As I'm writing down this long, involved travel narrative almost a full month after returning home from Canada, I know there's some stuff that I'm likely glossing over or not exactly writing about in chronological order as it happened. I'm working with memories at this point, old data in my head from a trip long over. So, reader, please forgive me if anything sounds out of place, because it probably is.
I mentioned briefly before that before we left Omaha, we set up no less than five security cameras both inside and outside the house at various vantage points that covered the vast majority of the house. We had one in the backyard, one looking out the front window, a third at the door (our Ring doorbell), one in the living room that we could make swivel/pan across the room any time we wanted, one in the kitchen, and finally, one in our bedroom upstairs that looked down on the bed and out the door into the hallway.
I just counted -- that's six, counting the Ring as well.
Most of the time we didn't see much on them -- we could pull up a live feed at any time, from any of the cameras. We'd also get motion sensor notifications for them, stuff like "Animal movement captured on Living Room Cam, x:xx" with the "x:xx" being the timestamp. We could then pull up the app and watch the 15 or so seconds of recorded video of one of the cats walking through the living room or kitchen to drink water, etc. These cameras were on, continuously, the entire time we were gone.
We noticed a pattern, though. For one, the bedroom camera never worked, or at least it never worked properly while we were gone. It would (only very occasionally) record one of the cats getting up or down from the bed, and it sent us a notification when Dad went upstairs to refill the food and water bowls up there, but we could never get the camera to display the live feed and could not reboot or power-cycle it remotely, so it remained a brick for most of the time we were gone.
The second thing that we noticed is that my little gray shadow-cat, Sadie, was never seen on the cameras, ever.
Sadie, as I've always said, is the absolute definition of my cat. She is my shadow, follows me everywhere, will sit outside my office when I'm in here with the door shut, will follow me into the bathroom or sit and cry outside the door if she can't, will get off the couch and be right on my heels when I go into another room, etc. She sleeps with me on my foot every night while I'm working, and when I go to bed in the morning she is usually eager to get into bed first, get "her spot" right between the pillows, and cuddle up with me. She lets me hold her like a baby, she gets mad if she can't sit with me on the couch, and occasionally wants me to pick her up and hold her on my lap, her paws resting on my desk, while I'm working at night. She is my cat. She loves Daisy too, and she will do when I'm not around or not available, but she is absolutely my cat.
Sadie is also extremely skittish, doesn't like people other than us, while being at the same time incredibly co-dependent on us. When we have friends over (rare, but it does happen), she runs and hides. When we leave on vacations, she gets scared and hides. When the parents come over to make sure the cats have food and litter and to check on the house, she hides. The parents have gone as far as to say she's a myth, that they're not sure she actually exists because she'll bolt and hide as soon as she knows there's someone in the house who isn't me or Daisy, and they've never once seen her when they've come over to take care of the cats.
But, when they were not here, and the cats were in the house alone? I never saw Sadie pop up on the cameras past the first day we were gone; there was a recording of her that morning jumping up on the bed, before the bedroom camera died. All of the other cameras inside the house were working fine; I'd get notifications showing me the other two cats moving around, going to the food or water dishes, or jumping up and down from the couch. Sadie? Nope. Disappeared.
I'd pull up the cameras and scan them via live view -- it was generally always the same. Maggie, our old fat white girl, sleeping on the couch, sometimes with Pete next to her or on the opposite side of the room in the cat bed. No Sadie. I'd check the kitchen cam, which had their water fountain in view, no Sadie.
This went on for days, until one afternoon when Dad was over here, we called him and I asked him if he'd just look for her around the house, because I was beginning to get very worried. Our cats are not young; the girls had their 16th birthday while we were on the trip (both of them, yes, because they're sisters from the same litter). Granted, there was food, water, and a litter box upstairs outside of the view of the single camera we had in the bedroom that wasn't properly working, but for Sadie to not be on any of the camera footage for the entire downstairs? At all? That was highly peculiar, especially given that she loves sleeping on the couch.
