Here's to the happy couple.

I've been stewing and stewing over how to address the sad and extremely deeply felt event of John Hughes' death all week, to the point where I've given myself writer's block in the process. Not good, friends. Not good. So instead I'm putting those feelings on hold for now, because this weekend is pretty much going to be the best weekend of all time. Saturday is my best friend's wedding. I never get tired of saying "my best friend's wedding," partly because it is the name of one of the goofiest movies ever made and no pop culture reference could be less apt. But mostly I never get tired of saying it because it is going to be so frigging fun, and because I love the happy couple so frigging much. There's nothing I enjoy more than tripping out in my head about how fast life moves and how much things can change and stay the same all at once. This party's going to be a big old object lesson in that very thing, with a side order of spinach dip and love.

This morning when I woke up, my mind was on this funny channel-surfing kick where different ridiculous Freya moments kept passing through my head--the time I played After the Gold Rush and made her cry, the time she wrote out a whole Gord Downie poem in a letter to me from a tree planting camp in Alberta, the time Greg, then only a casual twinkle in her eye, showed up on our Walmerhaus doorstep bearing Balderson cheese for one and all, the time I came home to find her curled up watching one of my My So-Called Life videos proclaiming, "Cait, this explains so much about you." So much has changed in the last ten (TEN!) years, and yet so much is still exactly the way it always was, and either way it's all the way it ought to be.

Which probably makes this next thing fitting. My favourite love poem, and maybe my favourite poem, is "Departure," by F.R. Scott, which maybe isn't even a love poem at all, since says goodbye more than it says hello. But more than that, it's about the vast landscape that becomes a part of every relationship when you live in this snowy minefield of a country, the eternity of the natural world and of the love you could find there, knowing it might not last forever but hoping that it does.

Departure

Always I shall remember you, as my car moved
Away from the station and left you alone by the gate
Utterly and forever frozen in time and solitude
Like a tree on the north shore of Lake Superior.
It was a moment only, and you were gone,
And I was gone, and we and it were gone,
And the two parts of the enormous whole we had known
Melted and swirled away in their separate streams
Down the smooth, granite slope of our watershed.

We shall find, each, the deep sea in the end,
A stillness, and a movement only of tides
That wash a world, whole continents between,
Flooding the estuaries of alien lands.
And we shall know, after the flow and ebb,
Things central, absolute and whole.
Brought clear of silt, into the open roads,
Events shall pass like waves, and we shall stay.

--F.R. Scott

Here's to you, Tony and Lily. I searched the annals of YouTube for "We're Hardcore" but clearly Gord hasn't left the digital footprint one might have hoped for. Anyway, this one's just as good, and just as true.