If I asked you to, would you let me take you up North, where everything I own is locked down, stored in cardboard boxes and I haven't opened a thing in years. And there are three tool chests, several instrument cases, a brass propeller, photographs, and a trunk I bought at a yard sale full of quilts collected by my Grandma. There should be a white one stitched with white thread, a log cabin quilt, and a crazy quilt made of velvet, silk and thin denim, embroidered in red with "1932". There's a wedding quilt, set with green and pink rings linked over white, and they were stitched by women, who have all died, who sat around tables over 60 years ago, with little pieces of fabric in their hands, and in yellow brick houses they counted and kept track, and talked about their farms, about fashionable quilting patterns, and about their husbands.
Then there's a bundle of little black cookbooks also, written in ink, by three generations on both sides, buried in box no. 5 and I want to read them with you, and unpack it all. But first we should take the long way home, so that when we load the truck let's turn further North. We should go up through Manitoulin Island, past the Sun Dancers there and through Espanola and La Cloche, and then into the short grass Prairie itself. And there's a drive I want you to see that starts in Saskatchewan and that ends with us standing cold to our knees in the Athabasca River, up between the mountains in Jasper.
You could tell me what you see there. We could talk to people at the side of the road watching caribou and I want to listen to what you'd say, and watch them get excited to talk to you too. And then we could drive back down the road through the wide valleys, listen to the gravel crackle under the tires, and yell out the windows "Look at all of that!"
When we make it back home, let's go inside, and open through it all. And let me find those recipe pages and I'll show you how to make butter tarts, and we can try to bake my Mom's Dutch apple pie, learn to make pickles, and discover strange old soups my great-grandmother made for my grandpa and read their handwriting.
And if you did all of this, would you marry me too? Then we could write down a few new ones of our own and leave them also, so that 80 years from now someone else could wonder about us, about what we built, and everything that will happen. Let them talk about our kitchen tables, about the colour of our brick walls, about our small conversations, and how it all got started.