Dad searched the house and couldn't find her. I told him she was likely hiding under the guest bed in Daisy's horribly cluttered office, and it wasn't worth him going in there and laying flat on the floor trying to find her/corner her in the room as that probably wouldn't go well for anyone involved. I saw on a camera notification that Dad entered our bedroom, walked around it, looked under the bed (where she apparently was not hiding) and exited the room -- from the camera that apparently only worked when it wanted to.
"I can't find her," he said. "But it doesn't smell like dead cat in here, like decay or anything like that."
Thanks, Dad.
That night, while laying in bed worried about the cat who loved me the most, I got a notification on my phone for movement on the camera in the kitchen. I pulled it up, and it was Sadie, drinking water from their water fountain. I was immediately relieved. She would only pop up on camera two or three more times while we were gone, always for brief mouthfuls of water or food, before retreating back into the shadows to once more remain unseen for the duration of our trip.
During probably the second or third visit the parents made to the house, Mom remarked that it was so dark and smoky outside that our dusk light had kicked on in the middle of the afternoon while they were there. The smoke was coming down from wildfires in Alberta that had just started up and were raging; you may recall that I got some wild photos of the sun from our trip to South Dakota in 2021, when the fires were blocking everything out:
Yeah, that is not photoshop, that is what the sun looked like as it was setting while we were driving up to Deadwood/Sturgis. It was due to wildfire smoke in the same areas of Alberta that had, while we were in Nova Scotia this time around, caught fire again and the smoke was flowing freely, and strongly, right down into Omaha on the jet stream.
This had affected us for a day or two before we'd left; the town had gotten smoky and you could very heavily smell it in the air. Omaha had been put under an air pollution warning for it. Well, after we left, it apparently got way worse for several days before it all slowly cleared out. We did not know, at the time, how much wildfires in general would affect the rest of our trip -- because, of course, we were in Atlantic Canada with ocean on all sides of us at any given time, and it's not like we were in an area that would be affected by wildfire activity, right?
Hah. Ha ha ha. Think again.
But I'll get to that.
We were well into our vacation, maybe around halfway or so, and I'd been telling Daisy every day that I wanted my poutine. We were literally a five-minute drive from the truck stop where I've eaten the best poutines I've ever had on this planet -- it was closer to us than Tim Hortons was -- and we had not gone there so that I could get poutine, not once, over the course of the entire first half of our vacation. I stressed the importance of this to her and how it was a very big deal to me, possibly the most important part of the Canada Experience™ to me. I don't know how serious she actually realized I was when I said that, or if she mostly brushed me off as if I were being dramatic (I was, but it doesn't change the facts).
I'd also told Daisy's aunt and uncle that I wanted to take them out to dinner while we were in town because we loved them and they've been so good to us over the years. This is the aunt and uncle who live next door, who let us sleep in their basement bedrooms on our first trip up there in 2015, who made sure we were comfortable and had bagged milk and a giant box of Tim Hortons K-cups in the house for me while we stayed there. The aunt and uncle who bought us the best possible wireless router off our wedding registry for our wedding gift, a router we used for many years and is still the best router I've ever owned. They are important to us. Daisy has been very close with her uncle since she was a very young child, and his sons and daughters are some of my favorite people in the family. I told them that it was important to me personally that we take them out to dinner and spend time with them once they got back from the lake, so we set a tentative date at that time for Thursday evening before what, in the states, would be Memorial Day weekend.
Daisy's aunt and uncle also know how seriously I take my poutine.
It ended up, as it was, being their anniversary. Which I honestly did not know beforehand, as they'd said what day worked best for them. I finally got my poutine, and I got an omelet and hashbrowns on the side (I was hungry, okay?) that I ended up only eating half of and took the rest home...to eventually throw out in a few days because I never got around to finishing it. We paid for everything. I wasn't about to let them pay for their own meal on their anniversary, especially not when I'd told them beforehand that I wanted us to take them out to dinner -- with the implication even then that we'd be paying for all of it. That was my overall plan.
Over the course of the week we did a few more things of note; Daisy and I went to get her hair cut at a local shop she visited last year, and they gave her the most radiant haircut she's had in all the time I've known her. Even now, almost a month after returning home and with the growing-out her hair has done since then, she still looks absolutely gorgeous.
