Remember that line? Well, tomorrow I am giving myself the first of a number of such gifts for my Milestone Birthday Year. I’m flying to Sault Ste. Marie to visit a former neighbour from Stratford days.

I was going to have a big party to celebrate my Milestone and I realized that many of the people I most wanted to see were too old to travel or reluctant to come to Toronto in February. So I decided not to have the party but to make a point of going to see my friends in their own place. Hence Sault Ste Marie.

It hasn’t been that simple to arrange the trips, at least this first one, because of my messy injury and the time it has taken to heal – not yet whole. I wasn’t certain until Friday that I would be able to go. As it is I have requested a wheelchair to help me get on the plane. I’m looking forward to seeing my friend.

I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll take Little Mac (my very small laptop). I’m not going to take a bag, not even a wheelie, and I’m not sure my sleek backpack will accommodate a nightie and essentials as well as a laptop. If you don’t’ hear from me till Wednesday you’ll know what I decided.

Anon, anon.

Unique, I think, is the Scottishtartle , that hesitation

when introducing someone whose name you’re forgotten.

And what could capture cafuné, the Brazilian Portuguese way to say

running your fingers, tenderly, through someone’s hair?

Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy?

And where is speech for the block of ice we pack in the sawdust of our hearts?

What appellation approaches the smell of apricots thickening the air

when you boil jam in early summer?

What words reach the way I touched you last night –

as though I had never known a woman – an explorer,

wholly curious to discover each particular

fold and hollow, without guide,

not even the mirror of my own body.

Last night you told me you liked my eyebrows.

You said you never really noticed them before.

What is the word that fuses this freshness

with the pity of having missed it?

And how even touch itself cannot mean the same to both of us,

even in this small country of our bed,

even in this language with only two native speakers.

Ellen Bass (b. 1947)