Every morning, from the comfort of a rented apartment in New York, I check the weather forecast for Lytton. Today there is a snowfall warning. Blistering cold. Ice causes accidents, accidents close roads. I read the worried Facebook posts, I feel the community’s tension as winter suddenly sets in.

The first winter after the fire was the hardest one in decades. I don’t mean because of the trauma and the isolation and the raw ruins of our town, although there was that too. It was a winter of the heaviest rainfall, the strongest winds, the deepest snowfall, the coldest temperatures. Every change in weather felt record-breaking, a new level of awful.

The fire had changed everything: a raging beast, out of control. And in that winter, even when the fire was out — the beast was gone — we were still helpless. Again and again, nature reminded us that we were unsafe. We cowered in the onslaught of disasters.

We were tiny, fragile specks trying to survive in an enormous, dangerous world.

I think back to that time, when everything seemed hostile, so far beyond my control. Weather, disaster, bureaucracy, insurance, society, illness. I looked around me, eyes wide, powerless.

There must have been a brief reprieve as winter faded, before the fear of another fire season set in. A little moment of awe, a little glimmer of beauty.

In the spring, a friend came to visit us. She played with Helen, she cooked meals, she sat in the softly lit living room with her snuggly dog and coffee and love. Together, we went to the ruins of Klowa — a place I had only been able to visit once — and it was there, finally, with that good friend, that I stepped away from helplessness and into something active, productive, strong.

I stepped into anger.

Two

The second time
I visited my ruins
was in the spring

nine months after the fire

the dangerous walls
still standing

the loose bricks
more
 settled

the ash and debris
the same

a friend climbed into the basement
 pit of ashes
with a hand rake

sifted for hours

uncovering relics
of my past

broken sculpture
fractured china
rusted jewellery
embedded in pieces of shattered glass

I sat at the top
watched what she pulled out
feeling nothing
except a dull curiosity

how a burned doorknob looks like a vase
or knitting needles crumble with touch
or only the ugliest dishes survive

feeling dull curiosity
but no attachment
to this excavation
of life

she brought up jars
herb-infused salts
products I made in the kitchen
a few days before the fire

the glass still intact
just scorched

she set them gently
on the sidewalk
beside me

and one by one

I smashed them

I read this poem during an interview that aired recently on NPR and CBC Radio. If you’d like to hear it in my own voice, you can listen to the audio here:

Q with Tom Power: Meghan Fandrich on devastating wildfires, moving forward after tragedy and healing through poetry (CBC)

(Our discussion about the poem starts at 11:26 and “Two” itself begins at 13:57.)

Years end.

The year ends in — in what? I was going to type “heaviness.” The heaviness of sodden garbage on a Manhattan sidewalk. The heaviness of loneliness, of confusion.

Heaviness of heart.

Or the year ends in safety. L.O.L. Surprise dolls and Barbies lie throughout the living room — couch, coffee table, floor — in post-Christmas prostration. Helen plays at the kitchen table with kinetic sand. “I mixed in the gold so it sparkles, Mom.” In the distance, a siren; here in the apartment, just Bluey on the iPad and the soft murmur of Helen’s internal dialogue as she plays.

The year ends in fireworks. A friend once told me that New Yorkers are obsessed with fireworks and I didn’t understand the level of that obsession until I felt the sky rumble and shake for ten minutes, twenty, thirty. Layer upon layer of blast, of roar, the shaking louder than sound itself.

Helen was already asleep, and in bed beside her, I closed my eyes to the noise and could see explosions. Bombing. Fire. Celebration mimicking genocide. Genocide mimicking celebration.

The year ends in fireworks.

A year ago, a neighbour’s midnight fireworks scared the two cats I had just put outside, unthinking. Kicky and Crazy, brothers born to a feral mother under our porch in the spring and patiently befriended by me and Helen. They were watching me through the kitchen window from their perch on the potting bench, and then bang and they were gone.

All that night and into the morning, a new year, I was sure they were close to home. Spooked.

The wild lynx, which sat on a corner of the porch on many cold December nights, undeterred by loud shouting and wildly flailing arms, unfazed by the frozen tomatoes I threw, was still in the area, leaving tracks through the snowy yard. A dark shadow in the winter night.

We called Crazy and Kicky, day after day, night after night, until we realized that the lynx was gone. It left when its prey was killed.

Years end.

