Christina Hunter
Bio
Author, Mother, Wife. Recipient of the Paul Harris Fellowship award and 2017 nominee for the Women of Distinction award through the YWCA. Climate Reality Leader, Zero-Waste promoter, beekeeper and lover of all things natural.
Stories (51)
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A Most Disruptive Morning
That mob of protesters was growin'. I can mostly slip by undetected and start my job without their harassing hatred for this place, but some days they catch me. "How can you be so cruel?! Those are sentient beings in there! Release them to the ocean!" The taunts follow me. I ignore them as I push past the crowd. I used to wait to change into my coveralls when I got to my maintenance closet, but now I just say fuck it, I'm tired. This job pays well. And those fish don't seem bothered at all. Hell, it's probably cleaner than the ocean these days with all that crap that's floatin' in there. I remember when I first started this job, people loved aquariums. Those were the days. People smiled back then. Makin' memories. Nowadays all they want to do is yell about stuff.
By Christina Hunter3 years ago in Fiction
Sweet as Honey
It was a Wednesday in May 2017, when we received our approved application to foster a sweet 14-week-old, mostly black, plump, German shepherd. There were four in total that needed foster homes, but as soon as I saw her, I knew it would be her that would join our family.
By Christina Hunter3 years ago in Petlife
The Mission
"Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say." The voice echoed out. Or had it come from within? The room smelled of bleach. A quick look around revealed a large blank screen that glitched every few minutes, and twelve white chairs that lined a rectangular matching table.
By Christina Hunter3 years ago in Fiction
How to Claim a Life
We bought a chess game; A beautiful mahogany, handcrafted coffee-table-conversation-piece that was to be my first step at backing away from this exhausting digital life we're all plugged into. Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was take a picture of how beautiful it looked in our living room and share it for the world to see. Alas, I refrained.
By Christina Hunter3 years ago in Chapters
A Ride to Remember
Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. It became the backdrop to the midnight train's play, with each night a new story unfolding. The scenery below the clouds shifted like an old Viewmaster toy. It's film reel presenting a new world to explore with each winding of the plastic orange handle. Click, blackness. Click, mountain range. Click, blackness. Click, ocean. Click.
By Christina Hunter3 years ago in Fiction
La Dolce Vita Estiva
We lived in a typical wartime house on the south end of town. A single maple tree dotted most front yards, though ours had a swing my Dad built. I was always proud of that. It felt like a little notch above the other neighborhood kids. I imagined it felt similar to when someone in the neighborhood had a pool, though nobody in ours did. Each backyard was nothing more than a bland rectangular patch of grass, and on sunny days my sister and I dragged our deck chairs to the middle of it, plugged our ghetto blaster into the extension cord and fed it through the kitchen window to blast the Cranberries or Counting Crows. Sometimes we listened to the radio to hear of any concert ticket contests we could try for. We lathered our bodies in tanning oil, and spritzed our hair with lemon juice, setting a timer to remind us to turn over every twenty minutes or so. Two whole months stretched before us with nothing to do. Those summers tasted like sun-drenched peach juice dripping down my chin, and salty, soggy chips from wet hands diving into the bag after a swim at the local beach. The hours ticked by while our parents were at work; too young for jobs ourselves, we basked in the freedom to choose what the day would bring. I can still taste the penny candy from the variety store on the main street. We'd swing our little paper bags around for all the neighborhood kids to see as we walked back home from our splurge. Some days I'd buy the giant jawbreaker and lick it while we walked until my tonge was raw and stained red and blue. We tried all the new flavours of pop from the dispenser, and mixed them together melting a popsicle into it and called it swamp water. In the evenings, Dad would put the sprinkler on and ask us to pick snap peas and cherry tomatoes from the little garden that lined the edge of the yard. We'd split the skin of the peas open pulling from the vein and count how many were in each, popping them in our mouths like m&m's as we worked. Back then we still ate meat, and so those summers tasted like grilled hamburgers with too much ketchup and mustard, homegrown garden salads and buttered and salted corn on the cob. Mom proudly used the corn holders I had made at school which were bright orange melted plastic and hard to hold with greasy fingers. On Sunday evenings after dinner, Mom, my brother, sister and I would get on our bikes and head over to the park to listen to the music playing on the barge. Dad didn't like the crowds and said the style of music wasn't great, so he stayed back. Some evenings it was an Elvis impersonator, or an old-folks band that played songs I'd never heard of. But it brought a crowd, and families sat on picnic blankets or camp chairs until the mosquitos came out. That or the donation basket started getting passed around which split the crowd up pretty quickly. On humid evenings we were allowed to get an ice cream from the concession stand, but mostly we swam near the shore while Mom listened to the music. She knew all the songs, and sang along to each one.
