick him out of his seat. Sit down next to her, ask if I could give her some advice I would have wanted a woman to give me at the edge of 20. 

Don’t ever- for any reason –  let anyone treat you like that.

I told myself I was butting in, that my advice wasn’t asked for, I didn’t know the context. In hindsight, I wished I’d at least figured out the class and section – maybe I could have figured out who the prof was and alerted them? Maybe they would have cared? 

I say this, because as I stood in front of the memorial about 3 pm, in the dying winter light,  I thought about whether it is better or worse. It’s 29 years tonight. It must be better. But that young woman? It wasn’t better for her. I failed her today, even if I have no idea how I could have succeeded. 

I stood in front of the memorial and the memory of 14 dead women, and I thought what I’ve seen in my career, I thought of the young woman in the computer science building, and I thought of my one Brownie, the one that wants to be a fairy astronaut. 

We are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn. 

I think of that quote each year when I think of those women. Each year I try and figure out if things are better and what I can do to make it better. This year –  I promised them that there were many of us now, and we would send so many more into the world. There would be so many of us that a monster could not hope to kill us all. 

We aren’t there yet. 

But the granddaughters of witches are multiplying. 

(I realize that some of you may never have heard of the Montreal Massacre. It’s one of only 23 mass murders in our 151 year history. This was one of only 4 murders where more than 10 people were killed. This was a particular tragedy in that the murderer specifically killed women – his suicide note blamed women for ruining his life. December 6th has become the National Day of Morning and Action against violence against women.) 

This summer I screwed up. I behaved in a most unladylike way. It doesn’t matter how or why. I behaved in a way that made people who know me really quite well express shock. I behaved in a way that was totally out of character. I made a spectacle of myself. This wasn’t the sort of situation where I could go back and apologize, so I was a bit stuck. In the end, I drove out to where we scattered mum’s ashes and I told her what I’d done and apologized. 

She wasn’t there. I mean, she was in so far as that was the spot I tipped her mortal remain. I just didn’t feel any sense that she heard me. I was mostly left feeling miserable by myself. I was mildly annoyed and I told her so. 

If you knew my mother, you can imagine her response. (Something to the extent of “Cheryl-Nancy, I’m dead. I’m fertilizing the roses and the thistles. I raised you to be a lady. I can’t imagine why you did that. You should be embarrassed.”) 

I suppose it’s no surprise she’d come to me in the middle of HomeSense. I was staring at the Staffordshire Christmas plates. I’m almost certain we had a set, you know back in the 80’s, when dessert plates were a thing. There was a tray in the shape of a Christmas tree, and then plates. I remember something about rum balls. 

And suddenly she was there. Right there next to me, telling me about the plates. About how they were chipped, about when she used them. 

I’ve thought a lot about that. How she wasn’t there when I needed her, and was there when it was sort of immaterial. In an ideal world, I’d tell you that there was some sort of resolution in HomeSense. 

There wasn’t. 

But for a brief moment, with all her faults and flaws, she was next to me. 

It’s was 4 years ago today. About this time of day. Beautiful bright sunshine and fresh snow, like today. 

I miss her. 

Christmas last year was painful. No one invited me anywhere. I wound up finding a place to go, but I was a not great fit and it was almost worse than having nowhere to go at all. (Again, PSA – if you know someone whose life changed in 2018, *please* ask if they have somewhere to go for Christmas. Seriously. I’m begging you on their behalf.)

This year? It’s been less painful and more. Like all big losses, there’s the first terrible year, and then, well, there’s the next year.

This year, without school, with a bit more time behind me, I could make plans. A friend and I are swapping stockings, which takes care of the present issue. I ordered Christmas cards with my grad photo and wrote a Christmas letter. I’ve volunteered to host some international students from the University, so I’ll have company and know that someone is less alone. The minion is coming to help me put up my outdoor Christmas lights.  This year I put up both Christmas trees. 

This year I opened the box I store all my ornaments in.

The ones I’ve collected for most of my life. The ones I collected while married. I took a deep breath and told myself it was time. I paused over the ornaments I bought that say “First Christmas”, “First House”. Vacations. Our honeymoon. Tucked them back in the box. I don’t know what to do with them. Something will present itself. 

And at the very end, I grabbed the step stool, stood on the top, reached up and put the star on the top of my tree. 

I’m not back. Not all the way. 

But it’s better. 

I was tidying up at the end of my Brownie meeting when Miss J arrived, rather flustered. “Woolly Owl, I am missing my boots.” 

Step one is usually to go and look with the girl. In doing this, jackets, scarves, craft projects and water bottles miraculously re-appear from their sojourn in a very hidden parallel universe. It’s my super power, really. 

I exercised my superpower. The boots did not appear. 

Mildly perplexed, I asked Miss J to describe her boots. She thought for a few seconds, screwing up her mouth as her hair fell into her face . . . 

“Well“, she said. “There are two of them and they keep my feet warm.” 

After some more discussion, we determined that they were purple, or maybe pink. Possibly two shades of pink? She thought they were sparkly, but maybe that was her other boots? 

A slight bit of further sleuthing located a pair of brown suede-ish boots left behind. Miss J agreed that these were absolutely, completely and utterly not her boots. Those boots were ugly (in truth, they were) and hers were not ugly.  

Alas, this is a winter climate and I am a sensible Owl. I sent her home in those boots, which mostly fit. There were, after all, two of them and they seemed like they would keep her feet warm. 

That was Tuesday. The remainder of my week has been spent attempting to ferret out who owns a pair of brown-ish suede boots and where a pair of missing boots (which could be pink or not pink) might have gone. 

Less Woolly Owl and more Poirot then. 

A while ago I decided that I would say yes to more things. I set a simple rule. I could say no if it was something I hate (I’m not coming to strip your wallpaper), something I wasn’t available for or something that required me to take my clothes off and/or break the law. 

I’m doing this for two reasons – left to my own devices I would moulder alone at home. I’m not the sort of person who tends to get invited to things (I’m not especially fun or witty, which doesn’t help). I also need to meet new friends (who might not mind that I’m not especially fun and might invite me to do things). 

I’ve said yes to a day session about learning to code, I said yes to the Brownies, a theatre board, the symphony, farmers markets and now I’ve agreed to participate in a Christmas cooky exchange.

I am bringing shortbread. I was going to bring homemade butter tarts, but we are only allowed to bring cookies. Fine. Nana’s shortbread. Someone posted they were bringing chocolate chip cookies. Now, I like chocolate chip cookies. But, not exactly festive. Then there was the person who is bringing gluten free peanut butter cookies. I don’t begrudge the gluten free (and I’ll bring her a batch of gf shortbread – it’s easy), but, uhhh, peanut butter? 

Maybe another rule. I think another rule. One that lets me be a bit more tyrannical.