Earlier that winter, I went out to the woodshed at night (keep the house warm keep the child safe) and my headlamp picked up the eyes of the lynx. Close by in the falling snow, watching me, its glowing eyes reflecting the light. I yelled, lunged at it, tried to prove I was unafraid.

It turned its head from me and slowly moved away.

The year ends.

When Helen was two, I knew if I was still married when the year ended, I would be trapped in that marriage forever. For days, weeks, months, every moment, I felt the end of the year approach, the window of escape get smaller.

I moved through life, played with my toddler, chatted with customers, kept up the motions, and every minute, I felt the year getting shorter. Knowing it had to end, I had to get out, but fearing the moment of escape. Fearing hatred, desperation, violence.

On the last day of the year, when the window was so small, so dark, I said, “We need to talk.”

Years end in heaviness.

Years end in safety.

New years begin.

I’m at a coffeeshop in Brooklyn, crying.

It’s something about a leaf, about the way it fell on the sidewalk. I saw it, stepped over it. Walked on. Turned around half a block later and went back to it, crouched down, pulled the phone out of my pocket with cold hands. Took a photo.

Leaf on sidewalk.

Something about a leaf.

This is the first time in a month that I’ve been away from my daughter. We spend days sitting beside each other on the couch or holding hands on the street. She leans against me in the subway, snuggles into my arms at night. When a shadow disturbs her sleep, she turns toward me, drapes an arm across my body, wraps a heavy leg over mine. In the morning, she asks me to come back to bed, to bring my coffee, to be close to her.

I am always close to her.

This is my first time away from her, and I cried the whole way here. Not because I missed her, no, not in these few short hours. I’m at a coffeeshop in Brooklyn and I’m crying because of that leaf.

The leaf twists
suspended in air
suspended in flight

and drops

settles

gently serrated edges
hovering over concrete
the lightest heaviness of a delicate stem

holding it
down

She’s seven and a half.

Just after her fifth birthday, most of our town burned to the ground.

Two and a half years have passed since the fire; a third of her life. A third of her life.

We arrived in New York and there was the fatigue of travel, of the push to get ready before we left, of the too-busy months before that. Suddenly, everything was standing still. We arrived in New York and the fatigue took me by surprise.

What does it feel like to spend a third of your life in a burned-up town?

We don’t have sidewalks anymore. Well, they’re still there, the sidewalks, but we don’t walk them anymore. No need to walk through that empty plateau.

The fatigue looked like depression. I couldn’t get out of bed. Three time zones make a big difference, I told myself. We should go to bed sooner. Shift our routine.

My body will adjust to this, I told myself.

I’ll get up earlier tomorrow.

I’ll feel normal. Soon.

My daughter, who has never lived in a city (two-thirds of her life in a vibrant little village and one-third of her life in its ruins), stayed on the couch in the dimly lit apartment. Refused to go outside. “Just five more minutes,” she’d say, and those five would never end. Late morning blending into night. North-facing, indoors.

I thought about her on the walk here. About how the first time I got her out of the apartment with the promise of a playground, a gust of wind hit the tree-lined street and she was surrounded by falling leaves.

A little child

who hasn’t seen leaf fall on sidewalk
since she was four

out of memory

eyes wide with wonder
looking up at strong autumn trees

asking the wind
for the next dancing leaf

I walked to this coffeeshop through the quiet streets of Brooklyn, past old brownstones, plastic Christmas decorations, gated front stoops. It’s almost December and there are still flowers blooming. Roses. New York.

Maybe I was crying before I saw the leaf on the ground. Maybe I didn’t cry, but the feeling rose up to my throat. Maybe my eyes were stinging with tears.

It wasn’t hard to leave her today.

The babysitter said they would call if she misses me. The babysitter said she’d be fine.

That leaf is still there, on the sidewalk, in its delicate perfection. Or — no, I can’t. I can’t know that it will be stepped on, broken, destroyed.

It is still there.

The lightest stem
holding it firm

I’m at a coffeeshop in Brooklyn, crying.

Something about a leaf.

I want to share a poem with you, the opening poem of my little book, but sharing a poem here, for the first time, feels vulnerable.

It’s easy to share the poem as part of the book. There, it’s protected between the smudged grey covers, in the company of all the other poems. Part of the story. Safe.

Here, in this space, it is alone, uncovered, exposed. Or maybe it’s me who is exposed.

“Entrails” is one of the first poems I wrote. Not just one of the first for the book, but one of the first of my adult life. I sat at the typewriter to record a memory for a friend, and this is how it emerged.

