My Two-Legged Compass

I have a weakness for photos of men figuring things out.

I adore their expressions, the focussed intensity, the dawning of comprehension, the eureka exclamation - “Ah that is what it is all about.”

They are just so winningly adorable– it makes me smile, wide, and feel happy and hopeful inside.

One of my favourites was a taken on a bone chilling minus 40 Celsius degree day – when it hurt to hold a camera with bare fingers - outside.

Our train had broken down. The engine lay still, passengers stamped their feet – that were slowly going numb as the passenger cars started to get meat locker, cold.

We were deep in thick woods, in the middle of nowhere – things looked tense. Voices rang out – volatile groans – with up and down tones.

The conductor, driver and engineer, breath hanging in misty clouds, huddled in a circle – outside - by the locomotive – a map spread out wide. One with his hat off, even in the bitter cold, his head so dearly needing to be scratched - leaving his vulnerable bare scalp with no where to hide. Each with their arms pointing in three different directions. It was so endearing; how could you not smile.

Just then the faint, familiar, bleating honk of our sports car’s horn sounded from just beyond the woods. My husband had found us - I knew that he would.

He had an uncanny ability to sniff the air and know which way to go. Had he been standing in that circle - the metal in his nose would have thrummed, to the magnetic pull from one of the poles, like a fish and he would have pointed to our exact location and said “Ah I see, here we are! Let’s let them know at the station.” We did of course, racing to town to get help.

He was always good at finding me too. Wherever, I was, he could track me down. My dad would laugh and say “Watch it! The hounds are out!”

It was like, I had some kind of magnetic trace that he could discern with his senses. I use to test it and hide sometimes. Till he got really mad at me one day, for the trickery though the dog thought it was a fun game!

Or, like the minus 20-degree Celsius day, I was cross country skiing in a thin racing suit - and got lost for 10 hours on some unmarked snowmobile paths that stretched for miles and miles – having to move fast to stop from freezing on rutted, icy, hard to ski tracks. Seeing and hearing no one the whole time. My trail of broken branches – showing me I was going in big looping circles - getting more and more desperate in the dark - ending up 40 kilometers away from the park.

Then there, he was on a snowmobile – headlight shining bright - bearing down on me from behind - shouting my name. Scooping me into a big parka and zooming us back to the lodge. It can be dangerous to be lost.

All through our life together, he was my two-legged compass. My finder of where we were, where to go and how to get there the fastest!

When he was gone, I cried the hardest, sitting in the car – on my way to somewhere I have been before – when I realized I had no idea of how to get there, on my own.

A lasting, love merges your brains I believe. I left so much key data in his – that is now forever gone – unravelled by a rare, unlucky, lightening fast, Bruce Lee - twist of fate.

But his is still intact in mine. I can feel it. Waiting for me to discover, I can be a doer, of a wide array of marvelous things and never be lost.