As predicted, Daisy's aunt and uncle -- the ones who live outside Halifax -- arrived for the weekend to see us. Their daughter, who is a few years younger than Daisy, hit town shortly thereafter (she arrived separately). In the states, this was Memorial Day weekend, but in Canada, they don't really have a Memorial Day weekend -- their holiday weekend was the weekend prior when we arrived, Victoria Day, which was the Monday before.
I've always had a kinship with this particular aunt and uncle; Daisy's uncle worked in telecommunications for many, many years for one of the biggest companies in Canada (and a company I work with as a carrier very frequently in my own line of work), and recently retired, so he and I have a lot of common ground and things to talk about. We can talk shop about the telecommunications business as well as the intricacies of networking (meaning, computer networking, not building connections with powerful people) and understand/empathize with what each other is saying. He very clearly knows far more about telecom than I do, but he also knows what I do and understands it. He's also a musician, like my dad, and we can connect there as well on a much more personal, almost spiritual level. He's Daisy's youngest uncle and the "baby" of the family, even though he's still much older than me. I really like him and respect him as a person. He has always been very kind to me and is first to crack a joke or find the subtle humor in something small.
Last summer, when we were there for his father's funeral, he had been put in charge of some of the arrangements -- I believe he was in charge of making sure the cremation happened on time, the urn was ready on time, etc -- and he had been calling different people within the funerary industry multiple times a day to help ensure everything was in order, and kept getting the run-around or the cold shoulder. He was visibly frustrated, even though he hid it well.
"Do you want me to call them?" I said. "I can whip some 'asshole American' at them and get them to give me a straight answer or ensure they provide progressive updates. The people who get the loudest get their shit taken care of the fastest."
Yes, dear reader, I offered to escalate on a crematorium.
Can you imagine how that call could have gone? Stop wasting our time, we have a deadline on this, no pun intended. Put him in the goddamn furnace already and let us know when the ashes and box are ready. You have two days.
Jesus, that would've been a bit too morbid and glib even for me, and I've got a pretty dark sense of humor as-is.
He declined my offer, but it did get the smallest, brief smile out of him. That's the kind of relationship I have with Daisy's uncle, and her family in general.
Daisy's aunt -- her uncle's wife -- is almost a polar opposite person. Her uncle, while fun and sweet, has (by most accounts) seriously mellowed out as he's gotten older. But the aunt, she is a spitfire. She may quietly, secretly, be my favorite person in the family and she's not even blood-related. I see Daisy's aunt almost as another mother-like figure. She has a take-charge, no-bullshit, not-taking-shit-from-anyone attitude, a biting wit and sarcasm, and she is never afraid to speak her mind or call someone out, bark an order, etc. But she is also one of the kindest, most loving and inclusive people I've ever met in the family. She was the one who gave me a giant hug last summer when we arrived late at night, tired and sweaty from our trip, and told me "welcome home." She said the same to me during this visit, too. I adore her.
Their daughter, who arrived later, is fairly close in age to Daisy. Daisy denies this and says she's a lot younger (Daisy turned 35 yesterday), but doesn't know her exact age. When she arrived, she was wearing a sweatshirt that said "1992" on it in big, collegiate block letters, and I can only assume she was wearing that shirt with a year on it to signify the year she was born -- which would make her 30 or 31 depending on when her birthday is. She and Daisy spent a lot of time together in their formative years when they were kids, and they had not really gotten a lot of one-on-one time since as they grew up and their life paths slowly diverged.
