You Hedged. Now What?

Not the movie. Not the hospital gossip. The ordinary ugly version: still no new picture, and the Washington trip is allowed to just… fade. Nobody says funeral. Nobody says canceled. The date gets soft. “Arrangements.” And we all have to live in that hole.

I am making plans as if that is the week we get. I can change my mind when a camera shows up. That is what plans are for. Until then, here is how I am talking to myself.

Beijing will not introduce a spare. They spent too many years clearing the bench. So they will do what they are good at. Letters. Instructions. A government that sounds busy while the chair stays empty. They can sit on a silence longer than we find decent. Decent was never the point.

And Donald — he will not send a card. He will send a bill.

He will look at Carney and say the thing out loud, because that is how he collects:

You were hedging with China. Now what?

He will enjoy it. The farm fight, the fifty percent, the liquor and the motorcycles already circling September — that stops being a spat and starts being the only door Ottawa has left. You do not get to pivot to a man who will not come to the door. Europe will take the meetings. Europe will not take the trucks.

I keep thinking about that. We were told the American door cost too much, so Canada would go east. Energy, cars, canola, a whole personality called “strategy.” Strategy assumes somebody is home. If nobody is home, that is not diversification. That is standing in a hallway smiling at a locked office.

Wall Street will not wait for a nice announcement. They will get tired of asking and start marking things as if the meeting cannot happen. Not Lehman by lunch. Messier. Who signs the export paper. Who holds the rocks in the ground. Which factory still runs when the center is a rumor. Oil gets jumpy because the calendar cannot be trusted. Things that used to leave a Chinese dock on Tuesday leave late, or Oh Dear, - not at all! That is a price you feel at a pump and in a grocery aisle. Midterms love that kind of weather, and not in a kind way.

Canadian energy should look clever in a scare. In practice it is tied to a buyer who may not be at the desk and a neighbor who is in a mood. That is not a tidy win. That is a mess with a pipeline.

And yes, I have thought about the shopping. Not a warehouse. I am not going to be the woman with a pallet of paper towels in the garage again. But I have thought about it.

Here is the honest part. In 2020 the shelves did not empty because the trucks stopped. They emptied because we all had the same idea on the same Saturday. The stampede was the shortage. That is the same trick the market is running right now, only with cans.

Two doors, and both of them sticky. Ottawa is in a fight with the neighbor who actually takes our trucks, and the eastern door may not have anybody standing behind it. Neither of those empties a store this week. A container that leaves a dock late arrives late in six weeks, not Tuesday.

Which is the entire argument for going early and going boring. Not because it is about to run out. Because if I wait until it is obvious, I will be standing in that aisle with everyone else who waited.

I am not rearranging my whole life on a rumor. I am also not pretending no news is comfort. No news, in a one-man shop, is the expensive kind.

When the picture comes — dated room, present tense, a man on the stairs in Washington — I will put this page in the drawer. Until then I am talking as if the appointment cannot be kept, and as if someone in Washington is already practicing the question.

You hedged. Now what? Watch for Carney on a plane to D.C. - then you'll know.

— Caroline North