Tilting Towards Joy is a collection of interconnected stories that trace the delicate threads binding lives across continents and through time. Set against the backdrop of rural France, each story follows familiar characters through unfamiliar terrain, offering insight into how we navigate new experiences, unexpected conflicts, and shifting relationships. Among the characters we meet are an empty-nest couple who trade their Edmonton home for a farmhouse in rural France; a young girl who exacts revenge on her siblings by serving an unconventional “dessert”; a woman who after being scammed chooses to view the situation with hope rather than pessimism; visiting friends who show their true colours; and siblings hurriedly preparing for a wildfire evacuation. Each story, grounded in a moment of personal reckoning, pulses with a sense of yearning—tilting always toward the possibility of joy, even as it remains just out of reach.

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from Unspoken

“Ours is the house of spare rooms,” Lucia lamented to her friend Mary Dunford one Thursday afternoon, as she and the elderly widow sipped tea in the front room of Mary’s condo. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the feeling of emptiness, Mary.”

“That place was always too big for you,” chirped Mary, a little too quickly. She smoothed out a lap blanket covering her crooked lower body. “It was that husband of yours wanted it built. Ego, all ego.”

Lucia felt something rise in her chest. Who was this ninety-year-old woman to judge them?

“Oh, Mitch,” she faltered, irked Mary should criticize her husband of some thirty years. “He thought a big house would be a good investment, and good for entertaining clients.” She had been bemoaning drifting through their four-bedroom home (plus den, plus study) and Mitch so tired in the evening, discouraging company.

“For Mitch, it is security.” She hated that her voice sounded meek, almost apologetic.

“Humph.” Mary reached for her saucer, fingers trembling. “Ridiculous, taking more than you need.”

Lucia bristled. Was building their dream home in boomtown Alberta taking more than their share?

Pronouncements like this from Mary were not uncommon in the decade and a half Lucia had been visiting the elderly woman, but she noticed they’d become more personal as the two of them grew closer.

The first time they’d met, easily fifteen years ago, Lucia discovered the elderly woman in a flap. The elevator in her condo was on the fritz, so Lucia helped Mary carry her groceries up to her third floor apartment. Mary insisted on offering tea, and Lucia accepted, overwhelmed by Mary’s great flurry of gratitude.

“You must come again, now that we’ve met,” said Mary Dunford. “I do love getting to know young people.” Young people! Her? And deciding it was all a matter of perspective, Lucia did return the following week, drawn to Mary’s old-world formality and the serenity of her soft-green-walled apartment. Every Thursday afternoon for years she visited, first for tea and conversation and then, once they became inextricably entwined, for more practical things, life things.

Starting out as a guest, Lucia didn’t consider the word caregiver until it dawned on her that Mary not only anticipated and expected her visits, she also relied on them.