Mnemonic (32 page)

There was a breakfast next morning, at the riverside home of Chad's parents. A huge platter of pancakes, kept warm with aluminum foil, sausages, scrambled eggs, a large jar of saskatoon berry jam, syrup, an urn of coffee. The big tray of Nanaimo bars and brownies that someone forgot to put out at the reception the evening before was emptied in minutes. Dozens of people gathered. The lawn sloped to the Fraser and it was fine to stand there and watch the water heading down to the coast. This was an opportunity for family members like us who'd travelled a distance to visit with each other, catch up. Although our absence was noted at the previous weddings of my nephews, I think our presence this weekend was hardly noticed. People were polite but not curious.

A little moment reminded me of how far my own children were from Dan's children: someone from his wife's family wondered when the next family wedding would be. Much speculation about how long it would be before everyone gathered together again to celebrate a marriage. In my presence, my brother suggested each niece or nephew or cousin once or twice removed and how likely it might be that they would be next. From the fringe of the conversation, I smiled — but my heart kept asking, Why wouldn't my children count as family? Silly question. Of course I know why. They are barely known.

We said our goodbyes, all of us promising to get together sooner rather than later, and began our drive south, to Clinton where we spent the night. It was so hot. We settled into the Nomad Motel, then walked to the local pub for cold wine and a burger. Later we visited the Clinton Museum, and I looked at the displays of ancient farm tools, mining equipment, and photographs of pioneers long since dead but also vitally present in the implements they'd cared for and left.

Somehow my muddled feelings of remorse for letting my brothers drift from me as they had and pleasure at having spent time in their company and sadness for not knowing them better eased into something like reflection at the passing of time and water and hills of pines, some dying of beetle damage and others scorched by fire, but small groves surviving. Nothing so dramatic as fire had caused our disturbance and among the trembling aspens, the leaves whispered of possibilities.

What is nostalgia but a longing for a time and a place, a hope to return there? That place was not my brother's log house on the shore of Rainbow Lake, though some elements of our relationship were evident there: a canoe tied to a dock, swimsuits on the rail, fishing poles leaning on a shed. We were as necessary and as obsolete as ploughs and horse collars, a pick and shovel from a forgotten claim where someone had intended to dig deep for riches and was disappointed, though perhaps the ore was just a little farther down.

There was a story in the Miyazaki House which I knew I'd pursue. Stories in the Clinton Museum I'd think about and reflect upon. But the story of families drifting apart and then momentarily brought together for a wedding or a funeral — where is the place for that? It's a story as old as time, as old as the memory of travelling through the canyon in a station wagon watching the Thompson River on its inevitable progression towards the Fraser, then the sea.

Sitting on my hands in excitement at the prospect of camping or ice cream at one of the fruit stands along the highway, I'd listen to my brothers bicker and joke while our father shouted impatiently for quiet; the snap of the cigarette lighter pulled from its socket. Back then, I was the only Kishkan girl, hair in pigtails, passed-down jeans rolled up to mimic pedal pushers. Over the course of a summer trip, my brothers sang endless versions of “The Quartermaster's Store” in voices that rang, then cracked and descended an octave. I never dreamed then that a wedding might be the only thing to bring us briefly together again . . . because it was impossible to imagine a world without them.

Arboretum

A Coda

I am thinking about how the world changes as we sit by our windows, chop wood for our stove, take our familiar walks up the mountain or through the winter woods. Driving out for groceries or meals with friends, we notice the new houses, a recent road leading down to Oyster Bay or carved into the side of Mount Daniel; and on summer days we are irritable about the crowds at our favourite swimming spot on Ruby Lake, remembering when it was just a tiny clearing among hardhack and cedars, the smell of wild mint pungent as we spread out our towels.

Farther afield, the subdivisions that cover Broadmead meadows near Victoria or the fields where I rode my horse along West Saanich Road in the years of my girlhood hang across my vision like unwelcome curtains. I can just see through them, a trick of the eye, to the dry grass where I ate my lunch while my horse waited, the smell of him still in my nostrils as I write this. In youth, we rolled our eyes as the old people we knew (some of them younger than we are now) talked about their earlier years and lamented the changes everywhere they looked. Where did time go, they asked, and our imaginations were too green to even think that we might one day remember everything we hardly noticed as we went about our lives.

And yet. And yet. I never expected to feel such physical loss as when I stand in the centre of my own still world and remember the past, which is almost always a landscape. Which is almost always what happened in a landscape. Camping trips with my brothers at Bamberton Beach, Englishman River, the shores of lakes where our father fished for our breakfast in his old jackets and our mother laid our Melmac plates on a picnic table and poured herself a cup of coffee from a battered aluminum percolator with a glass knob on top. Always there were trees which were gateposts to another world. The ponderosa pines I watched for in the Fraser Canyon, the spreading oaks on Quadra Street as I drove to my university classes or outside the window of the apartment I lived in on Fort Street, newly returned from a year in Ireland and waiting for the rest of my life to begin. Lying in my bed at night while car headlights illuminated the walls briefly, I'd dream my way back to Connemara, hearing the rasp of tough willow against the window of my cottage.

