Drinking Tea Before the Race
Karin Hedetniemi
photo credit: Karin Hedetniemi
I woke up this morning thinking about canceled plans.
Specifically, I was opening the blinds to this frosty midwinter morning, looking up to the cotton sky — to the silhouette of the Douglas Fir tree across the street. It resembled something out of an Emily Carr painting. Something wild and windswept and full of crows.
I looked over to my neighbor’s house with their early morning light on, like mine. Their white house against a white sky, with a little warm glow coming from the kitchen. Something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Something minimalist and quiet and a little bit lonely.
I imagined my neighbours were making a cup of tea. Maybe a piece of toast. Maybe looking out their window over to mine, where I was making a cup of coffee and eating peanut butter smoothed over a piece of crispbread. What you eat when you are having ‘quiet breakfast’ – something that won’t rattle pans and make a bunch of noise.
I wondered if they also had canceled plans. I don’t mean postponed or rescheduled or soon-to-be-revised plans. I don’t mean suspended, where you’re merely waiting for something else to happen first, something else to align before your plans can proceed. Like getting the vaccine before you can rebook your vacation. I mean, canceled. As in, not going to happen now. Not ever. Scratched.
The universe has been canceling plans for a very long time. These plans aren’t canceled ‘for a reason.’ Likely there’s no reason. Not a logical one, anyway. Nothing that makes you feel better. Nothing that makes it right. It’s not a trade. It’s not a negotiation. It’s not a punishment. It’s not a rejection.
It’s more likely that two potential outcomes were on parallel tracks, and one of them just happened to cross the finish line first. Take the prize. Like a horserace of plans. Your horse had the short odds. Your horse called My Daughter’s Laugh. You were flying down the track at top speed, no one in your peripheral view, your eyes squarely focused on that finish line. No other result in sight. And then, all of a sudden, Mine That Bird comes out of nowhere to win the Kentucky Derby.
In an instant, so many things are no longer possible. That race is over. Yet simultaneously, so many other things now are. Mysterious things. Somehow recalculated from ever-changing cosmic odds. Not exactly fate, not entirely free will.
Mine That Bird’s jockey probably never thought it was possible to win the Kentucky Derby. Not when they woke up that morning. Finding themselves inside a soft and dreamlike Degas painting, with such long odds. I’m sure they had other plans.
Karin Hedetniemi is a writer and street photographer from Vancouver Island, Canada. She's inspired by quiet beauty in ordinary spaces. Her creative work is published/forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Hinterland, Sunlight Press, Stillpoint Arts Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, Moria, and other literary journals. Karin won the 2020 nonfiction contest from the Royal City Literary Arts Society. @KarinHedet