There is a lot I want to tell you about.

Instead, here is the poem.

Entrails

You didn’t ask me about it

you weren’t like the others
who asked

             aggressive
              bloodthirsty
             cameras rolling

        extracting
                   trauma
         for the consumption of the viewing public

you didn’t ask me
about the ash filling the courtyard
the black smudged sky falling heavily into the windows
the man rushing breathlessly through the doorway
            “That fire’s really close you gotta go”

you didn’t ask me

you don’t know about
you didn’t
                    see

a tired neighbour peering down the street
looking for the fire
while the hillside behind him
burned

a small child
tripping over summer sandals
pulled by her mother’s hand
faster than the wind
faster than the fire

you don’t know

that insidious silver shimmer

the sidewalk empty
windows dark

(maybe everyone else is gone)

(maybe they’re still home
               shut in
                         oblivious

as the town burns around them)


You didn’t ask

Practicing, sharing.

To honour the existence of this poem before and separate from Burning Sage, then, let me share an early draft: the scan of an unnamed poem, typed and retyped for each minor edit, paper slightly curled and rolled from its time in the typewriter on the living room floor.

Uncovered, alone, and safe.

Look down at the subway floor.

I don’t know what to do.

When you talk to me, do you pretend to be happy so you don’t become a burden? or is dishonesty just easier?

In the spring, I looked up at a brick wall. Dirt, half-finished graffiti, a razor-wire spiral separating it from the sky.

Something was caught in the barbs, black, like the feathers of a crow. A shred of plastic, fragment of black garbage bag. Tangled in the wire and lifted up by the wind. Floating, flying, trapped. Hopelessly moving in its immobility.

Freedom only comes with destruction, ripping all the way through.

But then what? Do I tell you how sad I am? How lonely?

Do I ask you an unadorned question so that you can say no?

At least you could say no.

On the train a man stands near me, leans against the pole. Carries on a deep, guttural conversation with himself, with his spirit, with his demons. Head rolling back and forth. Eyes half-shut, unfocused. Emaciated body. Filthy, ill-fitting jeans held up with frayed rope. Words not stopping.

The train goes on, passengers getting off, getting on, shifting their weight in semi-conscious balance. He leans against the pole, words running.

And then I see that his hands have slid in past the loose waistband of those jeans, are starting to move. Head rolling back and forth. Words running.

Blood rusts into concrete.

Can you see your reflection in shattered glass?

Look down at the subway floor.

In a recent interview, I was asked this question:

David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

And my answer: Yes.

Yes. There is a certain feeling in the heart, and it can come from anything. The memory of a laugh. The evening sky reflected in broken glass. The voice of a cello that folds around song (I think of Appendix C by Holy Hum / Andrew Yong Hoon Lee). A charcoal drawing. A crow. Pine trees swaying in summer wind. Blood-stained concrete. Love. And, always and forever, heartbreak.

Question and answer excerpted from “12 or 20 (second series) questions with Meghan Fandrich.” Rob McLennan’s Blog. December 12, 2023.

Appendix C (song and album) by Holy Hum available at Bandcamp.

In the smoke and ash today are trees that burned two years ago.

Some have snapped in the wind, branches falling to the ground, black-charred bark revealing clean heartwood in a jagged break.

Others still hold their brittle pinecones, their ashen needles, and sway in the wind that fans nearby flames. They are fire-stripped, exposed.

There are forests of them, these dead trees. I hope that somehow, through bare branches and root memory, they know they’re not alone.

Originally published on Instagram @meghanfandrich

Last night we went to Klowa. It was Helen’s first time there since the fire.

A garden sage plant is growing under the maple tree’s new shoots, and I picked a piece for Helen; when she smelled it her eyes lit up. There, in that courtyard, she used to pick sage leaves to use as toys while I weeded the garden beds. I remember her cradling baby sage leaves in big hollyhock-leaf blankets. “I love that smell,” she told me.

It was my fourth time back, my first since the cinder blocks were scraped away and the basement was half-filled. The space is smaller than I remember. Life has moved on. The sage plant and the maple tree are tough survivors in the dry, brittle soil. The burdock fares better.

I took a photo of Helen and then she asked for my phone. Blurry photos of bushes and bricks. When she handed it back, she said, “I don’t like Klowa as much anymore.”

Neither do I, sweetie.

Originally published on Instagram @meghanfandrich