Wrote this first thing this morning then went for a paddleboard in WAVES so now my toes hurt from hanging on, but they hurt in a good way, not like my left shoulder that hurts hurts because I tried to do too many pushups in yoga, I know that’s not what they’re called in yoga but a pushup’s a pushup just ask my shoulder. All of that has nothing to do with this story which started out because I read some bird stuff last night and when I woke up I went straight to the empty page like a magnet. Thanks for being here.

Auntie Cupid by Sherry Cassells

Pigeons have magnetic crystals in their beaks that facilitate navigation, mine are not in my beak, but in the arrow of a pesky, loveless Cupid. The bastard shoots the idea into my head and next thing I know I am here. Once – I’ll tell you right now alcohol was involved – I woke up and thought I was on a bus going home but it was an airplane going home home – the first home in that charming duo is not actually italic, it is leaning, collapsing, due to the weight of all those years.

Aunty Jean out the lake used to say she was losing her marbles, she crossed her eyes and everybody laughed, her glasses were missing or sideways or Uncle Sad’s, that was an autocorrect, I’m letting it stand because Freud slips on typewriter keys, too, his real name was Syd.

One time Aunty Jean came to my mother’s birthday party in her swim suit, my mother always called it her surprise party, even when she had marbles Aunty Jean cut her hair in a style we referred to as startled. When it became apparent she really was losing her marbles Uncle Sad said don’t worry, Jeannie, I’ll be your marbles and he was, he remembered everything she didn’t and fed her the information in whispers, he took care of her and I don’t want it to sound like he did this in a normal way, because Uncle Marbles – Auntie Jean starting calling him Marbles and so did the rest of us – took care of her like Mother Hercules Theresa.

I call him from the airport, his voice when he answers matches the heatwaves from the tarmac, pretty soon he drives up to where I am standing in the bright sunshine, there's no cloud of dust around him but everything is that colour, his old truck, the dog, his corduroy shirt, him.

Is there such a thing as hug etiquette – which way do your arms go, which side your head – we grapple and come to rest in a pause of pure love, if there is a required or suggested duration for this, we ignore it. We stand clutching one another for so long I wonder in a nonessential barely there way if I might be successfully meditating for the first time ever, and whether he has fallen asleep ** please enjoy this interlude of undetermined duration ** we rub one another’s back simultaneously, twist and crack apart, he says you drive, and I’m telling you getting into that truck it’s like getting to your favourite part in a book, or getting into cool sheets on a hot summer night, or somebody saying we better eat this ice cream it’s melting here’s a spoon.

I keep looking at him – he’s wisely squinting and pleasantly handsome – like the good guy in a western, the lake sparkles and boils behind him, he's smiling.

I spent summers with him and Aunty Jean, and moved in full-time when she got sick, I did the cooking and shopping and chores, Aunty Jean taught me how to knit at night while Uncle Marble read his diaries from when he was a seafarer – the distance he managed to gain from his chair across the room was astounding – the knitting eventually degraded to braiding, we did it together side by side on the couch, the long plaits twirled to the floor, I'd usually undo them and pull them back into balls of wool but if I didn't do it in time the wool wasn't flat enough for her, she couldn’t tolerate wavy wool and she’d throw it to the wind, the birds and squirrels used it for their nests, me and Uncle Marble used to sit on the porch and play I Spy about flecks of colour in the giant trees, etc.

Uncle Marble’s nose slides across The Sleeping Giant’s profile and it comes to me that maybe this story won’t have a happy ending after all, I should visit more often, I never should have moved away, sometimes I think about home home when I’m in the city and it feels ludicrous that I’m so far away, my beak points toward the nearest bar and I trade myself in at the door.

It’s like driving through a photo album, a significance in each glance, fields I swayed in, doors I knocked on, pathways I took, Claire’s faded house.

There are things at the place half done, he can’t do everything alone, who can. I’ll help you with that I say let’s tackle that tomorrow I say we’ll need the tractor soon.

At dusk we’re on the porch, there’s a deep corn field in front of us, one of wheat next, then the bubbling row of walnuts this side of the tracks, then the lake, and it’s very pleasant, so comfortable, we’re talking and laughing and remembering, I’m happy I’m here, I keep saying how goddamn beautiful it is and it really is, everything’s purple but the lake’s silver, the sky is light and the early moon’s there like a sticker in the sky, some billowy clouds moving along the tracks like the trains used to, we counted as high as two hundred and seventeen cars once. I get an arrow. He says there’s lots of work up here now what with the new line they’re building from Marathon to Manitoba, I get an arrow, Claire’s back in town he says, three arrows at once, I don’t say anything I don’t even breathe, I spy a blue fleck in the birch, my beak opens and I get a sudden desire to go for a walk.

I make the sounds you can only make on an old wooden porch, the rocking chair rocks empty, my heels space out the seconds, I go down the stairs each one gives a different note.

I look back at my uncle and he’s smiling,

I know I said some unflattering things about city-Cupid, but here, Cupid is different.