Yesterday I put a post-it note on our dash.

It read: Saturday, May 28th, 2016.

It was a joke. A lousy and rather dark piece of humour in its reminiscence of the Menno Home extended-care unit and the daily white board notification of the date for all its lost inhabitants.

Whether you write it down or not, time feels more and more Jell-O like and just about as easy to pin down.

It doesn’t help that we have been ‘retired’ for a long time. In fact, I have now been unemployed longer than I was ever employed. So, the whole day of the week thing lost importance quite some time ago.

But in the last few years of living in the city while Kevin was once again doing that 9-5 thing again, it was easier to remember. Besides there were reminders, like Tuesday was the day the recycling was taken out, and for a couple of years, it was Wednesdays that I drove to Abbotsford to see Dad at the aforementioned Menno Home…

But now, with this new rolling life, we have become completely unmoored.  Not only from a sense of place and belonging, but from the currency of time.

I’m not just talking about the days of the week either. There was other contributing factors like the month of ‘summer’ spent this past February in Mexico.

 

 

And the recent dark and icy cold of our ‘Winter’ nights near Jasper, and now the unexpected blast of Prairie Spring time warmth as we drive further into Saskatchewan; all these non-calendar-like periods collide in to a rather disorienting mash-up of a season-less Never-Never time.

I have to think hard about the month, the date, and sometimes, to my great dismay, the year.

In order to provide a smidgen of context to our new lives, I like to think of this six-month trailer life experiment as a sort of pilgrimage.  Rather than simply random traveling, part of this quest is to see if there is Somewhere we might want to live. Not forever, but maybe for awhile.

But really…who knows?

Clearly, we don’t.

Yesterday was a very long day of driving. We left our campsite near Mette Hot Springs in the Rockies, and arrived, just across the Saskatchewan border at a tiny town called Macklin.

 

 

It was Saturday night (see aforementioned post-it note) and given the loose plan that has evolved over these last four weeks of travel, we decided to not cook. We would eat out.

The woman at the municipal campground answered our query about where to eat. “Well, there are only two restaurants in town. One is Chinese and Canadian food and the other one is…”

She searched the ceiling for the right description, “…well…just regular food.”

We drove back to the one street of town. But no matter how hard we looked between a smattering of businesses and shuttered buildings that were either for sale or rent or simply just empty, we saw only one place that looked like a possibility; the Peking Restaurant – Chinese And Western Food. We each ordered the two-item dinner so we could share a total of four (count ’em!) items. Kevin chose the chicken with veg and the sweet and sour pork. I picked dry ribs and ginger beef. Both dinners came with a pile of fried rice. It was hot, filling and pretty good as far as the Chinese and Canadian genre tends to go.

 

 

Kevin asked if they had IPA beer. “Oh. I don’t think so. That’s American?”  Before he could answer, her face brightened and she looked pleased with her solution to the problem, “Then…how about Miller Genuine Draft.”

“That’d be great,” said Kevin.

Two young men at the booth behind us talked about heifers, girls and cars. It was clear to me that we would be finding no Saturday night live music in Macklin. Random people came in to pick up plastic bags of take-out.

 

 

As we drove back to our campsite, I thought about our pilgrimage quest and my ongoing hazy grasp of time and I realized that though I can be too often unsure of the date or time of year, I am quite sure of this: I do not want to live in Macklin.

(This is, of course, said with all due respect to its citizens, because I know, just like anywhere in the world, a place is made complete by the people and I’m quite sure there is a strong community of good people that comprise the town of Macklin. But to belong to a small prairie town takes a lifetime, or most likely, several generations, and I no longer have a luxury of a lifetime to pull it off. And, not to sound too Vancouver-spoiled, I need at least one bookstore, a few coffee shops, and more than one street.)

This morning, we continued to drive down straight prairie roads with their cartoon-like way of looping the same scenery past our windows: mile after mile of endlessly repeating telephone poles, grain silos, fields and fences.

 

 

This flat landscape, where I can see only blue-skied infinity in every direction only serves to further mystify my already foggy understanding of time.

Maybe there are no dates?

Maybe there is no time?

Maybe we have been suspended in the middle of a Truman Show illusion all along?

 

 

Maybe, just maybe, I need the plastic and cardboard-cup grounding reality of a double-double.

I’m keeping my eye out for a Tim’s.