Updated: Jun 9
by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North
At the peak of a cool, June golden hour, Henrie searched for her house keys in the pocket of her jeans. They jingled around her fingers on their sparkly purple coil, singing with the wind chimes hanging from the porch. The old wood steps creaked, as if the groan of its paint-skin peeling, and the stone cardinal riding the chimes jolted as Henrie bumped their head on them. She’d always thought this a strange design—cardinals always appeared in pairs.
Finally finding the right key, she unlocked the door and sniffed for expected tobacco smoke. They slipped off their hiking boots, and tiptoed toward the foyer stairs.
“Henrietta? Honey, is that you?” A familiar, gravelly voice wound around the doorway of the living room.
Henrie breathed a soft sigh. “Yes, Grandpa, it’s me.” Henrie heard the T.V. volume decrease as her grandfather, Danny, shuffled out of his back and neck pillows. He stopped in the doorway, with a warm smile that reached Henrie like a ghost hug. They knew he was wondering why they hadn’t announced their entrance, as usual. But Danny was sweet, and respectful, which Henrie always appreciated. The grief of losing a mother wasn’t the same as losing a daughter, but the state of the old farmhouse consistently clarified that the ache was shared.
The quiet was a bit disarming. Danny must’ve fed the animals a bit early, Henrie thought. Why?
“Would you like anything special for dinner? I wish I could say the tomatoes were ready for pasta sauce, but not quite.” Danny’s eyes crinkled with playful frustration.
“Oh, that’s okay. I’m good with whatever you’re feeling, honestly. I’m a little tired to think.” The setting sun’s golden beams made the floating dust in the air between them visible. One beam shone directly on a black and white graduation photo of Ellen, Henrie’s mother, nearly coercing the colours of life out of its past as if they were behind the wall the photo was nailed to.
“Well why don’t we cook something together? Maybe you can tell me about your Tuesday afternoon?”
Clever, Danny. This is what Henrie did not want to do, but they didn’t know what else to say. “Okay, sure.”
“Perfect. Let’s do it.” Danny walked down the hall toward the kitchen, which was mostly windows overlooking Ellen’s garden. It was Henrie’s favourite room in what had been her mother’s childhood home. In the sun, everything caught fire, especially her and Danny’s deep amber hair, his now streaked with silver. At night, the dark orange walls looked almost black lit by a blue-white moon. The whole room smelled like basil, bread, and the ripening tomatoes climbing an open window.
As Danny washed his hands, he offered a look of invitation and expectation. Not unkind. But one Henrie knew well: Why, at 23 and living at home, she hadn’t been “working” this afternoon.
“Well, I voted, first,” she paused for a reaction but Danny just nodded as he poured green pasta curls into a corningware dish. “And then I went to an open meeting at the Seed Library. It was about queer ecology and ensuring community gardens and other natural spaces and parks are queer, trans, indigenous, and Black and Brown centred and inclusive leading into PRIDE, Juneteenth, and Indigenous Peoples Month. I wrote down pages of notes, and I’m hoping to volunteer a bit more, because, you know, learning about how to organize and activate a community is how we do more than just vote.” Henrie stopped here, aware of her swelling eagerness.
Danny nodded again, but looked down as he rinsed rosemary residue from his hands. “I voted, too.”
Henrie smiled with their lips pressed together. Danny mistook it for despair, and an opportunity.
“Don’t worry, love. Once we get a new government, they’re going to mend this cost of living crisis. You’ll be able to move out and live the life you’re hoping for—that I’m hoping for you.”
Henrie’s brows knit. She didn’t know how to respond to her unspoken question being answered.
“Grandpa, how could you vote for them?”
“What?” He asked with genuine confusion, again not unkindly, but defensively. “I’ve always loved and supported you. And learned about the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Did I say it right? I was just watching that series with RuPaul! And I finished Season 1 of that show last night! The Last of Us? Right? It’s very good. I really like it.”
Henrie’s heart seemed to stall between beats to take up more blood, but the delay hurt.
“I know you love me, Grandpa. I do. I really do.” She meant it. “But that’s not what we’re talking about. I agree with you. We are in a violent cost of living crisis. But it certainly won’t be fixed or solved by any of our parties or leaders. We have to vote for harm reduction, and not just for ourselves or the people closest to us. Maybe it’s like Joel trying to save Ellie in The Last of Us—he was only considering her when he killed all those people to free her from the hospital. And it wasn’t for lack of love. It was almost like—” Henrie paused to think, “love out of context.”
