Bittersweet Release

I finished the last exam on my undergrad on Tuesday. It’s bittersweet seeing King’s in the rearview mirror. I have no “I now know who I am” statement that neatly sums up the nervousness, joy, frustration, delight and longing of my university days. And perhaps there cannot be such a proclamation to succinctly capture a half dozen years of personal and academic growth.

I haven’t accepted that I no longer have the student label attached to my head. It’s overwhelming the ones that could take its place. I am currently a sister, daughter, cousin, niece, friend, seasonal bush bunny and traveller but most of those speak more to the who, not what, I am.



My family is not short of outstanding examples from which to draw from as I am still earnestly searching for the kind of woman I want to be. I feel moderately pressured to perform and follow their large, demanding and fascinatingly wandering footsteps. They’re not over-achievers in the traditional sense, but highly successful in their own realms.

I want to be devoted to the earth and her bounty like my mother, dedicated to a personal passion like Steph, well-read, helpful and encouraging like Donna, head-hunted like Robyn, caring for strangers and new-comers to Canada like Shauna and creative like Anita.

Read carefully and you'll see no mention of the other side of my family. Mostly married, they’re making babies like factories. I do not desire that. I value my girlish figure too much to follow their selfish desires to further destroy the earth.

In the short term, I want to develop my seasonal bush bunny skills that will ultimately support my selfish desires to leave Canada in the winter. After 30, I’ll allow myself to play the Grad School? game with myself.

Breezy Hair

Aging is cruel. I write this at the tender graying age of 24.

In my first year of university, when I was 18, I began finding my first gray hairs on my head, mixed in with all my other hairs. That collection of wiry hair has since had babies and lots of them. I used to extract them, but like Samantha on Sex and the City said, "There'll be six more coming to its funeral."

So I left them there to texturize and add colour to my naturally dark brown hair, a gift from my mother's Scottish roots and my father's Irish ancestory.

Like Samantha, I was shocked and rather appalled when another hair covered region south of my equator started sprouting grays. What to do? Manually brush them? Selectively thin? Apply hairicides? Dye it?

I laughed uncontrollably. I was trying to solve this question using what I knew about invasive species in commercial plantations. As a bush (read: forest) bunny, I am well versed in both the theory and practice of silviculture and sought to tackle my own invasive species in my bush accordingly.

In what would be in violation on any provincial forestry act, I decided to leave them. Not embrace them, but let them be.

Samantha taught me that chemical colouring should not be applied unless the desired outcome is a caution-road-works-sign orange box.