– Rachel Rose

Lukewarm IKEA coffee on a Tuesday afternoon. 
Her cup is empty and mine is half full. It’s the inaugural meeting of a new mothers group- the accidental, reluctant, unsure place makers of this town.  

How did you end up here?  

She almost smiles. 
Her hand reaches up and rubs a thick smudge of dirt on her cheek. 
Then she reaches across the table and touches the smudge on mine and says “you know.” 

She tells me it was the babies that held her close to this ground. 
They cried and babbled and wheezed wanting roots so bad.  

So she relented giving every bit of herself to the cause. 
Even now, even though her babies are bigger, she finds herself tethered to this unexpected home. 
The story is uniquely typical…  

She was from Saskatchewan or BC or something like that, just like everyone else around here it seems. 

The opportunity magnet scraped her across the prairies and mountains and the next thing she knew she had spent decades filing sippy cups with water from the Bow.  

She can’t leave. 
Their father lives here. 
Her mother somehow ended up here. 
Everything that she rebuilt from the rubble of that life before came from here.  

She was supposed to live another life you know.
A scripture was written about it but somehow, she couldn’t adhere.  

Instead she anxiously drives the Deerfoot back and forth from their fathers’ home to hers.
Cold hands gripping the wheel as she wonders what this roads namesake would think of all this sea of lights and fumes. 
How did this all come to be? 
All the while the babies cry and the cartoon screens glare.  

Eating Old Dutch chips and cottage cheese for lunch most days. 
Evenings devoured reading about drama, thankfully much worse than her own.
Her pillow fluffed high with dreams of other places far away. 
She is just acting like its home but it might just be temporary. 
How long does temporary last?  

And anyway, she buried her baby here, a part of her remains here forever even when she thinks about leaving.  

She walks on the pavement with soft feet. 
Careful to remember that she too is a guest on these lands.
Everything feels temporary, she is done with commitments- forever.  

But time unfolds and she became. 
Just enough of her heart was left beating after loss and rubble to keep caring.
And she does. 
Not just for her children but for everyone she sees who has touched rubble and lived to tell.
So that’s where she devotes her heart, here in this place, in this home she has found herself in. A community reflects what it sees.  

In time her babies took root and grew year after year and this place became home for them too. 
She is here now, where else would she go?   

This place has been witness to her births, her rebirths, her loss. 
That must be worth something.  

She pressed her face so close to the ground planting her seedlings so deep that her cheeks are forever stained with this soil.  

And anyway, after all is said and done you just have to look around you and you will see a city of mothers with dirt stained cheeks just the same. 
Each wearing the mark of place, stained love engineers making an unexpected home day by day.