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The Pilgrimage

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In the summer of 1999, I drove a thousand miles to the birthplace of my Cree grandmother. She was born amidst the open stretching plains of Spirit River, Alberta, under all that sky. Though she had passed away long ago when I was just a girl, I had recently heard her singing to me in dreams in a language that I did not understand. In these dreams, I would follow her voice through a heavy mist, always becoming lost before waking. I was increasingly unsettled by these dreams, seemingly related to a critical juncture in my life at that time. She was calling to me and I needed to find her. So one day I just packed my truck and drove.      I drove through alpine meadows in the rain, surrounded by the towering Rocky Mountains. I ventured along winding, deeply forested, single-lane highways on clear sunny days. I stopped to explore waterfalls and scenic trails, and made chilli on my truck tailgate while parked in an old forest grove. I photographed vast fields stained yellow with canola flowe
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Wind in Her Hair

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Two decades had passed before I returned to live back in my homeland of Nanaimo, B.C. Life as I knew it had ended, its remains sorted and rendered down to bare bones in boxes. A friend who lives in Nanaimo insisted that it would be impossible for me to find a place to rent because of an over-crowded housing market. “People live in hotels for months while on waitlists,” she said. “You need a place to land first.” But on the day my realtor listed my house in Alberta as sold, I got an offer for a condo rental in Nanaimo. And right in the place I most needed to be.       In mid-December of 2021, I arrived to my small condo unit on Jingle Pot Road. The lofty ceilings made it seem even emptier during those weeks alone before my furniture arrived. But I came prepared: in my car I had packed my Christmas decorations, basic dishes and cookware, a couple IKEA chairs, an air mattress, and a tiny, wrapped present from a friend for under the tree.       When I arranged to have my things shipped
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The Mother

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  “Hello, old friend,” I said. It had been 40 years since we parted ways. I stood in the afternoon sun by the side of the road, with my outstretched hand softly touching her craggy bark. Her thick, green lower bows used to touch the ground and shelter me when I was eight and nine years old. I could vaguely make out the grey rounds in the bark where lower limbs had been severed long ago. I turned my face to the sky and saw her high needled branches, which now seemed so sparse that I barely recognized her. You’ve lost some branches too , she said. I smiled. Yes, I have. Sometimes I brought friends here with me when I was a child and we told secrets in the shade of her bows. Once a couple boys came with us and told us terrible, terrible things. “Girls bleed from their vaginas,” one of them said. All the girls gasped and exchanged looks of disgust and indignation. “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “That’s disgusting.” “You’re a virgin. That’s why you don’t know about it.”
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The Finish Line

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This is a little piece I wrote in my recent writing class. These little snippets are what I'm working on as a greater part of my memoir project. *** I stood in the dim light of the backstage with the sound of my heart beating in my ears. I nervously shifted my convocation cap and wiped sweaty palms on my black gown. Anxious sighs and whispers of my fellow university peers permeated the thick air as sweat beaded on my brow. We intermittently shuffled forward as each graduate at the front of the line eagerly sprang onto the stage to claim their place in the world of things.  Families would be watching. Parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. The halls were filled with the sounds of their laughter and shoulder slapping only an hour before. I wondered, would this feel different if any of my relatives came to witness? Did it matter?  After what felt like an eternity, I was beckoned. This was my finish line. “Heidi-Ann Wild. Psychology Major, with honours.” I took a deep b
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The Alchemist

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I have begun to write my memoir. Normally I would expect to hear the scuttling sounds of family running for cover, but I’m pretty sure they don’t read my blog. It has taken me a long time to get comfortable working with the material of my past. I once referred to this process in therapy as exhuming the bones from the shadowlands of my psyche . The first time I told one of my stories in therapy, I had given my therapist notice beforehand that I would be discussing something big. This was after a year of working together. At the beginning of that session, he unwrapped a fresh blue stick of putty and handed it to me. “Feel free to make something with this,” he said. And so for the next 45 minutes, I spoke and worked the putty with my hands. At the end of the session, he looked at me silently with watery eyes. “You are a storyteller,” he said. I asked him if he was okay, and passed him the blue putty. I had brutishly crafted a roundish blob. He held it up and looked at it curiously. “Wha
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Behind the Glass

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In the famous words of Carrie Fisher, "Take your broken heart, make it into art." And so I did just that a couple years ago while drafting another entry for the CBC Creative Nonfiction contest. I dug this one up from the archives. It needs some air. *** The metal door clinked loudly as the officer shut it behind me. “Follow me.” He led me across a sterile room to a plastic and metal chair positioned in front of a booth, grabbed the back of the chair and motioned silently for me to sit. I sat down and looked ahead through a sheet of thick plexiglass to the opposite side. My mother stared back at me. “Hi, mom.” “Hi, sweetie.”  Small, dark specks of blood remained on her nose and chin. All the blood on the front side of her white sweater had crusted into a deep crimson from the chest down. “Mom, why are you in here and not him? It’s not fair.” “It was an outstanding warrant from a while ago. Nothing serious. They want to keep me overnight, that’s all.”
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Hole

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There is a hole in the calendar every year on July 9th. It's been this way since 1994 when I lost my cousin Ricky to suicide. On July 9th, 2013 the hole got bigger when my aunt decided that almost two decades without her only child was too much to bear. She jumped into that hole with both feet. Morphine and whisky, with the event marked clearly on her wall calendar. Since my aunt's death, July 9th opens up its jaws and pulls me under for a while. I usually don't see it coming until about a day before. July 8th. Shit. I can feel my body slowly sinking, ever so heavy. The air becomes too thick to breathe, making me wheeze. And I often have dreams that mimic childhood memories of running through the forest, playing hide-and-seek among the fir trees, the smell of their sweet, pungent sap stuck to my fingers. I laugh as the branches catch my clothes. I hear the sound of Ricky's feet crunching the forest floor behind me as he follows in close pursuit. But unlike whe
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