SWORDFERN
Rooted, I used to think.

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Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014 @ 4:42 pm
Success



Driving through Vancouver, the rain falling heavily, the streets lush with August foliage. I'm sitting passenger, DT's driving, and the wipers flip flop back and forth. He's driving, and I'm navigating us through the traffic jams, driving down leafy residential streets. We're talking about life and real estate and moving back to the island.

He tells me that we should go together, to work in the Victoria office. My heart is soaring, so happy to be there in that moment, with him telling me that he doesn't want to lose me. It's work. It's work. It's dumb, and I know it, and he's getting married in two weeks, and I know this, and I'm so happy that he is happy and I like the way he thinks and I'm pretty sure that I love him in a certain way that there isn't a word for. How the word love is so singular and that there are different types of love and that I want a word for how I feel about him that isn't the word love. All I know is that I'm happy around him, and that he makes me laugh, and that we have chemistry that is rare and perfect.

We sit in the car together looking at a set of drawings. We're talking about ditches and power poles, and there are horses walking past because we're in this rich horsey part of Vancouver. It smells faintly of manure and hay and of rain on asphalt. Huge maples arch over the road. We sit there, the windows steamed over from our wet coats, and his hand brushes mine as we're discussing the details of the project, and I'm SO aware of it, and it makes my heart jump.

I sit there thinking about it we we drive back across the city to the office. It reminds me of when it happened with Grant at the biotech company. His leg pressed against mine under the laboratory bench, and then we were riding our bikes home together in the rain (always the rain) and he invited me in to warm up. Later he told me that he would never trust a girl again, after the last one broke up with him unexpectedly. He was probably right to not trust me at age 21. Of course he was right. He's married (to another girl from the company) now, with a child, so I guess that he learned how to trust again.

But that stuff with Grant was so long ago, and I was foolish to think he wanted anything more than fun with someone so young and transient.

Today, I'm out on the job site alone. DT calls me to ask if I'm doing OK. I like that he does that. Me out there in a hard hat and dusty steel toes. The foreman stands kind of close to me as we walk the length of the project. The foreman and I are about the same age, and it strikes me as strange that we are the ones running this thing. There are some crusty old labourers in the trench, and I realize that I'm the one up above in the white hard hat and they are down below, their skin weathered and hair bleached from the sun.

I sit in the car and write my reports. In the background there is the sound of the back up beepers of heavy equipment. A woman astride a gorgeous horse clip clops grandly down the middle of the road, the horse's tail swishing back and forth in time with its feet. The sun sheens off the animal's coat.

I think about how my life has changed in recent years. From spending a week sticking my head into unmaintained septic tanks on a remote and frozen First Nations reserve in Northern BC, to inspecting the installation of a frou frou equestrian trail in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Is that what you'd call success?

I drive back to the office and think about DT and the foreman and how I am confident in this and that I can do this and that I trust myself to do this and that confidence is the biggest success of them all.


Roots | Shoots