A section of Irish hedgerow

I'd cross over from Inishturbot by curragh to Eyrephort Strand and then walk up to the Sky Road where I might get a ride to Clifden if I was lucky. If not, I walked the eleven kilometres. Sometimes I borrowed a bicycle from the farmer whose cows grazed in the fields that ended at the sea. Either way, the road that led up to the Sky Road was narrow, a leafy tunnel through fuchsia, hawthorn, branches of black sloes hanging heavy from their stems, brambles, and gorse blooming in almost every month. I never knew all the birds that sang, or didn't, in the dense lattice of twigs and greenery but sometimes I'd see a nest with a blue tit hovering, or I'd hear the flute notes of a blackbird. Spiders, butterflies, bees humming in the primroses of early summer, and once I glimpsed a badger emerging from a gap where the hedge met a stone wall. Cattle beyond the hedgerow grazed in sour fields while soft rain slicked their hides.

There weren't many large trees. Plantings of pines and yew near the farmyard of the bachelor who gave me rides a few times and who was handsome as sin but also rumoured to be dangerous. A few alders in the damp area where a seasonal stream came off the hills, the stunted willow by my bedroom window. I missed the dense forests of my native British Columbia raincoast during that year, though now I sometimes dream of walking up through that tunnel, fresh in spring or dust-worn in August, listening for birds, plucking a stem of fuchsia to tuck into my hat. Thirty-five years have passed, and still I remember white campion, dead-nettle, meadowsweet, and bryony lacing up into the sallies, and how I once dug up a small primrose to take back to my cottage where it bloomed in a blue teacup on the windowsill.

Always trees, with their leafy shade on a summer afternoon or fringes of needles to filter light and provide the scent of balsam to carry on my hands. They stand for hundreds of years on rocky outcrops, reaching deep into soil to anchor them until eternity or until a great unpredictable wind topples them and forever after is remembered as the wind that brought down the big fir or the hemlock by the bend in the driveway. (Do you remember?) Birds collect in their steadfast branches, climb their trunks (See the red-breasted nuthatch as I write this, racing up that cedar?), and the smaller ones nest in the holes left by bigger ones drilling for insects and sap. A quick whirl of chickadees comes to buzz and dart as I fill their feeder. I hold my hand out for a few moments only and one of them perches on my index finger, the lightest possible weight, pecking sunflower seeds from my palm. I know I am too impatient to wait much longer and the one brave chickadee doesn't return but scolds and agitates with the rest of them. Never mind. When I am old, I will stand for hours and let them choose from the seeds I carry. I'll stand so still they'll think I'm rooted.

Standing Dead

How curious it would be to die and then remain standing for another century or two. To enjoy “dead verticality.” If humans could do it we would hear news like, “Henry David Thoreau finally toppled over.”

— Gary Snyder, “Ancient Forests of the Far West” in
The Practice of the Wild

There are many holes in the standing dead cedar on the curve of our driveway near the top. I've always wondered which birds nest there — red-breasted sapsuckers? Chestnut-backed chickadees? It's too far from the house for me to keep an eye on the comings and goings of the winged couples in spring, but I expect such perfect real estate is in high demand. Some birds no doubt return year after year. Not wanting to disturb their privacy, I instead imagine reaching into one of the high cavities and touching eggs among the hair-and-moss nests within the crumbling heartwood.

For years I loved to see another huge dead cedar near my home, part of a route we walked regularly with our wonderful dog Lily. I thought of all that tree had seen over the centuries on its slope above Sakinaw Lake. The water itself, alive with loons and trout. Canoes of the First Nations people, some of the paddlers painting messages on a tiny rocky island not far away. House-building by the people who are now our neighbours, then gardens blossoming in the mild air. Fireworks in winter. It was a perfect tree for a bear to stretch to, to sharpen its claws on the silver wood. For ants to enter, and colonize. For birds to perch on and nest in, for eagles to watch for merganser chicks and snap them up, one by one, on early summer mornings.

One winter afternoon, thirteen years ago, not long after a storm, we were walking the trail towards the dead tree when Lily stopped in her tracks, her ears alert. We expected to see an animal ahead but instead, the big tree lay across the trail. It had fallen in the storm, too far from our house to hear the crash. (If a tree falls and no one is listening . . . ?) Horizontal, it came up to my chest, heart-high, and the bush adjacent to the trail was very dense and impenetrable. We certainly could have climbed, or detoured, but what about Lily, who was twelve and very arthritic, her hips creaky?

