1. When the crematorium burned to the ground.
2. When I drove the dark highway at night from Thessalon to the doctor’s house on the lake, talking with the singer who’d had a double lung transplant about how almost dying makes you less scared.
3. When my phone said 4:20 in Haight-Ashbury, but it was actually eighteen minutes after five.
4. When the old man told me about the IQ tests given to students in Gillam, Manitoba in the 1950s. How one of the questions asked for an explanation of the significance of a green light. When the northern lights turn green, one kid answered. You shouldn’t whistle, and you should run home.
5. When we almost ran out of gas in the middle-of-rolling-oil-fields Alberta and the woman at the convenience store that did not have hummus told us to go to the town office and buy a voucher for a fill-up at the equipment yard. Which we did, the cat on my lap, trying to look out.
6. When my mother, grieving my step-father who’d died a few weeks earlier, developed a craving for pumpkin pie and we drove all over trying to find one that was gluten-free before buying the ingredients so she could make it herself.
7. When I danced under the hot, yellow lights, surrounded by close, sweaty bodies, nose-to-nose with the band playing Springsteen’s Atlantic City in the Pig’s Ear Tavern. Heart in my throat (those lyrics). My friend’s flushed face; her long, whipping hair.
8. When we camped in the rain on my husband’s birthday, drank pre-mixed gin martinis poured from a steel water bottle, and the dog climbed into the hammock, tired of lying on the damp, cold ground.
9. When my brother streamed karaoke videos on YouTube and he, our cousin, and I sat crowded on my mother’s couch, belting out the tunes, shouting out names of ones we wanted to sing, while the fifteen-year-old filmed us on her iPhone.
10. When the fox snake rose out of the ash-clouded water, on an empty granite island, in the middle of Georgian Bay.
Lauren Carter is the author of Swarm, a novel published in 2013 by the always fantastic Brindle & Glass (seriously, have you noticed how many authors we have in common?). But back to Lauren… she’s also the author of the beautiful, and by all accounts very popular, Little Fiction story “Places Like These.” What else can we tell you about Lauren? She knits like a champ and—we’re willing to bet—makes a generous pour when she fixes you a drink. Just a hunch.
