Gunnar In The Carrels

Author's note:

Welcome to what I am calling Season 2 of Gunnar In The Carrels. Anyone who hasn't read Parts 1 through 10 (what I am now going to call Season 1), relax! You are officially absolved. But don't let that stop you if you feel inclined as it will certainly help your understanding of events.

What you are reading is the first draft of a potential novelette? novel? written on the fly. Events and timelines are going to shift around as they find their natural level. Go with it.

Most of all, thanks for reading and feel free to comment.

Part 1

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

-Adrienne Rich

The online article was titled Why We Hold Onto So Much Stuff, and How to Let Go. There was a photograph of a rustic bookcase with artfully arranged books and a sock monkey in it. The houseplant beside the bookcase had lit fairy lights and an antique looking globe hung suspended from the ceiling.

Ginger McNally surveyed the greenhouse in front of her with crushed cardboard boxes stacked against the back wall to the ceiling and wondered if she needed to change her search terms. It looked like she was dealing with something more drastic.

We all know the role that clutter plays in our households, began the article, posted by one Dabney Frank in 2014. Ginger thought she looked fun in her photo and the name Frank boded well because she could use a little frankness right now. To varying degrees, it’s a nuisance, or it distracts us, and —in the worst cases — totally overtakes our lives.

Sing it, sister, thought Ginger and poured another generous glug of pinot into her oversized wine glass. Raising her feet onto a little wooden table crusted with chunks of oil paint, she settled her Chromebook more comfortably on her thighs and returned to the article.

Here are some of the underlying reasons why you’re reluctant to let go of physical objects, and some steps to take towards living a life less burdened by stuff.

Dish it, Dabney. Give it to me straight. Unburden me!

1. You Feel Like You'll Need it One Day - Focus instead on the right here, right now, and what you need in the present. Banish the "what ifs" and "what thens" and let go.

Let go of Grandma, Ginger thought, allowing her eyes to roam over the mass of her Grandmother’s favourite possessions and a large number of the odd things she created with them. And this is just the greenhouse.

There were many times in Ginger’s life that she had felt the benefit of being the only child and only grandchild of a generation in her family. Watching her friends battle their siblings for attention and their parents economize to buy new school shoes for all of the children, Ginger had known herself to be lucky.

Lately, however, she wondered if this was the other side of the coin. Mom was dead, had been dead for ten years. And now Grandma McNally was dead too.

A tear splashed into her wine glass.

I can’t do this alone. It’s too hard. Too much. I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I miss Grandma.

Ginger relaxed into the sobs. Grandma had believed in the power of ‘a good cry.’ ‘It’s like cleaning the windows, Gingin. Everything looks clearer and brighter when you’re done.’

When will I be done crying for you, Grandma? Her eyes streamed with tears, her nose ran, and her body shook with the force of her waves of grief. Her upper body folded onto her lower and she allowed herself to fall off the chair onto the greenhouse floor, finally curling up in a fetal position and giving voice to her feelings of abandonment and loss, knowing herself to be finally and forever alone.

Elsa Andersson hoped the apple streusel cake was baked through. Her youngest boy, Adam, had demolished her carefully planned Saturday schedule when he revealed he needed a ride into Anneville today. His Grade 6 class was working overtime on the decorations for the Mayor’s Spring Gala. Elsa wondered how many taxpayers shouldered the cost of extra gas to drive in to town so that their kids could make free decorations for the fancy dance that only people able to afford $150 a plate could attend.

You’re being negative, she told herself. This is a happy thing you are doing. Try to look happy.

Elsa pulled the still warm cake out of the car and clacked in her black heels (silly to wear them, trying to look fancy) around a few last piles of snow in the driveway and up the front stairs of the small white bungalow nestled in ample shrubbery. After ringing the doorbell, she turned and looked closely at the bushes. She recognized the holly, but that other bush she couldn’t identify. And that tree is a magnolia. This will be lovely soon, she thought. Lily must have loved her gardens.

No one answered the door. Elsa confirmed again the car was in the driveway and she knew this was the car Ginger drove because she had seen her drive past their place last week when she was out at the mailbox. Ginger had waved which warmed Elsa’s heart since most of the women around here didn’t wave at Elsa. She saw that they were of an age and wondered then if this new woman might be a chance for a female friend.

That was what had set the whole plan in motion, to make the cake and bring it and maybe have coffee the way women used to do and then maybe finally to connect with someone and have a friend.

But no one was answering her knock. Finally she turned from the door, pausing in her walk back to the car to tip her head up to the warming sunlight and listen to the birds. There was robin song which she noticed for the first time last week. But that right there, that was a red winged blackbird and the first she'd heard this year. Elsa loved the liquid trill and their call could still conjure up a warm August afternoon playing in the river with her sisters.

She inhaled deeply, breathing in the scent of melting ice and thawing soil. What a peaceful place this is, she thought, mentally comparing it to the constantly roiling mess of men, dogs, and boys that was her house. It would be nice to be alone here.

As she stood quietly, she became aware of a keening coming from behind the little white house. It sounded like an animal. A hurt animal. Elsa hesitated. Country rules dictated that she go see what’s wrong, because privacy is one thing but livestock is another. She knew, though, that Ginger was from somewhere else - likely some place more sophisticated than Elsa - and wasn’t sure if she should trespass.

The sound came again and, this time she recognized it as human and so quickly used the pretty stepping stone pathway to round the house (was that thyme between the stones?) and emerged into a gardener’s paradise of a backyard that she knew she would love to explore if she ever got the chance. The door to a semi circular greenhouse sheathed in plastic was open slightly so she headed that way and looked in.

A red haired woman was crumpled on the floor of the greenhouse emitting the loudest sobs Elsa had heard a human make. If one of her boys were making that noise, she would have called them a drama queen and applauded. On a small table beside the woman was a mostly empty bottle of wine and the biggest wine glass she’d ever seen - also empty.

Elsa knew Lily McNally was Ginger’s grandmother. While the older lady had become reclusive in the years before her death, Elsa remembered being a little girl and seeing Lily out in the community, not exactly an outsider but not exactly welcomed either. She often wore overalls and Elsa remembered overhearing her father joke with another man that if you could ever get Lily McNally out of those overalls there might be something worth looking at.

Elsa suddenly flooded with hot shame. She had never considered that Ginger might be grieving. In her hopes for a friend (how pathetic at her age) she completely ignored this other woman’s loss. What was she doing here, trying to get something for herself out of someone else's sad situation?

Elsa made a sudden decision and bent down, silently placing the apple streusel cake on the flat stone outside the greenhouse door. On second thought, she shifted the cake slightly to the left of the door so that Ginger didn't trip on it when she came out.

Then she quietly picked her way along the lovely pathway back around to the front of house.