Aerospace I : The Lunar Cycle

Aerospace I - Adib's Story

Aerospace I : The Lunar Cycle

Adib's Story

Chapter 1 : Adib George

My father works in Candle Lake. His name is Lightfoot. Call him Lightfoot. I can't remember him being a hunter and trapper but he tells me stories of that time. What I do remember is mom complaining that he is always away. He takes care of the empty houses left behind, when the base shut down. There were once four hundred thousand people living there and all about.

My mother is Reena George. She has a Iranian background. She married dad for love, not money and I know they still love each other. I came along and I was called Adib George.

The base was closed down long before I was born. Last year a crew came in and began renovating the place. Fixing the field, rebuilding the hangars. This base is to be twice as large as the last one. It was a few weeks later that the first of the new tug planes and shuttles started landing. People poured in and the move was on.

There was that terrible crash in the second week where thousands died. Everything is fine now.

But there was a flaw in the system. People were coming from China with children and then fleeing the base for parts unknown. Sometimes the children were not theirs. These young ones got left on the base. The administrators had no time to handle such cases, so they asked native families, in the area, to take a child. About a thousand children were left, before China beefed up its screening.

One day Cherry arrived at our home. Dad thought the support cheque made it workable. We live at the north end of Montreal Lake. It is still out in the woods.

I had never seen a chinese girl before. Fourteen and pretty, she understood no English. I was seventeen. It was just the three of us most of the time. Dad was now busy getting the houses ready for new people to move in.

All ours food were strange for Cherry. We sat at the table trying to encourage her to try our food.

Mother had this idea. She thought this plant leaf, she had found in the woods, was a vitamin supplement. Every morning, mom put four leaves next to Cherry's plate. When mom went out to the kitchen, I would take two leaves and started chewing on the bitter things. Cherry would bravely join me.

That first day, after breakfast in late June, I was feeling strange and needed to take a walk. I took Cherry by the hand and lead her out to the woods. I had a favourite spot, by a large log that was comfortable to sit on. There were many places to visit including the beach by the lake.

But that day we sat on the log, and Cherry began to sing. She came with me the next day, and she sang a different song. Her voice ranged high and unusually low. I thought she was singing traditional chinese music. The songs could last an hour. I was hooked. Then when she finished the second day, I started to tell her a story. She needed to learn English some time.

These stories were from both my mother's and father's traditions. Each time we went out, she sang a new song, and at some point, I knew they were not chinese songs. She was making them up. The songs were creating pictures and whole stories in my head. I started telling these tales.

Then dad returned and he found out that mom was feeding Cherry, Seer's sage. He was angry. It could have killed her. But Cherry seemed fine. We stopped eating the bitter weed.

At 17, there were a lot of jobs I could not get. So I took a job, delivering groceries to the local cottages, on my emotor bike. When I was finished, I would rush back, so I could have time with Cherry. She was doing a lot of the house work with mom. There was an English education ESL site, for Cherry to use in her spare time.