Covered Bridges.

Chapter 1

There’s times looking back that I knew I was different but really I hadn’t a clue at the time how different.

I pull my rental car into the parking lot of my old home. This is where I grew up. The driveway’s still dirt and is just this big half circle that goes from the edge of the lawn to the road. The grass is starting to reclaim it now. My House and my grandparent’s houses aren’t here anymore…Well it’s been a long time.

There isn’t really a trace of them either we never had a basement just a frost wall that the houses sat on and Albert the guy that used to be the next door neighbour had bought the land from us when my Dad had passed away. He had recovered from getting that celulitis? Stuff in his right leg. It’s that flesh eating disease and he’d been in the hospital so sick for like a year. I was thirteen then and really didn’t get how sick that was…three weeks after he got home he died…a blood clot had come loose and just like that he was gone.

I was just a teenager then and Mom couldn’t handle everything with the houses and the property and we had to move. Albert really ripped us off though. Fifty acres of wood land and another hundred hectares of field and farm and two houses. Seventy thousand was all we got off of that. The money that could have been taken off it in lumber and the fields were just prime for being made into blueberry fields. Well I guess Albert made all that money.

The houses were crap I’ll say that much. Small things just one story with three bedrooms and those were small like college dorm room small. We didn’t even have doors we had these plastic slider doors that were made to look like wood grain. I had to share a room with my older brother for most of my youth until he moved out. Ten by twelve living room and a small kitchen with an heater block stove called a wood chief in the living room and an Enterprise cooking/kitchen wood stove and gravity fed running water…all cold water.

It really was a poor way to grow up in a lot of ways but I really didn’t know different until I became older.

Still looking back at it all there’s some homesickness. A lot of it really grandfather garage is gone just the poured cement floor is still there. I liked my grandfather even though he drove me nuts. There was no such thing as a day off with him. He’d been long retired when I came along and it was always something to do here. Wood heat, working in the garden and not that little hobby things people in cities have I’m talking a real garden up on the first little slope of field in back of our houses the rows were two hundred feet and it fed two households back then.

Odd so much really that I hated being trapped into the farm work and it’s all wistful memories. I walk through a bit more but there’s not much to see, it’s all gone and the garden field and the hayfield are all in blueberries now.

I see Tracy’s house still there across the road from here it’s for sale so I walk over. There’s no one there but I’m in the middle of rural Nova Scotia so it’s not like anyone will accuse me of robbing the place. Besides I know too much about the places around here to be a random stranger.

No I’m just being nostalgic. Heck until I was ten I lived here as much as home. Tracy was my best friend. Well out here all our other friends from school live a few miles away so we had only each other to play with.

It’s not like that there was no cross dressing games.

Tracy and I were little kids together and looking back that might have been weird since we didn’t play boys games but then again Trace had this great forceful personality that dragged you into things.

But she was still a girly girl.

Lydie her grandmother’s garden’s still here and it’s all scrubs and flowers and stuff that was just majikal as a child. I remember Tracy making “Perfume” by making a tea from flowers we’d pick together and I never really though that much about it as a girly thing, It was Tracy and there was just something…

Looking back it’s that restful girl serenity she’d have every once in awhile even as a kid. I can still remember her in a dress closing her eyes on the swings out back and just being. It was like she could just soak in being a girl and being free.

I stole that y’know. I love just being in a nice spot and wearing a dress and swinging on a swing and letting the wind from it move the dress and my hair and it’s like my troubles get taken away from me.

I sort of wanted to be Tracy I think those times and memories of us together as kids are so unspoiled in my head and she had always just seemed so at peace inside.

Or she was as a kid, she moved away to Ontario when we were ten and I was left without my best friend.

It didn’t take long for puberty to find me and stuff and trouble too.

I take one last look at the place and smell some of the flowers and get back into my Camry and drive away.

The next place on my little farewell tour of home was just a mile away down the road and over the hill there was a hard left turn and it took you over the bridge into the Junction proper. I was a junction kid; poor working classed white trash in a way. We really didn’t get thet whole white trash stuff back then. No the Junction was this big square of roads; they didn’t even have street signs there. On either end of the square was why there was even a Junction to begin with.

