Pictou County, Nova Scotia, Canada
Lint blue thunder flavors the memory. The waves are enormous, curling up high and mighty like Caribou antlers. In hindsight: Why are we at the beach during a thunderstorm? But back then, in all of my five year old wisdom: The water is so warm and excited to see me.
The power went out for three days during one hurricane or another. My niece was only a baby, my mom and sister murmuring about warming the milk. Everybody crowded together onto a bed, every blanket in the house employed. I thought it was wonderful. I remember standing in the middle of the street, the wind tearing straight through me. I watched my red hat get sucked up and away into the grey, watched trees flail, calm as a clam, as a strange and lonely little girl transfixed, like watching a snow globe from the inside. The Ship Hector crept up onto Caladh Avenue and my mother finally burned the candle. Life went on.
On the night a deer ran into the side of our car, the glass exploded like confetti. I don’t remember crying, I remember it all like that magnificent snow globe, the details lost on me beyond the glittering shards swirling around like snowflakes. I remember being confused later on, when my sister kept insisting that I was crying in the passenger seat until the ambulance came. One of us remembers it wrong.
I remember reading about psychologists manipulating people into believing that fabricated memories were ripe from their subconscious. The recovered memory movement. I devoured the written word, anything I could get my hands on. Reread books my older siblings forgot to return to school again and again and again, learned about Mardi Gras, owls, sedimentary rocks. Learned about public libraries, then went and read every ghost story ever recorded in Pictou County. It’s all I really remember, the things I read. If I even really remember. In the years since, I’ve read a lot about that place as I knew it and as I didn’t. About the skatepark they’re still trying to get built; Shubenacadie Residential School; the pulp mill, not the familiar stench but the contamination, who and how it killed; about small-town racism, small-town small-mindedness; Viola Desmond; the No. 2 Construction Battalion; and then hurricanes worse than anything I ever saw, a place that isn’t what it was before. I don’t remember what it was before, in my own eyes just a blur of happiness and hardship, yellow on green, salted grey, lint blue thunder, the seabound coast. I know that when I thought I knew, I didn’t really know. Not all of it. Maybe this schism, this discordance, it’s all it ever was, all anything is.
I remember where to go to feel as dissonant as the memories. Into the thick of woods up past what used to be Pictou Elementary. Go at night. Walk up the center of the road, if you want. There won’t be cars. Look up. I bet those stars remember things, too.
I wish I hadn’t read about the recovered memory movement. I wish I could ask somebody in good faith to sift my every memory through a sieve, the falling granules sparkling, backlit with Jitney sunshine, to let me know which parts were real, which parts are missing and how to get them back, let me know why we were at the beach during a thunderstorm.
Courtney Buder (she/they) is a writer and visual artist living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on unceded Wolastoqey land. Their work is published or forthcoming in Geist Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Room Magazine, the Queen’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram @courtneybuder.
