I don’t need to tell you that from the moment Jonny said we could work out together if I spent the winter in Owen Sound, my life changed significantly, and for the better.
I flew back to Palm Springs so fast I barely remembered to take the plane. I spent the next 16 days putting things in order in Palm Springs; arranging for my mail to be picked up and forwarded, and confirming all my electronic financial accounts were in order.
The only exception to that last part being the hateful property management company I paid my monthly rent to. Them I had trouble with, but that’s another story.
With Jonny’s world limited, sans car, to things within walking distance of his room rental, and the idea of renting a car for four months being out of the question, I definitely needed to drive myself to Ontario to be able to get around once in Owen Sound.
A plan began to form.
“Hey Siri,” I called out to my iPhone, “what’s the shortest route to Owen Sound, Ontario?”
The answer to that question took me through Colorado, where only a minor detour would allow me to spend a few days over Christmas with my youngest brother George and his wife, Teri.
Christmas in Fort Collins was lovely. Teri arranged for the three of us to do something I’d never been able to pull off thanks to my near perpetual state of procrastination; we helped serve Christmas dinner to dozens of Fort Collins’ homeless at the Fort Collins Rescue Mission. On Christmas day we had our own feast at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.
…we helped serve Christmas dinner to dozens of Fort Collins’ homeless at the Fort Collins Rescue Mission.
I set off for the remainder of my journey early, four fricken a.m., on December 28. That first day I made it as far as Iowa City, Iowa, where, thanks to a late December snow storm, I spent an unexpected day watching cable TV as the winds howled outside my hotel room window.
Jonny spent the semester holiday break at his parents’ home in Hamilton, Ontario, which meant I could pick him up and take him back to school on my way to Owen Sound. I arrived in Hamilton the day before New Year’s. Jonny, Brodie, and I spent New Year’s Eve in Toronto with friends. A day later, after returning Brodie to Hamilton, Jonny and I took off for Owen Sound driving through what turned out to be a road-closing blizzard, but that’s another story.
I found a wonderful short-term executive studio apartment in the Old Post Office Building in downtown Owen Sound and set up my home away from Palm Springs and Jonny’s tiny room rental, which he kept as a place to study in solitude.
There was a full-size kitchen in my little flat, complete with pots, pans and dinnerware, which meant I could save money fixing my/our meals, thereby cutting down on restaurant trips.
“Hey Siri, convert kilograms to pounds” became my battle cry in grocery stores. Additionally, Siri became my go to source for converting gallons to liters, miles to kilometers and Celsius to Fahrenheit as I went about adjusting to life in the Great White North.
Four months of long walks on nearby trails, shopping together, workouts, dinners, movies, and cold winter nights snuggled up to one another flew by. Soon the semester would be over and I felt closer to Jonny than ever, closer than anyone I’d ever known.
To complete qualification for the various classes of power engineering certification, the provincial governing body that oversees the program expects students to spend several months each year working in a certified plant. These positions are referred to as co-ops and most often take place during the summer months.
Jonny had applied to the co-op program and been accepted at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada in Cambridge, Ontario.
“I don’t know about you,” I said to Jonny one afternoon just weeks away from semester’s end, “but I think these last few months have been a lot of fun for both of us and I wouldn’t mind extending our boyfriend trial run over the summer months.”
He didn’t mind either.
Luckily for us, an old friend of Jonny’s lived in Cambridge, just a few miles away from the Toyota plant Jonny would be working in. Steve, Jon’s friend, was getting the house he’d been living in for twenty years ready for sale by September and he invited Jonny and I to stay with him until then.
We took advantage of Jonny’s rotating shifts at Toyota to do things like taking trips with our now mutual BFF Brodie to Toronto for Pride Weekend, a visit to the massive Canada’s Wonderland theme park.
We decamped from Owen Sound, not likely to visit again as Jonny had transferred schools and would begin the next fall semester at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ontario. We left Owen Sound and headed south to Steve’s house in Cambridge where we spent the majority of the summer of 2016. We took advantage of Jonny’s rotating shifts at Toyota to do things like taking trips with our now mutual BFF Brodie to Toronto for Pride Weekend, a visit to the massive Canada’s Wonderland theme park, and a long leisurely weekend of camping, literally and figuratively, at a Southern Ontario gay campground.
But all of that is another story.
As summer drew to a close, it was time for Jonny to think about what needed to be done before starting classes at Cambrian College. We made the long drive to Sudbury twice, first in early July, right after Toronto Pride, to visit the college and confirm the transfer of his records and credits from Georgian College and to get a look at the town. We returned in early August to find a place for him to stay.
Even by the time we made our second seven-hour road trip back to Sudbury, neither of us had spoken either about our feelings for one another or what and/or where we expected to find ourselves after Jonny’s three month co-op in Cambridge ended. In the words of the song, should I stay or should I go? I didn’t want to assume.
“Hey Siri, how do I talk to my boyfriend about his feelings?”
And that’s our next story.
Edited by
Kenneth Larsen
Join us again on January 30, 2018 for Not The Arctic Circle.
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