Excerpt from “Crisis Moves”

[…]

The move itself was frigid. Men in boots tracking snow and salt through two houses. Half of our plants died in cold moving trucks. My big orange tabby shat in his cat carrier riding next to me in the car from Hamilton to Paris. An omen? Those first weeks in Paris [Ontario], I saw omens everywhere. Worst was what I found in the attic. Kneeling and feeling for drafts by a small window, I saw bones lying on the floor next to me. They comprised a full skeleton. It was as though the skeleton had been picked clean and preserved for a science class. Not a bone missing or chipped. No rotting flesh or feathers attached. A bird? Squirrel? Baby raccoon? An offering to dark gods left by previous owners? I couldn’t tell.

In Paul Auster’s Winter Journal he talks about finding a dead crow in the house he and Lydia Davis lived in in upstate New York during their short, doomed marriage. Auster doesn’t believe in ghosts, but feels that their house is haunted. In the crow, he saw “the classic omen of bad tidings”; and their marriage collapsed within a year of finding it. I didn’t have a bag or anything to put the bones in, and I didn’t want Jess or the kids to see them, so I left them lying where I’d found them for a few days. The skeleton lay on the floor of the attic, ten feet above our bed. Before falling asleep, I lay there thinking of it lying above me.

Our first months in Paris were isolating. It was the coldest, snowiest winter in memory. We couldn’t really go outside even if we’d wanted to because it was the peak of the omicron variant of COVID. Nearly everything about the move we’d been excited about – hikes, building community, exploring the town – felt unattainable. While the thing we dreaded most – feeling physically and socially isolated – was now our daily reality.

To make matters worse, there were all kinds of trouble with the house itself. Our first night in the home, the pipes connected to the bathtub leaked through the ceiling onto the basement stairs (talk about omens). The upstairs toilet moaned for fifteen seconds after every flush. We called it the “Paris-saurolophous” – because Gus loves dinosaurs, and the Parasaurolophus is the dino with the crest on its head that honks. You flush the toilet and wait. Then yell, “A Paris-saurolophus is running down the street!” while smiling at Gus and wondering what will break next.

The washing machine ran only hot water. Gus’ room was very cold, despite our covering the window in plastic. The door to the basement wouldn’t close. Neither would the bedroom door. Gus’ door didn’t have a handle. The gas fireplace stank. The whole main floor stank (of gas?). The bathroom sink faucet sprayed water on your clothes when running at normal pressure. Hammering a nail into the upstairs hall, I heard something large drop inside. Was this a normal level of move-in trouble, or had we bought a lemon? I imagined being interviewed for a TV show about people who unwittingly move into wrecks. Then the basement flooded.

Standing in the kitchen in morning darkness, bleary-eyed, waiting for coffee to brew, I heard unidentifiable splashing. With Gus in my arms, I ran down the basement stairs to see water gushing through the stone foundation. It had rained overnight for the first time since we moved. Snow melting in the yard poured into our utility room. In one spot, water was coming through the wall so rapidly, with such force, that it spurted into the room as if from a backyard garden feature. Weeping walls, a crumbling foundation – the contrived symbolism, the on-the-nose pathetic fallacy of an unimaginative poet. Was our house about to collapse? We were falling apart.

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*In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times* by James Cairns

More about In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times :

Drawing on social research, pop culture and literature, as well as on his experience as an activist, father and teacher, James Cairns explores the ecological crisis, Trump's return to power amid the so-called crisis of democracy, his own struggle with addiction and other moments of truth facing us today. In a series of insightful essays that move deftly between personal, theoretical and historical approaches he considers not only what makes something a crisis, but also how to navigate the effect of these destabilizing times on ourselves, on our families and on the world.

About James Cairns:

James Cairns lives with his family in Paris, Ontario, on territory that the Haldimand Treaty of 1784 recognizes as belonging to the Six Nations of the Grand River in perpetuity. He is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his courses and research focus on political theory and social movements. James is a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books, and the community relations director for the Paris-based Riverside Reading Series. James has published three books with the University of Toronto Press, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (2017), as well as numerous essays in periodicals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, the Montreal Review of Books, Briarpatch, TOPIA, Rethinking Marxism and the Journal of Canadian Studies. James’ essay “My Struggle and My Struggle,” originally published in CNQ, appeared in Biblioasis’s Best Canadian Essays, 2025 anthology.