Melanie In Saskatchewan@saskatchewan_in
I wasn’t supposed to find this.
Most of you know what’s been going on. The sewer backed up. The line is shot. Seventy feet from the basement to the street that I somehow have to replace on an income that barely keeps the lights on. Then came the mold. Creeping in quietly where the air doesn’t move. The kind that doesn’t care that I have COPD. The kind that doesn’t care that I physically can’t fight it.
So the basement had to come apart.
Piece by piece, some of the new life on the Prairies I built with my husband getting stripped back to studs because there is no other option.
Funny how life works sometimes. The guy helping me do it is connected to a moment I’ll never forget.
A year ago I found a woman barefoot in January, standing in the snow watching her home burn down with her child beside her. I pulled over in my school bus, brought them in, took them to my house, gave her warm clothes, got her somewhere safe.
Now I’m the one standing in the wreckage of my own home, and her husband is here helping me tear it apart in exchange for some things I no longer need, like the extra television and blue ray player and about 100 DVDs and blue rays. Man cave stuff I won't use since I already have those things in triplicate.
There’s something poetic in that. Or maybe just painfully human.
But none of that prepared me for what he found.
When we bought this house in December 2019 Dave built me a canning kitchen downstairs. He built it with his hands, like he built everything. Like he built our life. It’s gone now. It has to be. The mold took it.
He was never a man of big words. Thirty years together and “I love you” wasn’t something he said often. That wasn’t how he was raised. He showed it instead. In the fixing. In the protecting. In the quiet ways that don’t announce themselves but hold everything together.
He was my hero in work boots. My spider removal specialist. The unplugger of toilets, the one who said its just shit and washes off, the reacher of all things over 6 feet. The man who would drop everything to help anything that needed it, especially animals, wild or domesticated.
You didn’t need to hear it from him. You just knew.
Or at least I thought I did.
Until today.
The guy called me downstairs. I thought something was wrong from the look on his face. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t damage.
It was something softer. Something heavier.
Empathy, perhaps.
Because behind the wall, hidden between two studs where no one was meant to look, Dave had written something in black marker.
“Dave & Melanie 2020
For Vida. Xoxo.”
He never said it easily.
So he put it somewhere permanent instead.
Somewhere it would stay long after everything else wore out.
I don’t know if he ever meant for me to find it. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was just his way of saying it without having to say it out loud.
But there it was. Waiting. Like an unexpected gut punch.
Behind a wall I never would have opened if everything hadn’t gone wrong.
And somehow, in the middle of all this mess, all this loss, all this stress I don’t know how I’m going to survive…
I found it.
And I will carry that for the rest of my life. ❤️