“But I’d do what he did, Henrietta. I think I would. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know, and that’s what makes this so hard. Maybe Joel and Ellie are a poor example. But we do make judgement errors when we don’t consider folks outside of our immediate circle of conversation and influence. How much we love someone close to us should be fuel for learning to love others who aren’t.”
“Yes,” Danny tried to take a calming breath, “you’re right about that bit. But this government has messed up everything for your generation. We need change! How could you vote for them? Again?”
Henrie glanced at the tomatoes growing up the kitchen window frame, green but reddening, reflecting off of Danny’s furrowed face.
“You’re right. We do! But change has to come from us. And when we vote—a bare minimum step—we have to think about who, in a position of power, is most likely to join that change when we make it. And react with fear, control, and surveillance least often.”
“Henrietta, you’re young. You’re confused—”
“No, I’m not. Can’t you see we’re saying the same thing?”
“You just voted for the same crap that’s been happening for ten years!”
“There has been a lot of trash. Yes. A lot of manipulation. But reviving a past—before the past ten years—isn’t change. Doing this won’t build or enact the new pillars we need to float our country’s dock.”
From the living room, a breaking news anchor’s voice wafted in. The election results.
Henrie and Danny made sharp eye contact before hustling into the living room. Both were silent as the election was declared, much earlier than anticipated. Henrie felt her socks sink further into the tiger-print carpet than usual, because it hadn’t been vacuumed.
“Well. That’s just perfect. Good job.” Danny’s voice wavered as he walked out the back door to the garden, knelt in the dirt with both knees and elbows, and put his head in his hands.
Henrie jogged upstairs, flopped onto their bed, and opened Andrea Gibson’s Substack.
The first poem that popped up was a video of “What Love Is”. They hadn’t heard it before. Henrie wept as she listened to it, facing her mother’s handwriting—accidentally in plum-purple Sharpie—on the top right corner of her vanity mirror.
“Where there is rage, remember its tenderness. Where there is tenderness, don’t forget its rage.”
[This is an invitation to pause reading & watch Andrea read us their breathtaking poem; we don’t have copyright permissions to reprint it!]
Face damp, Henrie stood to look at their face in the mirror. Her freckles seemed bolder, like wet versus dry rocks. In the mirror’s reflection, Henrie looked out her open window. A mist of rain sprayed lightly across the backs of her arms, bringing with it a few lilac petals from the bush that climbed the back of the house. Henrie didn’t wipe away her tears on the way to the printer downstairs, and then out to the garden.
***
Danny was tenderly thumbing the tomatoes, both a fruit and a vegetable, as if two truths simultaneously. Henrie walked slowly toward him, remembering something from earlier that day, at the Seed Library: patience as the vital cornerstone of nature, and of course, gardening. When they flourish, not unlike a family, it’s not always due to their fertility and reproductivity, but to their depth, circularity, and broadness of influence. Our garden and our grief is what we have in common, Henrie thought.
Henrie approached Danny, dropped to their knees, and placed a hand over his. “I don’t blame you.”
“I know. I don’t blame you either.”
She took a deep breath and handed her grandfather a paper with a poem printed on it. He took a few moments to read it, right there among the tomatoes and lilacs. Tears fell into the imprints where his hands had been pressed into the soil. He read one of the last lines out aloud:
““I’m 76 years old, he said, and I just tonight figured out what love is.””
“I know what love is at 23 because you’ve shown it to me—in ways like this poem. And that’s where we’ll try to understand and forgive each other, okay?”
Danny nodded. He smeared soil across his cheeks, like a football player or a warrior, as he tried to clear his tears. “Could I share something with you, too?”
Henrie nodded, eagerly.
“Victor Hugo said, once, that “Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.” Our souls are both on their knees, Henrie, I know. Especially right now. But because they’re here, they see eye to eye. Let’s stay for a moment. Let’s talk from that place.”
Henrie closed their eyes and took their grandfather’s hands, nodding gently. Two cardinals landed on the lilac bush beside them. She tilted her head up to the warmth of the afternoon sun, the smell of petrichor, and colours of the garden making a mosaic against her eyelids. They thought—perhaps prayed—to always be moved by what love is.
