oh, holy holy.

I've always had a thing for Holy Thursday (for the long hard soul-searching days leading up to Easter in general, really). It stems from my wannabe-Anglican leanings, which I've written about before (on Holy Thursday, no less). I love the darkness before the dawn, the ending and the beginning nearly overlapping, the profound and heartfelt sadness you can feel free to immerse yourself in fully, since you know there's brightness coming, just a couple days away.

I always seem to find myself on the road on this Thursday, which is part of why I love it so much. Running away, running home, running back: I have always been a sucker for the great escape. When I was a student I'd usually be on my way back to my parents' place, loaded down with books, because Easter weekend always seemed to fall smack in the middle of finals. I'd be feeling tremendously sorry for myself, but also somehow hopeful. We were nearly through the shitstorm. The time was so close when I would never have to think about Absalom, Absalom! again. The darkest hour before the dawn, and all that. I'd schlep home for a few days and hunker down and eat candy and lie awake in my childhood bedroom and maybe take a trip to the garden centre to buy Easter lilies. The hard part was almost over. The summer escape was on its way. It was a good life.

The year I started this little verbal vomit trail, I spent Holy Thursday feeling happier than I'd been in a long time. After years of planning my way out of Ottawa, I'd finally found my exit route: I'd accepted a job in Kingston and was gearing up to move in a month. The job was fairly secondary to my happiness; the better news was that I'd be moving to the town where my oldest friend lived. I didn't know it yet, but we'd end up living five minutes from each other, just like we did when we were kids, and it would be wonderful. I was also, in spite of my better judgment, making the move to be closer to a man I'd fallen in love with. At the time I knew in my deep-down secret heart that hitching even the sketchiest of wagons to that particular star was probably a bad idea. And yet, and yet. We do what we can with what we've got when we've got it. At the time, the prospect of proximity made me feel happy, and that was enough. That April Thursday, I brought in chocolate for my Ottawa colleagues, who still didn't know I was leaving in a month (I'm a leave under cover of darkness kind of girl--I think they call it the Irish Goodbye). I left work early and drove home to Hamilton, fueled by the music of Joel Plaskett and the incredible high of knowing I would soon wipe my slate clean.



One year later, Kingston was home in all senses of the word. Tom and I had survived yet another winter at the lake and he was in the process of buying a piece of property that he promised would be ours together. It was unseasonably warm and gorgeous that weekend, and we planned to spend most of it truck-camping in those woods, his woods, our woods. First, though, we had some family obligations to endure. On Holy Thursday he picked me up after work and we drove out to Brockville together to have dinner with his parents. "We'll just get it over with," he promised, not that I needed convincing. Visiting his family was anthropologically fascinating to me. His mother's definition of vegetarian cooking was pretty heavy on chicken, and there was usually a Dairy Queen ice cream cake. We drank cheap red wine and dodged questions about having babies and took advantage of their cable television and trundled on up to bed in our separate rooms. If you've never spent the night alone in the single bed your boyfriend slept in as a child, sharing the room with a photo portrait gallery that includes a professional shot of his former longtime partner, I suggest you try it sometime. It was surreal. The next morning, Tom snuck into my room and jumped on top of me to wake me up. "We should get out of here," he said. "Fast." (In hindsight, two proponents of the Irish Goodbye in one relationship is probably a recipe for disaster). After a quick breakfast we hit the road, driving along the Thousand Island Parkway on our way back to the County. Tom pointed out all the islands he'd spent time on as a kid and yelled at me for blocking his view as I reached over him to take pictures as we passed. By lunchtime, we were home--home in South Frontenac, home at the hideout.



I haven't found myself in transition much lately, and after years of getting high off the terrifying potential of massive change, I don't miss it as much as I thought I might. This is not to say that I don't still have an escape route planned (I keep a sleeping bag and a tetrapak of bad red wine in my trunk, just in case), but at the same time, I've finally come to the realization that there's value in staying put and settling in. This Holy Thursday, I'll come home from work and sit down at my piano, maybe noodle through a few old Lenten hymns (I may be the only Unitarian in possession of copies of both the High and Low Anglican hymnals), and water the icicle pansies on the back porch. It's been an unsettled spring, fraught with hail and flash freezes, but they've survived. They're hardy, and their roots are deeper than you'd think.