The Weight of Salt & Longing - Evergreen House Museum, April 25 at 2pm

A storm of life, a metaphor without a wife. 

Twenty-one days had passed since he had belonged to anyone. Sleep was his respite. He looked over at the sofa where he slept, a stark reminder of his solitude, and then back to the window, where he had kept a vigil since he had quit the TV. He scanned the horizon of houses, streetlights, and roads, watching for anything that moved. One night, a fox cantered down his road and into the woods. Most nights, he waited for the teenage boy to cross in front of his window at 11:55. Shoulders hunched and smoking a cigarette, a solitary figure in the night. He wondered if the boy had ever seen the fox. 

He shook his head at his silent chaos and the unsettling feeling of death still alive in his mind. 

When he stepped outside, he raised his shovel like a sword and breathed in the icy air. 

Julie was probably watching him from above. 

Keep the light on for me, he said to the pale grey sky, and he dug the shovel in.

As he backed the truck out of the garage, he looked at the blue shutters with the cutout hearts─Julie’s choice. Everything was her choice.

Frank followed the plough tracks down the road. When he reached for his sunglasses, he ignored her gloves on the passenger's seat, her sunglasses in the cup holder, and the statue of St Christopher she hung from the rearview mirror to keep them safe. 

How could she have passed and left so much behind? Every inch of their home was hers. 

On the nights when Frank couldn't sleep, he would shovel and then head to the backyard, where he would sit in the snowbank behind the garage and beneath the big spruce so the neighbours couldn't see him. 

Frank watched the streetlights fill with snow. That night, he remembered Julie pointing at him and saying, You can do this! 

Frank wanted to be nearby while she worked in the kitchen, in case. He looked out their back window as she prepared their supper. The trees cast deep black shadows, like they did tonight. 

Since Julie had returned from her three-month hospitalization, Frank had cooked every night except for that one; she had insisted. 

He awoke, startled by the bizarre dream of a shovel in his eye. 

Shovel in my eye?! Shovel in my eye?! 

See what?! 

Am I supposed to see something? 

The ambiguity of the dream bothered him like a message only half heard. He had zero patience for anything that wasn’t as straightforward as death. 

Frank watched the sunrise. He had not slept because his mind was lit with the possibilities of his life. 

His ideas were beyond his ken. It was as though he had stepped inside a gateway, a portal to places of his imagination where adventures were there for the taking. 

He and Julie had done everything together.
They were a good couple. But now Frank was alone, and time was ticking away on his clock.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead's descriptions of the Bardo’s states between death and rebirth reflected how he felt himself to be. He was between the between. Between life and death-the death of his wife of fifty years and his own rebirth into… That was the question he feared to pose. He did not know what was after the old life and what began his new life. 

Kim Williamson writes with the quiet authority of someone who has looked directly at mortality—and kept writing. Her work is shaped by age-earned wisdom and a deep curiosity about the human condition: how we endure, how we remember, and how, in the face of loss, we begin again. Sources such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Stephen Jenkinson's Die Wise predominated her outside reading. 

Her stories are not escapes from reality but invitations to stand in it more fully. Frank, The Shovelling Man, emerged from Williamson’s return to a long-absent winter. After nearly a decade away from snow, she found herself watching the simple, repetitive act of shovelling, and saw in it something deeper: a metaphor for effort, grief, and the stubborn beauty of starting over. Frank’s story begins in the raw aftermath of losing Julie, his wife of over fifty years. Alone in his Nova Scotia home, he doesn’t chase healing; he shovels forward.

His journey is not about conquering grief; it's about what it means to carry the weight of absence and still move forward. As Frank moves from the snowbanks of Nova Scotia to the ancient roads of Portugal and the cafés of Seville, we see not a man escaping life, but a man choosing to stay in it, fully present, aware, and quietly courageous.

PS: This is Kim in KL working on her Master of Communication and what she did to keep from being overwhelmed by the work and being older than the students and Profs..

God, he wished he could pick up his shovel and head outside. It would be so much better than the finality of burning her life story. The firepit was set up in his backyard, ready to be lit. All he had to do was carry her journals to the backyard. 

The sun hit his forehead, telling him it would be down soon. Final decisions to read or release. 

He picked up the Tibetan Book and reread the passage that warned her not to return, for he knew she could never. They had talked about this point.

Be not attracted to the dull blue light of the brute-world; be not weak. If thou art attracted, thou wilt fall into the brute-world, wherein stupidity predominates, and it will be a very long time ere thou canst get out.

That was when they laughed, and she would apologize for needing to leave this brute-world first.

Be not attracted to it. Put thy faith in the bright, dazzling, fire-coloured radiance. Direct your mind one-pointedly toward the deities, the Knowledge-Holding Conquerors and the Ḍākinī...

And Julie would say: Ah, the Ḍākinī, the beautiful “sky dancers,” and the most sacred female in The Tibetan Book. And she would smile and say, I am awaiting the moment I meet the Ḍākinī who will have come from the holy paradise realms to receive Me...

And Julie would repeat: Me! With her hand held over her heart.

And Frank would say, I haven't got my travelling suit pressed and ready to go yet.  

And Julie would assure him that she would keep the light on for him. 

He held the book to his heart, closed his eyes, and waited for the spirits to disappear.

When he had lit the fire, he watched it consume a lifetime of her words. 

 Frank said he had nothing to do with it and added a weak laugh. 

As the days passed, he became acutely aware that the nights were getting longer, and he inexplicably felt ill at ease about something he couldn't define or dismiss. 

Leaves drifted down from the birch, creating a mottled canvas of his lawn and walkway. He raked, bagged, mowed, trimmed, and weeded, and afterwards, he sat in exhausted silence on Julie’s swing in the backyard. 

He spoke so rarely that his voice was rough, and the heaviness of unexpressed thoughts inside him was collecting like old arthritis. 

It was as though someone had pulled a curtain around his life. 

Before, he and Julie had filled their days with an ongoing conversation. All the stories about their neighbours, funerals, weddings, and guess who I bumped into today were done. The trusted daily company that asked how he was and where he was off to was done, too. And there was no, good night, Frank, before the click of the bedside lamp.

Frank had never truly contemplated leaving before, but now he wondered, given the statelessness of his life. When thoughts became things, and he remembered the sunrise morning.

He stowed the lawn mower in the garage next to his shovel collection and closed the garage. 

He was going to go inside, but something like an unfinished thought stopped him. 

Since he burned Julie’s journals, he felt he'd aged twenty years. He seemed to be living without either a past or a future. He was floating─ a floating yardman without a wife. 

No one knew what she knew about him, her, them. She’d taken their stories with her. She’d erased the chalkboard, deleted the content, cut the connections, severed like a head decapitated. 

Such a gruesome thought. Where did that come from? 

Imagine, Frank, we will pay homage to Jesus's apostle, James the Greater, whose decapitated remains have rested in the Santiago Cathedral since the 9th century. 

Oh, he remembered the decapitation. Thanks for the thought, Julie. 

Imagine, Frank.

And he Imagined.

Cued by the taxi's honk, Frank locked the house and grabbed his luggage. Time was up. He was going! 

As the taxi pulled out of his driveway, he was sure he saw the bedroom curtain move. 

Impossible! Frank looked away. 

He double-checked that he had his passport, currency, and airline ticket. 

His hands sweated as he walked through the airport.