heather ovenbird Heather’s favourite colour was purple and when I went to visit her in her room at the graduate college where we both lived for two years I would sit on her purple sheets and hug her purple pillows and spill my secrets out while bathed in the glow of a purple light bulb. When I think of Heather now, every memory is purple. She had the most joyful laugh of any person I had ever met. When she smiled you would smile too. Your face literally had no choice. Her smile was so huge that it escaped the confines of her own mouth and migrated over to yours so that you would find yourself grinning and quite possibly laughing with zero conscious control. She radiated kindness and warmth, she was someone you could go to with heartaches and have your wounds tended to in the most loving way. She was one of three members in an a-capella group we founded at the college. We practiced in the communal kitchen, letting all those harmonies bind us together. We called ourselves the Common Kitchenettes. When my heart was broken in a spectacular way it was Heather who walked me down to the edge of the ocean to scream my grief at the waves and let the salt of my tears mix with the salt of the sea. She knew the importance of ritual and she knew how to hold space in the face of grief. She didn’t shy away from feeling and while she held her share of sorrow she also contained a bubbling wellspring of glee that never seemed to dry up. We lost touch slowly when graduate school ended and everyone scattered across the globe. Our last message is from 2017 and we were talking about a mutual acquaintance that had died of a presumed suicide. It seems strange to me now that our last conversation was about an unexpected death when her own was looming on the horizon. I found out that she had died from aggressive pancreatic cancer two months after she was already gone. It seemed impossible. There was no public indication that she had been sick and I was wracked with guilt over not having known somehow. I had no chance to reach out, to tell her how much I had loved her in the time we had been friends. She was gone and I would never sit bathed in the purple light of her spirit again. In the initial draft of this blathe I wrote that I would give anything to listen to a recording of us singing together and when I was reading the draft back to myself I had a sudden niggling memory. Didn’t we make some recordings all those years ago? Not good recordings, but recordings nonetheless? Recordings made in the very kitchen we were named after? I grew frantic. Did I have these somewhere? In a Facebook message from 2011 Heather asked if I still had the recordings. I said that I might have MP3s but then never confirmed if I found them. It’s possible the conversation moved to email at that point but it would have been an email address I no longer have access to. I start to panic. I can’t find them on my current hard drive or my flash drive. But then I recall that I have an old external hard drive from many years ago. It’s the kind you need to plug in. I don’t even know if it works anymore and I’m not sure where I’ve put it but my mind throws me a memory of stashing it in a closet and I find it there. I plug it in. At first it doesn’t seem like it’s going to turn on, but then suddenly it does. There’s a distinctive whir. The files all flash up on my screen, and there, towards the bottom is a file called “Common Kitchenettes.” My hands are shaking as I click on the file and I discover that past me archived six songs performed by the Common Kitchenettes and suddenly I am hearing our voices singing together, when I never thought I would hear them again. Suddenly I am back in the common kitchen, late at night, singing something I haven’t sung in nearly 20 years, and Heather’s voice is clear and bright. I can pick her voice apart from the rest. I can hear the signature of her operatic training. I can hear my own voice blending in with an alto part. I can hear our friend Sierra joining us and I’m crying now like I haven’t cried since the day I screamed at the waves, overcome with gratitude for this gift from my younger self. I hit play again and again because I want Heather to be alive and it isn’t fair that she’s not. It isn’t fair that she is gone and will never sing this way again. I have to sing for both of us. And I do. 250521 ... ovenbird Addendum: The last song recorded by the Common Kitchenettes does not feature Heather. It's just me and Sierra singing Wild Mountain Thyme: "Will ye go lassie go, and we'll all go together, to pull wild mountain thyme, all around the blooming heather. Will ye go lassie go?" From this vantage point it feels like we're singing for her. It's strange how the present changes the past so that it's hard to tease them apart. Time is not linear. It moves in circles, outward from the center, where a voice drops like a stone into the water. 250521 ... e_o_i (I'm so sorry that you lost your friend. Someone my dad knew died from this same cancer, and it can be sudden. I was riveted to your description of finding the recording, remembering how so many memories can be wrapped up in small and seemingly insignificant material things. I'm glad you could hear it again.) 250522 ... ovenbird Thank you e_o_i It's been really amazing to be able to hear the recordings again and if it weren't for blather and the space it gave me to revisit an episode from my past I may have forgotten them entirely. It really is interesting how memory works! 250522 what's it to you? who go blather from