Charlotte is here with us this week at our new-to-us house on Vancouver Island, so close to the ocean, you can sometimes smell it and hear it, though not quite see it. We are camping in a house that has not yet gifted us with a working furnace or much furniture other than a new king bed that is perfect for Don and Moondog and me (and sometimes also Charlotte); a table and chair set bought secondhand by my grandparents when they first moved to Canada as refugees after WWII and then lovingly refurbished by my Daddy; and a loveseat I bought at the local Habitat for Humanity store that cost 170 dollars plus 100 dollars to bring it over in a truck. Don is in the king bed on Facebook marketplace as I write, looking for a utility trailer to haul all the things we both need, want, and are happy to collect second-hand and over time, provided we have something to pick them up with. I am huddled next to a space heater in the spacious kitchen, with my down jacket on over my pajamas, listening to the herons squabble outside as they build their nests and play in the trees of our back yard. How majestic and jurassic they are. It’s a new world. A new world without Emily, yet I feel her presence so deeply here that sometimes I could swear she is right beside me.

The Salish Sea is a place she loved: she built log houses along its shores to huddle under; she served countless orders of food meticulously plated on exquisite pieces of driftwood laden with sand and kelp and stones and shells fashioned into exactly what our wishes were; she bounded on all fours like a little lion and frolicked with Heather’s dogs here; and she walked the trails with gusto, always searching for eagles and seals and all the little treasures her and Don would pick up and pocket along the way.

I am convinced she is happy, no – DELIGHTED – that we are here: that we can now call Little River/Singing Sands our home. I am certain she wants us to nest, just as the herons are doing in our fir trees. 

Spring has come, and the mating dances have begun, little purple hyacinths are springing up everywhere: the buds, the blooms, the surge of growth exactly mirror what is happening to me. (Well, maybe not the mating dance, because I have found my perfect mate, and we are together becoming more perfect by the moment. Haha.) But this place: yes, it is magical and transformative. We knew that when we came here for the first time seven years ago, when our friend Heather found our house for us just a few days after we had left this beautiful neck of the woods neither of us had ever visited. She called us at the airport as we were heading back to Beijing after a summer spent mostly on the Pacific Ocean, saying she had found us the perfect place. We bought it sight unseen, and came back the next summer to find that, yes, it was perfect indeed. Heather had worked her magic, but that magic is part of the universal magic that crystallizes and makes all events synchronize into this marvelous life, even when we don’t know why or how it will all come together.

Maybe that doesn’t happen for all, and who am I to say this after losing the most precious thing of all, a child? Yet here I am, feeling my Emily and knowing that we are destined to be here in this moment, and knowing that we have found our home and it is time to nest.