Dirty Laundry...

...should be washed at home. (sorry mum, this might make you cry) But despite our herculean protestant efforts, the family dirty laundry is about to be washed very publicly.

An eviction is never pleasant. And when the evictor and evictee are family, no matter how estranged, a peculiar kind of horror descends upon the proceedings.

Today, after three months of warnings, negotiations and court proceedings, the bailiffs and locksmith arrive.

The awfulness of the eviction is bearable only because the alternative is worse. There is a kind of freedom in slicing the threads that attach us to each other. Though, in this case, the threads are more like fraying twine, and the slicing closer to sawing with a butter knife. And I don't know what colour this freedom is. The velvety close-to-black green of a hillside of pine trees? Gut wrenching scarlet?

I am grieving for two little boys with blonde crew-cuts and seersucker shorts, digging in the Departure Bay sand. The one who dug the frere and me Gabriola sandcastles at low tide- who is gone. And the one who is tall and gaunt and who is getting cut off today. Set adrift for perhaps the first time in his life.