The lumber mill and the CN train yards. Most of the families here worked one or the other. But these had sorta been my childhood friends too the kids here. It’s where I learned how to swim with them in the river, play baseball and full contact ice hockey in the winter from the CN guys. It’s where I learned to set a snare because we used to sell rabbits for money in the winter, we jigged smelts off the bridge and fished there and after seven at night there wasn’t any traffic so the bridge became the hang out.

These were rough kids if not good kids given how much people drank and stuff back then with those families. You fought and swore and acted tough with these kids to get ahead. And now…me without Tracy as my moral compass something in me hurt that I had no clue about and I acted out trying to make it better.

Oh and buy the time I was in my early teen years I had grown and slapped on the weight thanks to that clean your plate lifestyle of a country kid and a lot of emotional eating. I got big as I hit my puberty and my growth spurts, fat too.

Oh being a poor fat kid in junior high was just lots of fun. See here junior high collects all the kids from all the small little schools around home just like high schools and that included the kids from the nicer areas and money and even just from town.

These kids never got that you had to do chores or things like heat didn’t happen. They didn’t get that to take a bath or do laundry you had to heat the water every time. They had the clothes and the food. I only ever seen store bought sliced bread when dad would get paid and that’s last the weekend. Hand me down clothes or cheap knock offs.

And they loved to point that out to us have nots. It wasn’t really over the top but it was still mean and cruel and well it was being bullied. It only got worse when you’d do something good. Do well and score points or whatever in gym and the jocks and stuff would be all mean about it. It’s so great when stuff jiggles and moves when you’re getting changed in gym, after gym.

Shower afterwards, like that naked no fucking way. Which led to hygiene jokes always funny and finding soap in your locker and all sorts of other hilarity. The girls too were actually the worst. Popularity was life in school and if you were a social leper like me than you know what I mean.

What really hurt that every one in awhile you’d get sort of stuck with one of those people whether it was a guy or a girl and they’s actually stop and treat you like a human being. Or well until other people were around and then it was like I never existed.

And then there were the few times I trusted someone enough to let them in and get to know me and that became the perfect ammo. We had a couple of place home that would’ve been that welcoming beckoning blackness. How many times I never would have made it to as long thirteen standing there like I am now sitting on the edge of the train trussle.

No, I’m not going to jump just sitting in my old darkness like it’s a friend smoking a joint.

Yes a joint, not often but yeah.

It’s how I spend the day actually and just driving around old hangouts, places I used to drink and smoke up and looking at the homes of old friends here in The Junction.

I can’t help but to stop into Thompson’s store a store that used to be a house and used to be the store for the mill guys and the CN boys and all of us. I walk in and it like the last twenty four years just never happened. Hardwood floors that aren’t that click stuff weathered and worn with no varnish left on them, the old coolers, the old fashioned coke machine and…

“You’re still selling glass bottles?” I ask the kid texting on his phone. He ignored me except to check me out. I felt the feel of his eyes running me over. Face to face he’s locked onto my breasts. “Uhm hello?” I arm motion his gaze up from my chest. I like guy’s fine but not boys. He still takes his time looking away from my boobs to my face and the little so-and-so is actually trying to figure out if I meet his teen ideals of good enough.

“Yeah, the old guy who runs the place he takes off once a month to the island to get them.” FYI in the Maritimes the island is generally referring to Prince Edward Island, the Anne of green gables place and where they don’t allow plastic pop bottles or cans. You can’t even get canned beer in the stores there. There’s a provincial ban on the stuff so they still bottle in glass. It saved the bottling plants from being taken out of the province.

Even the major brands like Coke. I buy three of them and shell out nearly twelve bucks for the privilege. And they the 355ml tall bottles. I almost bought a case or two and put then on my card to take with me but that might be a hassle on the train to B.C.

He goes back to either ignoring me or treating me like a piece of meat in equal measure. There’s time’s I’m love to be a mom and then there’s times like these. And you know the worst part about feeling this way? I’m a teacher.

