We took a few snow days these past two weeks and found out many autobiographical things, some interesting, some frightening. One frightening detail was that, after finally cleaning our basement, we found out that we–surprise surprise–are HOARDERS OF PERSONAL EPHEMERA. The slush pile of teenage poetry, birthday cards, scribbled muses, and half-baked apocalypse novels holding up the foundations of our house was/is an embarrassment.
Sorting through all of this wretched errata on our kitchen table, we each had to agree that at some point in our lives we thought, incorrectly, that someone SOMEWHERE might want to write our biographies, and that THIS RECEIPT from a Greyhound to Toronto would be a sublime key to our story. No. It wasn’t. It isn’t. Moreover, NO ONE IS GOING TO WRITE OUR BIOGRAPHY!
And so the recycling pile grew. It gained consciousness like the Trash Heap in Fraggle Rock. It became a bizarre amalgam of ourselves. A Janessa, filled with pointless secrets and regretted lovers. It was hideous, and we promptly took it to the curbside of our little street where it was buried under drifts of snow, to be forgotten and recycled into more useful, hopeful, notebooks and ledgers.
Liberating, really. Does the present not have too much to bear already? However one discovery did, suitably, blow our minds. This one came out of nowhere, and still needs to be substantiated by genealogical triple-checking. But, in going through our mass of family papers and news clippings, we believe that Jason’s ancestor is (or might be) one of the farmers who helped build THE MASSIVE BLOCK OF CHEESE featured in James McIntyre’s epic doggerel poem “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7000 Pounds”.
We have seen the Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze —
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
This truth is staggering, as McIntyre is one of Jason’s favourite poets. And to think that, through some, perhaps pointless, alchemy of Time, he is related to the man–the, read it, cheeseMASTER of the Ingersoll Cheese Manufacturing Company–who helped craft that ridiculous achievement of local dairy production, made the hot shame of hoarding a little easier to bear. Maybe there was some misplaced spirit of failed greatness driving him all along? Maybe, since the mammoth cheese only placed 4th at New York State Fair in Saratoga, there was a little more than providence–read MANIFEST DESTINY–in his archival and literary attempts. Perhaps he was to build a mammoth cheese of his own. A CANADIAN LITERARY CAREER. There was much to think about in that little kitchen, that snow day in February of 2022, when days were short and the snow was high.
But what can YOU take from this? Perhaps nothing. Or, if you feel generous, maybe know that even in the ripening age of 45 a shining, blazing detail can emerge that can place all meaning in a new focus. Perhaps a secret of yours lies out there waiting to be found
in drifts of snow,
at the curbside.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
