It's About Time

I think my luck may be changing. It's about time.

Maybe it really is about time. Maybe you have to go through bad times before the good ones can happen ... in order to appreciate the good ones ... or maybe just because life moves cyclically.

Marta and I lost one another three years ago. After that I went back to Kenya and discovered that my faith in people was still strong, but I had lost my faith in organizations whose mission was to help those in need. I watched in disbelief as the best of those Canadian organizations became bureaucratized and impervious to the pain of its most faithful employees. I listened to the backstabbing and we-they pronouncements of Canadians from that and other organizations who had come to Kenya to help but who had become more and more alienated from those same Kenyans.

And that is why I decided to stay home ... to get a puppy ... to root myself after years of having no real roots at all. As it turned out, I became absolutely uprooted as a result of making that decision. And maybe that is something that must happen before you can move on. Maybe the old has to be completely destroyed before you can be re-born.

Having a new puppy proved a trial and a tribulation because I lived in an apartment with a weird neighbbour living beneath me. I stayed away from home as much as possible and then moved out to the cottage a month later.

I realized I wanted to live in a real house on this lake and so we began the slow painful process of construction. It seemed that everything that could go wrong did, and what began as a modest project required far more money, energy, patience and time than we could have imagined. Kenya and I began living in other people's houses. I not only had no roots now. I had no home.

During this time I began working with dogs to earn some extra money and to give Kenya the right kind of socialization. As a result, I broke and dislocated my finger and that began the year and a half filled with the misery of dealing with a medical system that did not work.

My hair is greyer today than it was three years ago. I look and feel more than three years older. My right hand no longer works very well. My chest has been aching lately. I am still dealing with the ongoing problems of construction done badly and I am considerably poorer than I was.

I have had to face the fact that not all dog people can be trusted and not all workers give a damn.

I have, over the last three years, suffered more than one bout of depression, and a sense of dislocation. I was so completely uprooted and homeless while the house was being built, I lost my ability to focus. As a result, I became unable to read and write, the two activities that had sustained me throughout my life.

After I moved into the house it gradually became the home I had sought. I began reading again. Now I am writing every day ... not novels perhaps ... but still, I am writing. Kenya has matured into a real companion. I love this lake despite the difficulties associated with living here, especially over this very hard winter we have had. I have met some good people while dealing with the others, so, on balance, I still have faith in people and in the redemptive quality of dogs.

And Marta and I have reconnected.

Maybe that is the sign sent by the universe that things will now be better.