I turned 32 in the Yukon, the place of my dreams, only it’s turned out not to be much of a dream. There really is something to be said about those sunken-eyed, frostbitten placer miners who never found anything, not even dust, but who stayed.

Back home, on the day I turned 32, they put our 33 year-old cousin in a matte grey casket and walked him off into storage, to wait until spring.

Spring isn’t coming round here; most snow they’ve had since ’72.

The premier came out and even sang happy birthday to me with the rest of the cabinet office all gathered around a lemon tart. He is beautiful and approachable and was in a band for the longest time before politics. I think our cousin would have liked him. Our cousin loved lemon, too, I remember. I lied at the cottage when we were seven. I said I preferred them to cherry and took the last one from under his nose. They never suspected and I still think about this. Especially now.

I drank all week. Pucker-up gose beer or cheap red wine from Cali. Do you remember there was a time when I only drank Canadian fermentations?

Our cousin was never like that. One of the many who stayed within an hour of the farm we were bled from.

After this year of constant yellow Lysol smells and baby showers and funerals via Zoom, I cannot honestly say what I used to say about predictability, about root digging right where you were born, about moving and not moving, changing and seemingly not changing in pools of stagnation.

In Dawson City, when they first rolled out the Moderna vaccine, the premier and I and two other staffers went for Greek food. I’m aware of how that sounds but this isn’t Ontario. I poured my red lager from its can into my glass as if I’d never poured a beer in my life. The premier couldn’t get over all the foam. I went tomato red — the deep beefsteak type. And I did it twice.

I think our cousin would have got a kick out of that, too.

The weekend before my Michael turned 34, we drove to a resort on Tagish Lake. I needed to mark 34.

The front desk staff emailed us ahead of time to ensure we had four-wheel drive. The painfully slow, tractor-like crawl down fourteen kilometres of pockmarked snow pack was worth it though for the starry sky views, the wild salmon dinner and the conversation with the Tasmanian server — it has been so long since we’ve socialized with strangers. This effortlessly further extended into an after-hours discussion over free beers on Stalin audiobooks, northern trains in Myanmar, Dolly Parton versus Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and the idea of fatally crossing paths with berry-stained bears.

I think our cousin would have liked the music chat at least. I thought of him with every Yukon Gold toast because I could see the snowmobiles parked outside from where I was sitting.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get back on one now.

And there are so many more trees here than back home.

Later, I dreamt of our cousin asking me to take his toes to Dawson for the Sourtoe Cocktail tradition.

He’s the funniest out of all of us, isn’t he?