I know about the ghosts and the hauntings.

I know about the generations of strain.

I know about things that people don’t talk about. In English or German or French.

I know what people want to talk about, but they just can’t. It isn’t always shame, sometimes it’s fear. Nobody really knows what the ghosts are capable of.

The heart of the woods is momentous. We should never forget them; constantly, we do though. And that’s our fault. But we’ll get over it. We always do.

Now we’re a quarter of the way through 21c. I don’t have a fucking clue what the next quarter will look like. I have a variety of competing scenarios. Most of them involve way too much chopping down of trees in the greater Ardennes Forest.

I once knew Claire, she was of the Ardennes. And everyone knew it. But they weren’t afraid to speak about it. Because she was larger than her life. And also smaller than the decay from the entropy of centuries of battleground.

After her second marriage, 17 years after the second war, war so much war, she took the money and moved to Western Canada and bought a hotel. The Claire Ardennes.

It was in colonial Victoria, in colonial British Columbia, the seat of English and British supremacy on the Western continent. She lived in irony, but the English weren’t well versed in irony. But their staff were, while the travelers themselves missed it all. Which was fine.

The staff of the Claire Ardennes spent a long time with the staff of the guests on their way through to the Indian colonies. The guests who also had homes in Macau. But we don’t speak of them.

{Musical Interlude: please watch this short song}

Claire, of the Ardennes, is part of the heart of the woods. Stretching from trees grown in blood and intestine, to the Civilized Colonial Bastions of Riches, among the Arbutus trees of southern Vancouver Island, a place with empty Indigenous land acknowledgements and people looking for the best bumbleberry pie.

“Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

…But first we cling to it, desperately, as it burns like

Paradise

Fort McMurray

Lytton

Lahaina

Jasper

Palisades and Malibu



But all woods are Ponderosa Pines. Requiring the heat of the fire to conceive new life and restoration, and the end to the empty, gaslighting land acknowledgements…

…all for a chance to rename a place, less genocidal, more symbiotic, with the heart, of the woods.

P.S.

I sat with Claire at Pagliacci’s, on an April Saturday afternoon, out of the windrain, with our Caesar salads, waiting for dinner service. She sent me back to The Ardennes with 17 Arbutus seeds.