"It was spring, perhaps"
On timelines, testimony, and the limits of recall
Once the season turns enough that the sun rises with me and the temperature is tolerable, I resume my ritual of a pre-coffee walk each morning. At any point between 6 and 8am throughout the week, you can find me slowly wandering the streets with headphones on, nothing playing, contemplating my mere existence.
This morning, I came back through the door with 4,200 steps in, filled a mug with peppermint tea and boiling water, stretched on my yoga mat and took my meds. I placed a jazz vinyl on my record player and cracked my laptop to begin the workday while espresso poured from the machine into a tiny cup.
This moment is as concrete as any.
It’s April 13th, 9:17am. My mood could most succinctly be described as “moderate.” I just used the last of my Greek yogurt and hemp hearts. The milk is running low. I need to call a lodge on a lake where a friend is getting married in September. I have case work to do that looks similar to any other case work. In two hours, Justin and I will have a phone call that sounds like most of our phone calls. I’m looking forward to painting on a fresh canvas later. I think maybe I’ll paint a frog smoking a cigarette.
By the end of the week, I won’t remember how long this morning’s walk was. At this point, I can’t remember which of the three perfumes I plucked from the table in my entrance before I left, needlessly spritzing myself, though I had yet to brush my teeth or hair. I can’t tell you what I wore to bed last night.
Nothing about this morning is memorable, but if, for some reason, in five months, you had to ask me about it, I’d probably be able to place it as early spring. I’d likely remember that it was grey, that the trees were still dead, and I might remember that I was annoyed with myself for wearing my white runners, not my boots, because there are still small mounds of dirtied snow melting into the ground, creating thick mud throughout the walking trails.
I might not be able to tell you if it was March or April, but you could cross my memory against the weather and snowfall. If I somehow remember that I called Wolf Ridge Lodge the morning of this particular walk, I could check my emails for a reservation confirmation or search my texts to see if I mentioned it to anyone I was booking accommodations with. If I happened to recall that I stopped to rub my sore back because I had my period, I could check my cycle tracker. If I give the smoking frog away to a friend, we might be able to smash our brain cells together to think of when.
Now, say, you ask me four years from now about this morning, what I can remember would depend on a few things. Nothing small or elaborate, just large life architecture stuff.
I’ve lived here for seven months. If I move when the lease is up, I’ll know it was spring of 2026, the only spring I had here. As we speak, my dad is sick. During my walk, I texted him to make dinner plans on Wednesday at a spot we’ve never been to. Because he’s sick, I catalogue these memories differently than I did pre-cancer. If that’s the first and last dinner we have there, I’ll probably be able to tell you with some level of accuracy that these two things happened around the same time. I’m expecting to hear from someone in the next few days that I don’t typically hear from. If I do, it could be another marker.
But all of these things rely on a hypothetical.
I have no reason to believe I’ll move. I think I’ll probably have more dinners with my dad. If I do hear from this person, it could be lacklustre. I could hear from them again, and those things could blur together.
I probably won’t remember this day at all.
I’m currently combing through materials related to two grooming cases. On a granular level, they’re not similar at all, but they do share some overlapping themes. The alleged perpetrators in each case are around the same age, the victims are too, and the “relationships” happened in the same time period.
In both cases, the legal proceedings happened a number of years after the fact.
A big point of contention and confusion is the timelines. The “relationships” went on for years; the court is focused on a relatively small number of specific incidents over all those years that blur into other incidents; we’re relying on the memories of kids who have become adults, and memories are a fickle thing.
I reached “throw your keyboard across a room” levels of defeat one day when I hit page 637 of a trial transcript. Nothing made sense; the dates didn’t add up, the lawyers were confusing themselves, littering the transcript with a dozen half-thoughts that only led to more confusion. I found myself placing events on the timeline that happened between two people months before they supposedly met. Under cross-examination, things didn’t get a hell of a lot clearer.
