WriteOut of Her Mind

I didn’t attend the Taylor Swift concert in Toronto. It wasn’t in the budget.

The Carpenter and I are about to be townies again. We’re packing up our life on the farm, we’ve re-homed all our feathered friends (honestly the hardest part of all), and we’re moving back to the town where we first landed in Wellington County 23 years ago.

It could have been any day of the week, but the fact it was a Sunday morning felt like poetic…

I owe you an end to my story of how I met my Carpenter. I’m grateful to those of you that have read along these past two weeks. The feedback has been fun. So let me close this chapter for you.

If you read this column last week, you’ll recall that in honour of our 25th wedding anniversary, I shared the beginning of the story of how the Carpenter and I officially met, walking up the aisle together in someone else’s wedding as bridesmaid and usher.

They say that when it comes to finding your true love, “The One,” you’ll know. 

You’d think by now that I’d have learned to keep my thoughts inside my head, but if you’ve read this column for any length of time, surely by now you know I’m not hardwired to hold back. 

I took my husband to see my boyfriend perform at Centre in the Square last week. A rare date night with my two favourite men: the Carpenter and Jim Cuddy.  

He tore out the advertisement  from last week’s newspaper and put it on the kitchen table where I couldn’t help but see it. He’s subtle like that. 

She handed me a stone like she was handing me a bar of gold and something about the gesture felt as if that’s exactly what it was: gold. 

The Carpenter and I have entered year two of an NFL pool and this year, I’ve deflated my water-wings to dive in with an enthusiasm he wasn’t quite prepared for. Yep, this football season, I’m making waves. 

She dangled from the eavestrough of the barn, upside down and balled up, completely content in a matrix of invisible thread. She was about the size of a toonie. 

We’re back at it: the routine that September brings. Full calendars. Coordinated schedules. Structured time. Registration fees. The never-ending saga of the question that has no easy answer: “what do you want for dinner?”

Corn on the cob is about as genuine an end-of-summer tradition as any end-of-summer tradition gets and I am here for it. But it’s not because of the corn so much as it is the butter. It’s all about the butter. 

Well now, that was a weekend.