Commentary

Of salt bags, salty souls, and existential change

October 8, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

Autumn, and there’s frost on the ground in the morning. Change, seasonal and political, is descending across the province like the blanket of red, orange and yellow of the deciduous canopy this time of the year.

People will go to the polls throughout Ontario this month to mark ballots in political contests to choose municipal governments. Many of those people and others are watching store shelves, but not for Halloween treats or yuletide affectations. Nope. Election campaigns aren’t as high a priority as the first bags of walkway de-icer that will hit the shelves.

Candidates might hope to get a smidgen in votes of the number of bags homeowners hope to stock up to get through the now-familiar February and March salt shortages.

I’ve never liked change. I suppose it’s indicative of a laziness on my part. Change means adjustment, and that likely entails mental maneuvering, possibly with a certain amount of physical movement involved. Depending on the change. The mental is more the heavy lifting, in my experience.

I’d often be spun out because things changed. So often that I dreaded change would happen. Often that dread kept me from enjoying the things that I feared would change. So I would miss in the moment what I hoped would not change. A perpetual churning inside, becoming spun out that something had changed or just a certainty that, by gawd, that particular something sure was going to change.

Because everything, all of it, changes.

I’ve always known that.

A cliché: The only certainty is that nothing is certain. And nothing will always be as it is in a moment. That’s the very stink of change right there.

It recently dawned on me that much of what I wanted to remain unchanged was actually unimportant. But I couldn’t see that.

I saw on a business door recently a notice for services. It was a price list, that notice on the door. Something about physiotherapy. Maybe therapeutic massage and spinal adjustments. It isn’t important because what stuck out to me was the bolded font that screamed that people 55 years old can avail of the seniors’ discount.

And that’s a change for me. It signalled an existential shift.

I’m four years from the seniors’ discount.

Four years. I’m still older than that number in months.

Age never mattered to me. It still doesn’t matter to me beyond that it has become a measure of something other than years. I’ve come to the point where I’ve seen that much of my concerns had been foolish. Trite. Unimportant. I look back at the years now, and I see the people who are missing today.

An aunt died, and then my father died last year. Another aunt died last month. Two people I would go to about everything are not around anymore. A large Newfoundland family. My father had 12 brothers and two sisters.

All close in age, it was as if my grandmother had the same box of Tampax for a dozen years or something. Somebody once asked her how long she and grandfather would wait before the next pregnancy. Nan was the one who said it depended on whether the hospital room was private or semi-private. A laughing lot, they were.

The changes are heavier now. More real in ways I’d never considered before. I remember talking with my father, a box of beer at our feet in his shed. There was always a box of beer or two the times we ever really talked in a meaningful way. One thing that stands out in memory is my father saying how the family had been pretty lucky health-wise. But when it happens, he said, it would all happen fast, in quick succession.

Those changes signal a life shift that is irrevocable. He wasn’t talking about bags of sidewalk de-icer flying from department store shelves.

All I can hope is that maybe there will be a place where bags of walkway winter salt are eligible for the seniors’ discount. That’s a change I can get my head around

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