By Christina Hunter4 years ago in Feast
Age of Dragons
~ Chapter 1 ~ There weren't always dragons in the valley. But if you linger around barstools late into the night, you'll hear fragments of stories slip out from the old men. Join the circle of any of the cooking fires and ask one of the elders to spin tales of what life was like before the shift, and little by little, the truth of the old world is revealed. Cece was fascinated by it, and couldn't imagine a time when immediate tasks of survival didn't rule the day. They spoke of massive tin structures bigger than the dragons themselves, that flew to faraway places. That the people wore brightly coloured clothing and fancy shoes on their feet, and colours that women (and some men) put on their faces to get attention. They spoke of little black boxes that each person carried with them to communicate with others. It felt like something from another world entirely. How could it all have disappeared without a trace? Wouldn't there be some proof of it? Cece was determined to find the answers to these questions, even if it meant leaving the valley to do so.
By Christina Hunter4 years ago in Fiction
Mothers in Law
We drove home in the late afternoon slanting sunshine of that March day, after a long and arduous birth that spanned from the previous afternoon. It was a turning of season in every way as the snowbanks receded on lawns and the breeze carried promises of warmer days. I was now somebody's mother. We arrived to a full house which smelled of homemade lasagna and garlic bread, the language of love. I remember her teary gasp as she laid eyes on her first granddaughter; her son's first-born child, for the first time. I was elated, exhausted and sore. I somehow managed to escape the excitement by sneaking upstairs to sleep off the whirlwind event that had just taken place inside my body. Hours later, the door to the bedroom creaked open and my husband brought in our daughter. Shadows of my world against a hallway of light, such a beautiful moment, and yet my eyes could only focus on that small, pastel, plastic soother that had been introduced to her while I slept. I recalled the midwives talking about nipple confusion, and the importance of getting nursing right. I glared at the soother, angry. I thought up all these wicked scenarios that my baby had been downstairs crying for me, needing me, and that man-made thing had been shoved in her face instead. How silly, now when I recall that memory. She nursed like a champ anyhow, and so the entire issue was moot. In fact, she continued to nurse exclusively for thirteen beautiful months until transitioning to a bottle, and then cup, and now stands nearly as tall as me at thirteen years old. She thrived. She was perfect in every way, and continues to amaze me every day still. But sometimes I recall that moment when I'm in the shower, or walking the dogs, and feel guilt at how I'd reacted, how I internalized such a trivial non-issue as if I'd been wronged, or worse, undermined, in my first hours of motherhood. How easy it was for me to accuse my mother-in-law of this crime. In my head anyway, I can't even recall if I had said any of these things aloud. Not to my mother-in-law, I would never. But I likely didn't even vocalize it to my husband either. And yet the memory burns sometimes. Silly, trivial, and such a waste of my time.
By Christina Hunter4 years ago in Confessions
Breaking the Addiction to Breaking News
The first time I legitimately watched the news was September 11th, 2001. I was 18 years old. It was my day off from my retail job, and the day began with my Mom yelling from the rec room. I slowly made my way to the couch, shaking the sleep from my brain with my comforter wrapped around me. As I looked at the t.v my eyes shifted into focus on the horrors unfolding in real time as the planes hit the twin towers in New York.
By Christina Hunter4 years ago in Humans
Forget Single-Use Plastics, People are the New Disposable Commodity.
The Great Divide began in the Trump era with news outlets and late-night television picking apart everything the administration did, and we all pulled up our seats, grabbed our popcorn and laughed, clicked, shared and liked it. We were the majority, and we had no time to try to understand anyone that was "for" that type of behaviour. We shut it down. We blocked it. We refused to go there.
By Christina Hunter4 years ago in Humans
