In the spring, as the smell of decomposing dog shit fades away, and the last lingering bits of snow dissolve into the muddy ground, and I can walk without my winter jacket, and I have washed and stored my woolen mittens, scarf, and toque, I see my father again. Behind the arena. It’s strange, this annual sighting. Like some saint or Mother Mary apparition that a lonely girl of twelve might imagine because her days are hollow and she wants to believe in some kind of god or in the possibility, however remote, that there might be a life where someone wants to sit beside her in the cafeteria at lunch time and where her mother packed a pretty pink and yellow box with one of those sandwiches with lettuce, and maybe an apple or a stick of gum, and wrote a note, like Melissa’s mother did, that says something ridiculous like “I love you.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not that lonely girl. Even though the appearance of my father every spring, levitating above the mud and dog shit, might seem to be the same kind of thing.
And even though I’m pretty sure it’s nothing more than memory and wishful thinking, every spring I wait to see if Dad shows up again. And he does. Reliably.
Like he never did in real life.
Maggie G. Daly (she/her) is a mother and grandmother living in Ottawa on traditional and unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory. Maggie is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
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