Richard Wagamese

I’m brown. It’s the second or third thing I notice about myself every morning. The others are that I’m alive and that I have things to get done by the end of the day. Depending on the state of my bladder, the second thing is sometimes shuffled. In any case, by the time I make it to the bathroom and walk by the mirror, the fact that I am brown works its way into my consciousness. Brown. Rich, deep and luxurious. A brown man engaged with the process of living one more time.

We inflated frogs. We were eight years old. We were Ojibway kids trying to navigate the world of foster homes, a white neighborhood, white school, and the callous disregard of a 1960s mill town. The world was cold then. Empty. We spent our days longing for things we vaguely remembered, and the rivers and the bush were the only places we felt like ourselves – or, at least, who we thought we should be.