The house we moved to was an ordinary ’50s bungalow. There were three bedrooms, a small bathroom, a small kitchen, an adequate living room. But there was also a basement and a plan to rough-in some rooms down there behind the furnace where small windows, non-opening, gazed out to the carport. There wasn’t a paddock but the house stood on nearly an acre, the back part of it wild, so we would fence an area for my horse; he remained behind in Matsqui at the farm of a friend until we were ready for him. A few junipers on the front yard, a hawthorn, some pines in the back yard. A vegetable patch of clay soil which my father would rototil annually and then whack at with a shovel, swearing at the clumps of hard clay which refused to crumble.

We moved to that house well after the school term had begun. It seems my father had gone through a kind of crisis, half-wanting to buy into a sporting goods shop in Abbotsford where he could have worked as a gunsmith — his hobby — but knowing also that a job waited for him in Victoria with known income, benefits, the things he was accustomed to. My parents argued in the night those last few months in Matsqui and finally we moved to Victoria to the house which didn’t fulfill anyone’s dreams and where a patch of overgrown sour grass waited to be fenced for the arrival of my horse. We stayed in the Cherry Bank Motel while we waited for the moving truck to arrive and we were registered in schools in the area. It was painful to be the gawky girl introduced to the class a month into the term.

I would think, Entire lives have been lived in these houses, and would be filled with something like sadness but not quite. Later the word nostalgia settled into my lexicon with such ease that I knew I had been waiting all my life for it.

All my life, I have wondered at the feeling I have in particular houses, usually ones no one lives in any longer. I’ve felt it in Point Ellice House in Victoria where members of the O’Reilly family lived for nearly a century and where the rooms are arranged in tribute to those days; felt it in abandoned farmhouses on Sumas Mountain when we’d come across them on blueberry picking expeditions and where a tattered remnant of wallpaper, neatly cut (if mouse-eaten) squares of newspaper on a nail in the outhouse, or a rusty cookstove spoke to me of the deep legacy of belonging and loss. Once, in Utah, I wandered around a cabin in the Dinosaur National Monument Park and sensed the presence of the family that had lived in that place so vividly that I had to wipe tears from my eyes. A tire-swing hung from an old cottonwood, clematis covered the roof of the cabin and foamed over the windows in cascades of white blossom, and a few milk cans stood battered and empty outside the collapsing barn. Sometimes a house seemed as though it was waiting for its family to return, furniture still in the rooms, a kettle on a stove. There was a low clapboard cottage in the woods near Elk Lake where I rode my horse and its windows seemed to me a study in patience, as did the lilacs which bloomed in spring in anticipation. I would think, Entire lives have been lived in these houses, and would be filled with something like sadness but not quite. Later the word nostalgia settled into my lexicon with such ease that I knew I had been waiting all my life for it.

When I was a young woman, I travelled through Europe with a change of clothing in a knapsack and imagined myself into a shepherd’s hut on the south coast of Crete, my lover Agamemnon bending to enter its single room and showing me its hearth, a small opening in the roof to take away the smoke. There was a room in the commune near Grasse in France where I was taken by friends for lunch and where we were served food grown and prepared on the property, even a glass of the brandy made in the cellar, barrels scented with oranges from the trees providing shade to the terrace. Later I lived in a cottage on an island off the west coast of Ireland and planned to stay there forever, finding in its stone walls and windows facing the north Atlantic a solace of long occupancy. People had lived on the island since Cromwell’s cry, To Connaught or to hell, drove them there in a desperation of survival. My cottage wasn’t from those days, of course, but ruined and tumbled buildings on the island probably were. I loved the wind, the hedges of fuchsia, and the jugs containing milk the colour of primroses that my landlord brought me.