I wasn’t frustrated because I needed one thing to have happened or because I had an opinion on what happened at all. I don’t. Whether or not the timelines don’t make sense because someone is misremembering or because they’re lying is not relevant to my work of putting down on paper who said what about whom and when. In fact, inconsistencies are valuable.
But I have a brain that, like many brains, likes order, and having to break a massive timeline into tables of anomalies in a different document is not the kind of order my brain craves.
Once I was thoroughly bamboozled and in need of a break, I switched to the other case, where I was glad to have more than just transcripts. I had trial audio.
Having audio or video in a case, particularly those that happened 10 or 20 years ago, is a beautiful thing. The way information is contextualized through these mediums is vastly different than the words you can read on paper. For me, at least, it’s much simpler to follow someone’s train of thought audibly than it is to read it transcribed.
I was prepared to settle in, let the information synthesize in my brain, get the basics into my skull, and restart the audio to take my notes.
Unsurprisingly, this case was also riddled with memory failures. It was a bit more straightforward in that the victim rarely asserted their recall as fact. Because they were apprehensive about naming dates for things they couldn’t clearly remember, there was little contradiction. Instead, they provided large ranges that evidently frustrated defence counsel.
So much of the cross-examination focused on narrowing those dates.
But the victim in this case had an atypical childhood experience.
They were in an accelerated program for gifted students, shuffling schools at a different rate than their peers. When prompted, they couldn’t remember what grade they were in during certain events because their grade didn’t correspond with their age. They lived with different parents in different households with no formal custody agreement or schedule; narrowing down where they were staying was unhelpful. They’d known their abuser for many years as their coach, so trying to recall certain games, of which there were hundreds and dozens of tournaments for years, was also futile. Even the weather was largely debatable. “A bit of snow on the ground” could be fall, could be an unseasonally warm winter week, could be early spring.
When asked for the tenth time to try to give a more accurate date, there’s an objection. The victim has tried, in every conceivable way, to give a more accurate date. They cannot. The objection is sustained.
There’s a particular kind of scrutiny placed on memory in cases involving children and grooming that feels, at times, fundamentally mismatched with how memory actually works. We ask for specificity from people who were, at the time, still building the frameworks that allow memory to organize itself at all. Most people, let alone children, don’t catalogue their lives in dates and sequences. They remember in fragments of people, places, sensations, and disruptions. Add grooming to that, and those fragments are also shaped by power, confusion, normalization, and, often, a slow and purposeful erosion of what should have stood out as unusual, and what should be understood.
Grooming, by design, blurs reality. When something happens once, it can be easier to isolate. When it happens repeatedly, incrementally, and within a relationship that is already part of a child’s life, those moments don’t always register. They accumulate and become part of the background. Years later, when asked to recall them, what surfaces isn’t clean or isolated events, but overlapping layers of detail—this happened when I was still going to that school, when I was staying at that house, when it was cold out.
Time, in these cases, is rarely linear. It’s anchored to structures like school, sports seasons, holidays, who they were living with, whether there was a broken curfew, a first cell phone or messages on the family computer. Even those anchors can shift. A child moving between households, switching schools, or living in instability, not uncommon for grooming victims, may not have consistency to rely on. And over time, memory fades. Early spring becomes “summer” or a spring from a different year. Late fall becomes “before winter.”
And yet, we bring those memories into systems that demand chronology. We ask for dates, sequences, and order. We narrow, and we press, and we try to fix things in place. Sometimes that produces clarity. Sometimes it produces a contradiction. Often, it simply exposes the gap between what memory can offer and what we expect it to provide.
I probably won’t remember this morning.
If you asked me about it years from now, I’d try to give you a painted frog smoking a cigarette or an empty spot on the shelf where my dark cherry yogurt should be, but I’d probably have a failure of memory on any of those details. So, I wouldn’t give you a timeline or much for nuance, I’d give you a season. I’d give you the feeling of wet pavement and stubborn snow, and hope we could make something of it.