I open one though and get in the car and head off for town. I want to get a room at the Mallard Motel if it’s still called that and just spend some time walking around town or driving before leaving. I shouldn’t be worried home’s one of those right beside the Trans-Canada Highway little towns just about fifteen hundred people total and if you’re trying to find it and pull into town off the highway don’t blink because you’ll miss it.

It’s exactly the same. The Mallard is right at the edge of town beside Salt Lake Lions Park, the local rotary club and sharing the parking lot with The Mallard is The Big B. It’s a sort of grill place, just one bench while you wait and I’ve no idea what the B stands for I always assumed burgers.

They added a dining room to it. Well seating at least. It almost ruins it.

I park and go into the “office” for The Mallard and see…Chris…Chris Thompson behind the desk looking like he’s looked better. He was one of the guys who thought he was special and was on the basketball team in school. He’s one of the guys with the bachelors of gym class and couldn’t find a job teaching or coaching. A bit of grey in his hair, some beer gut and lazy fat on him too and he looks up from the laptop he’s on and folds down the screen cutting off the faint sounds of porn.

And yay he’s looking me over like I’m his lunch. “Can I help you Miss?”

“Porter Haley, Porter.”

“Any relation to the Porters here in town?”

“Cousins.”

“Oh, I don’t recognise the name.”

“That’s okay, no biggie Chris.”

“You know my name?”

“I recognise you.”

“Oh cool.” He seems to puff himself up to the way he used to be in school.

“You don’t seem to have changed much.”

“Naw I’m still y’know cool.”

“No…I don’t really know that, back when I was around you were kind of a mean, petty, jerk who was more into being part of the popular crowd than treating people decently.”

“Hey!”

“No Hey, I remember the stuff you and Keith and Trevor and all your other buddies use to do to people and say about people Chris.”

“But...”

“I think I’ll get a room somewhere else. This place smells like assholes.”

I walk out and he follows. “You can’t fucking just walk in here and talk to me like that! You just mad that I didn’t fuck you back then! Fucking whore!”

He get’s close and I spin on him. “Go the fuck away Chris, before you’re wearing jalapeno body spray.”

I don’t have a can of pepper spray but he doesn’t know that. He gets all flustered and storms into the office. “fuckin bitch she don’t know me nothin but a fuckin dyke more than likely…” he’s cut himself off by going inside and slamming the door shut. I get in my car and he’s peeking out the blinds and I give him the finger.

I drive out pretty fast, I’d have liked to burnt rubber but that’s hard to do in a front wheel drive Camry. It still felt good though. Chris was a jackass, one of those people who peaked in high school and never got anywhere in university because when he got there like a lot of the asses like him who thought the were something he found out that uhm yeah…he wasn’t.

I drive down to the Millstone lodge about six blocks away and pull into parking lot out back. It’s an old three story B&B some stone work and stuff and it’s still got the wooden board siding still that canary yellow and I go in. They used to rent movies here when I was a kid out of their office. At the risk of dating myself I watched “Quest for Fire” from here on laser disc…and you could rent VHS and Beta-max.

It’s still nice though and I’ve always wondered what in was like to stay here. It’s a bit expensive but not too bad for a B&B and the girl at the front desk I don’t recognize but then she was likely born after I left here.

I take my few bags to my room and take out my things and computer and head to the bathroom. “Oh…this is a nice surprise. There’s a shower but also an old claw foot tub. I turn the water on to get hot and get my bathroom kit and pour some honey lemon scented bubble bath into the water.

It feels nice to get undressed. Rub the girls back to life. Some thing that’s so erotic…ffft…I’ve been in that bra all day and it just feels good to get them out into the air and rub the bra pressure out. The same goes for my little dangly friend once free from his confines.

Yes I’m one of those…no, I haven’t had the finale done yet. Long story and I’m not sure I want to risk it not coming out right. But yes, sometimes I’ve really wanted and wondered. The bath is pure bliss and I get nice and comfy and soak. I wash my hair and put it up with the towel and slip into a big white men’s t-shirt a 3XL and really comfy cotton panties. I like to be comfy when I sleep.

I turn on my laptop and re-read the job offer then go online and start looking at real estate in Bridgeview British Columbia.