I first met this cousin last year during our trip there in August, and when I did my first thought was that she was basically Daisy from a parallel universe -- a parallel universe where Daisy had straight hair and slightly different genetics and a slightly different personality, because the two of them are very similar in many ways, even if they don't see it in one another. Daisy, in most social situations, is very outspoken, loud, and has a laugh and a smile that can light up any room. Her cousin is much more reserved and quiet, but extremely observant. She has her mother's biting wit and her aunt's (read: Daisy's mother) sarcasm and attitude. Both of them are big girls, and very amusingly to me, she and Daisy both share the same taste in men -- apparently -- because her fiance is almost a mirror image of me -- down to the fact that we both vape, have similar hairstyles, both wear glasses, both have tattoos and dress very similarly, and both of us have beards and an amazingly similar sense of humor. Our body builds are even very similar, save for the fact that he has muscles where I have, well, dad bod and fat. Her fiance is a boatswain in the Royal Navy and was -- at the time of our visit last month -- sailing his way to Singapore.
Daisy's cousin arrived late in the evening that night, just as her parents were leaving, and sat up with us in the sunroom, talking. Eventually, Grams went to bed -- late, far later than she normally would have stayed awake, and by 1am or so I told the two girls that I needed to go crash too. I went back to the bedroom and eventually crashed out, leaving Daisy and her cousin to catch up.
I awoke a few hours later, in the early morning hours, to realize I was still in bed alone. I didn't think much of it -- I figured maybe Daisy had gone downstairs into the basement to sleep again because she was hot, or that she'd gone to the bathroom or something.
Oh no, that wasn't the case. When I got up for the day, I found that both girls had been up all night talking until after the sun came up. They both slept fast in the early morning hours and were both up again by midday. Daisy's cousin got up first and I had some nice one-on-one conversation time with her for a while before Daisy herself got up eventually. She is a very sweet girl and reminds me so much of my wife. Maybe it's a family thing, I don't know.
All of the extended family had left town once more by the evening hours, and we were once again at the house alone with Grams. I think this was a relief to Grams, because she has high anxiety when family visit (though she never really had that with us, perhaps because Daisy and Mom stayed there last summer far longer than Dad and I did).
As an aside, I've been told so many times by Mom since our return how much Grams likes me, and how enamored she was with me. I had many long, intricate conversations with the woman while we were there, and she was very engaged and wanted to talk to me. Mom says she isn't like that with anyone, that she doesn't like people -- doesn't trust them, doesn't want to be around them, etc. If that's true, I never saw it in my interactions with her. She was very kind, very funny, would tell me stories about the old days, about growing up in the area, about the house and the property the family owned, etc. I think it's because she knew I was genuinely curious and that I actually cared about what she had to say. I am intensely fascinated with the family history, especially since that seems to be cornerstone knowledge in Daisy's family to know their heritage, know where they came from, to trace it back and remember it and hold space for it -- and most of my own family couldn't care less about those things. I know very little about my own family history aside from the most basic things, because nobody in my family ever seemed to care about keeping records, telling stories about the family history, or recording names and places lived. I've had to piece together the bulk of the information I know secondhand or from census records and other online resources.
We went to visit Daisy's grandfather's grave on a cold, misty morning a few days before we left. It looked much like it did in August, when they buried his wooden urn containing his ashes, but there was nobody around on the day we were there. Well, there was one guy sitting in a truck, but he drove off as soon as we entered the graveyard. I don't know if he was a groundskeeper or what, but he looked sort of sketchy.
Next to the grave of her grandfather was the grave of his daughter -- Mom's sister -- the only member of that generation of the family who had died young. She had died of cancer a few years before I met Daisy, so I never got to know her. The cancer was aggressive and it was a brutal, painful death for everyone in the family to experience. I lost a sister young too, but I never knew her -- it was much different for Mom, Daisy, and the rest of the family, who was close with Daisy's aunt.
There are many family/long extended family graves in that graveyard -- people related down the line, tangentially or through marriage, who died generations ago. There are entire swaths of gravestones in family plots, all of them with the same last names, all of those last names British, Scottish, or Irish. You'll see that a lot in Atlantic Canada, I'd assume, and even more so in Nova Scotia. Cemeteries are always a peaceful place for me; despite being what some people would call "sensitive" to the denizens of the other side -- I've seen or been haunted by many ghosts in my life, but those are stories for another time -- I've never experienced anything in a cemetery that has made me feel uneasy.
The same can't be said for some churches, which is something else I'd learn over the course of this trip and I'll cover in the next, and final, part of this series.
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