Tangible ties to our past, gone in a flash

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/06/2025 (485 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I wrote a list.

I wrote a list, because I am nothing if not small and fragile and human — and aware of that — and the things on the list weren’t any of those things.

I hid the list in a newspaper column — and because our kids don’t always read my columns, I also buried it deep in a book, just in case time went by and they might have a chance to trip over it later.

And it went like this.

It occurs to me that we will eventually be gone, and you will be left to sort everything out. This is a message, a map maybe, about some of the things in the house, and what you’re supposed to do with them. Or at least about some of the history they have. …

The point is that, if you’re reading this, you’re trying to figure it all out. What’s important. What isn’t. And you won’t figure it out — I wish you could, but it’s not likely to happen.

There’s just too much information that you don’t have — too many things you and I both will wish you would have asked about, but always thought we would have time for later.

So this is an incomplete list. I’ll add to it now and then if things strike me.

Wondering about the bits of bricks that are scattered everywhere? Good question. They’re all different sizes, rounded by the ocean. We started collecting them, I’m not sure why, but I would keep them — there’s a comfort in things that endure the harshest situations. But you don’t have to.

The gin bottle with the slim hips and the wide shoulders? It’s just a nice bottle that someone gave me once for doing them a favour.

There’s a miniature cupboard on the wall in the dining room. It’s got all kinds of tiny pewter objects: teapots and spoons and even samovars. It was Leslie’s mother’s — we’ve had it for years.

The huge, toothed clamshell in the bathroom. Keep that. You’ll never see another. Mom found it diving, 50 or 60 years ago at least. But don’t take it across any borders: it’s like ivory now, an endangered species.

On the shelf nearby is a silver cigarette case with a monogram — that’s from Leslie’s family.

And there’s a folded photocopy of a poem about fireweed, right near the wall. It is Leslie’s mantra; she says it out loud every year when the fireweed is high and purple in the yard.

The list goes on. And on. Filled with details about a coffee grinder in the kitchen, particular kitchen knives, things that have real value, others that were merely anchors sentimental.

It’s good to leave a road map, I thought. For later.

It was exactly one month ago today.

That house in Adam’s Cove, N.L., was an anchor, a lodestone, a place where time stood still. Close it up, come back in a month, and the dishes from your last meal would be waiting in the dish rack to be put away. A constant, in a world where things are anything but.

I got a call from a friend on May 7 that a wildfire had started in nearby Broad Cove.

A small fire, but significant. Growing. Wind-driven.

There’s a lot of that just now, right here in Manitoba.

There’s a lot of that just now, right across the country.

We got sporadic messages. Southwest wind, 50 km/h, gusting to 70. Everything’s dry. Fire’s spreading. Fire’s close.

Then, for an agonizingly long time, no one could tell us anything. The worst kind of radio silence.

In the morning, around nine, someone on Facebook sent us a picture of our house, collapsed in on itself, still burning.

The house and everything in it, flattened in just a few hours.

The shed on the root cellar? Incinerated, the fire hot enough to drool aluminum from the storm-window frames down across the foundation stones. Glass blown out in twists and curls like stretched toffee.

In the woods, the ground is now black and crunchy and light-brittle, so that your feet sink too far in and leave a mark in the tuff.

The trees, especially the firs, are stiff carbon-black brooms.

Where the house was, the cast-iron bathtub sits, warped and cracked. The wood stove bent and broken.

The conifers are mostly burned out. The broadleaf trees might have a chance. The grasses are poking up green already.

We survived. But none of the things I thought would outlive us both did.

Our hands were on them right after our parents’ hands were there, and no one’s hands will ever be there again.

We were at the remains of the property last week, shifting foundation stones and grubbing through ash for important things.

Old keys. Tea figurines. Drill bits and now-rusting crescent wrenches and hammers with their handles burned off — and my mother’s countersink punch, a remarkable tool that has nine lives if it’s ever had even one. That one, we found.

We found burned treasures, identified things from their melted and carbonized remains, laughed with delight at that, stood up sometimes with our hands on our hips with tears streaming down our faces. Tears, running through light pancake makeup of ash.

Hard times for so many people. People who have lost their waypoints, their tangible history, the things their hands implicitly know the shape of.

Sometimes, I wake up and think it hasn’t happened. But it has.