Finding long sturdy pieces of bark that had come away from the ancient trunk, we made a ramp for her and helped her climb to the top; then I held her while John scrambled to the other side and arranged the bark for her descent. It took some time. She wasn't happy about having to walk the plank, particularly as her eyes were cloudy with cataracts, and it was another moment — there are many when one is in the presence of an aging animal — when I realized that animals apprehend and navigate the world very differently from us. In youth this is true, and in age.

We didn't walk that trail again until the fallen tree had been cut into lengths by the neighbour who owned that piece of land, some lengths ending up milled into lumber, for the heart was clean and usable. The smell beside the area where the portable mill had been was heady — incense, spice, richly arboreal.

Not long after the tree toppled — we called it the fallen warrior — a dear friend died. He was a writer and his legacy is a shelf of books in my study. I look at them. “Dead verticality” or “dead, reclining,” depending on how I arrange the volumes on my pine shelves. His name, Charles Lillard, on the thin spines, his dates bracketed in my memory.

And within a year, Lily died too. She has no literary legacy, nor offspring (she was spayed when we brought her home), no “dead verticality.” But I do keep the bone of her pelvis on my desk. This is not as macabre as it sounds (or maybe it is). We had nowhere to dig a deep enough grave for her body so we dug out salal from beneath a big cedar on rough ground and laid her body among the roots and moss. We covered her with quantities of cedar boughs, moss, and slabs of bark we'd found near the tree. After two years, I reached into the area and pulled out a section of her skeleton which proved to be her pelvic girdle. It was quite clean but I put it into a bucket of water with a bit of bleach and let it sit for a week, then dried and aired it before bringing it into my study. I keep the long wires from the various accessories plugged into my computer – the mouse, the wire providing my Internet connection, the printer — coiled and nested in the open area near where her sacrum had gathered the fused bones of her vertebrae.

As a girl, I'd fractured my own pelvis when my horse fell on me after rearing on a hill in wind. In Lily's beautiful ivory bones, I see my connection to her, to my children (whom she loved and guarded like a mother), to the threads of life and death that hang close enough in our lives to touch at any moment.

As for Charles, I have his poems.

The stars sang in the twilit garden;

morning was moonlight,

raspberries, wine clear as the wind and cold.
¹

And all along the length of that remembered tree, sawdust fell from the cavities where birds had nested in springs older than memory, deeper than love.

Go back, I tell myself. Go farther back, to the origins of the bike that took you to the very edges of the known world of Fairfield, along Dallas Road where the missionary sat among his spiders and plundered artefacts, past Clover Point. Dream your way back to the time when your brother came up from the swamp with your rocking horse over his shoulder, a beloved toy that had disappeared from the porch a year or two earlier, and which he found while out hunting frogs with his friends. It could not be restored, but you never forgot its return across the fields, even as you were yearning for something else to ride.

Juglans spp.

It was the autumn I was five years old and we lived in Matsqui, near the radar base where my father worked. Ten identical houses in a row provided housing for the families of the men at the base. There was a narrow boulevard running in front of the houses and a grassed slope led up to the main road. Small trees were planted where the grass met the boulevard.

A neighbour's child, a year older than me, had received a bicycle for her birthday that fall. There was something so bold about the way that girl pedalled her bike back and forth along the boulevard and I was so jealous I wouldn't come out to play with her and the other children of the row. In later years, my parents confessed they hadn't intended to give me a bike of my own that Christmas, but there didn't seem to be any other solution to my anguish. This surprises me now, because it would never have occurred to me that my actions would ever warrant such results.

But there was a bike, a small blue bicycle, under the tree that Christmas, and I was ecstatic. I didn't know how to ride it. If I hadn't spent the weeks leading up to the holiday in my bedroom, green with envy, I'm sure the child next door would have taught me to ride her bicycle.

I don't know what gave me the notion that I should take my new bike to the top of the grassy slope, once I'd learned how to balance myself briefly on the seat, toes to the ground. Maybe other children were present and suggested it, but in my memory, I was alone on that rise — which was probably very minimal in any case (I've revisited hills that I remember as treacherous in my childhood and realized that their mild incline was such that I didn't even have to shift gears to drive up them). After balancing for a few moments at the top — in triumph — I let myself go and coasted down the hill.

It was thrilling in the extreme — the speed, the freedom of rushing through cold air, the way I felt as bold as that neighbour girl a month or so earlier. But then I realized I would have to stop or else I'd crash into the house on the opposite side of the boulevard. In panic, I steered my new treasure into a tree at the bottom of the slope and collapsed as the front wheel hit the trunk hard enough to bend the bike frame slightly.