The first thing I grabbed when the evacuation order came in was my bag of power tools and a bucket of screws. If my little cabin burns I will need these to rebuild it.
Non replaceables were next. My case of genealogy papers which include handwritten notes and letters that go back to the 1800s. Childhood photographs and my collection of jewelry from my grandmothers. These small collections made it to the car, along with my clothes, some food, and my sourdough starter. I took the Laphoaig Quarter Cask my friend had given me for my 40th. Scotch from Islay is substantial enough to raise a glass in relief or in despair.
And then the books. I took my journal, The Parable of the Sower, and two books on land ownership that are core to my art practice, The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes and Who Owns England by Guy Shrubsole. But for the rest, I told myself books are replaceable.
I know how to move. After moving 38 times in life I am familiar with disruption. I know how to live in chaos. In many ways I thrive in it. To quote Fiona Apple, “Sebastian said ‘I’m a good man in a storm.’”
What I don’t know is how to feel during the chaos. I can survive storms just fine. But I am numb. I am dissociated from the pain of looking possibly for the last time at my little cabin–everything I have worked to build and make with my blood, sweat and tears over the last three years, and feel the sadness of it possibly burning to the ground. These grief states feel like something that has been trained out of me. If you move so many times, after all, you stop putting down roots and attaching to places.
I am safe, supported, and cared for. I feel anxious but grateful. I know I have in me the capacity to navigate whatever happens next. But the thing that I feel on the edge of my consciousness is a niggling concern that what I am at risk of losing is not possessions.
What is at stake for me if this little home burns is the loss of knowing myself as a rooted person. I feel like I was just beginning to meet this side of myself, possibly for the first time.
I grabbed my violin. I rarely play it. There have been too many other demands than playing scales. But in the back of my mind I know there is a time in my future where the dust will settle enough that I can pick it up and play again. I know there is a version of me who has been sidelined by the pace of chaos. My emotional capacity has gone to tend other more important things than learning an instrument.
I think I grabbed my violin in a desperate hope that there is still a future where I will meet her–me, rooted, and curious, and once again attaching to place. Re-learning my d-scales and minuettes is this symbolic future where I am not just responding to disruption. Where there is energy to be present to the goodness of what it is to be alive in a moment.
Right now this future is in the hands of some incredible firefighters who carry the weight of not only my own future, but the future of so many vulnerable Manitobans. Over the next few hours and days and news of the fire comes in, I will be listening to see who I will need to be–Alexandra the survivor or the yet-to-be-discovered, Alexandra the violin player.
Alexandra Ross Works 