I met Erika at a little college south of Winnipeg. I was seventeen. She was nineteen. We fell in love with a storybook sweetness and intensity. We were together for less than a year before she moved to Brandon, Manitoba. After a year of struggling to keep up a long-distance relationship, we decided to let each other go. We were no less in love than we’d ever been, but our lives had begun to go in different directions. Our decision seemed practical and it broke our hearts.
Erika became a nurse. I worked, studied, and travelled before settling in Winnipeg. We had almost no contact for five years, but I couldn’t forget her. There weren’t more than a handful of days when I didn’t think about her and wonder where she was, how she was doing, and whether or not I would see her again.
In the fall of 1999 I was broke, lonely, and depressed. My parents invited me back to Youngstown, Alberta, to help them with the harvest. I needed to get away from the city, so I drove home to our farm and got straight to work. Mom and Dad wanted to sell the farm, so I was glad to be there for what might be the last harvest. Dad and I bailed hay, cultivated fields, fixed fences, and worked around the yard, but it was the harvest itself that I liked best. We started early and worked until after dark, and Mom kept everything going with the lunches and suppers she brought out to the fields. Dad thanked me every day for coming home to help. He said he couldn’t have done it without me. (It turned out to be the best harvest my dad had ever seen. The following summer they sold the farm and moved to a little acreage near Linden, Alberta.)
Farming was good for my soul, and being home with my parents was just what I needed. The long hours on the tractor gave me plenty of time to think. I thought about Erika. I thought about where she was, how she was doing, and if I would see her again. I tried to come up with situations where we might meet up. But it was all make-believe, all in my head. I thought she might even be married by now. Once again I tried to let her go.
Two days later I stopped at the house to pick up my lunch and Mom met me at the door. “Guess who called?” she said, putting her arm around my shoulder. “Erika. She wanted your number. She said she was going to be in Winnipeg and wanted to meet you for supper. I told her you were here and that you’d call when you had the chance.”
I called that night. We talked for more than two hours. I called her again a couple of days later, after the harvest was over. I stopped through Brandon on my way to Winnipeg and we had supper. We talked until it was late, trying to catch up on the last five years. I felt the goodness of it right down to my bones.
Months later Erika told me that she’d called me out of the blue because she was tired of wondering where I was, and how I was doing, and if I still loved her. She didn’t know if I was even in the country or whether or not I was married, but after five years of longing she’d had enough. She called me because she wanted to marry me.
One year later, she did.
Vancouver, British Columbia