So many living things require and actively seek a home. All around me as I write, birds are making nests, some are choosing boxes we’ve nailed to trees, bears have awoken from their winter dens and are walking the high trails, eating new grass and insects, the mountain itself their home, and on the shore, hermit crabs awkwardly drag around their whelk shells. I remember watching a muskrat on one of the creeks on Matsqui prairie build a dome-shaped house of cattails in a quiet eddy; from my place under trees on the banks of the creek, I imagined myself inside that place surrounded by the smell of water and the whiskered fish. And even octopuses have their dens, the larger ones choosing underwater caves and the smaller ones, old bottles and moonsnail shells. Home offers protection and exerts a strong influence on organisms, shaping them physically as well as spiritually. Imagine knowing a place only briefly, a few months, but then remembering it so precisely after a period of three or five years, that it’s possible to swim a thousand miles and find the tiny stream where conception and birth took place. I think of this every fall and winter when I watch the return of the coho and pink salmon in streams near where I live.

Each pile contained within it the dimensions a heart tells to the hands, to the saw, to the hammer and nails, the rooms accumulating until there were enough for a home.

Home, my dictionary tells me, means, “dwelling-place; fixed residence of family or household.” When I was in grade seven, my teacher asked the class to write a composition on what home meant to us. I still remember the rich feeling of putting into words all I wanted, all I hoped for. My piece wasn’t about an actual place — that year was the second or third we’d spent in a patchy old house on Harriet Road. My room was in the basement: I’d been caught shoplifting at a local grocery and spent long hours feeling remorseful in my underground quarters next door to my oldest brother who made my mother cry because he kept hiding pictures of naked women and she thought he was headed for hell (a lonely boy I could hear in the night talking to an iguana he kept for a pet). I’d come back from school one day with scabies caught from Andrew Elliot who sat next to me and who never washed. Every night for some weeks I had to stand naked in the bathroom while my mother painted the open sores with some sort of disinfectant. What I am saying here is that the house itself and the circumstances did not characterize home. Rather I wrote about ideals: the warmth of a fire, the taste of hot chocolate on a cold winter day, the fact that there was always enough hot water for a bath, and enough dumplings on the stew for each person to have two. My teacher read my composition to the class and I listened as though to something written by someone else, or if not exactly someone else, not really me either but a finer self. It was a moment when I knew that words could do something other than fill in space.

A kiss led me to the truest home I’ll ever have. After several years of travelling, I was paused in Victoria, waiting for something to happen. I hoped to return to Ireland where I’d been happy and to earn money, I was working in a bookstore in the mornings, trying to find my writing voice in the afternoons. I met a poet in Victoria — he’d come to give a reading at Open Space — and he was walking me home from a party through the dark streets of Rockland. Stopping in front of the Art Gallery, he kissed me, a moment that began the rest of my life.

Herbs on Deck
BY John Pass

At the age of twenty-six, I helped the poet, now my husband, erect an old blue tent on a plywood platform on an Easter weekend. Our son, two weeks old, waited in his carseat to be moved into the tent wrapped in a swaddle of blankets. In the back of the car, among the bags of diapers, food for the week, was a ball of twine, and a plumb bob. With these, we intended to mark out the shape of a house on a bluff facing south west.

We built four nestboxes in the year leading up to my 50th birthday, nearly half a lifetime away from that kiss. Three were for ourselves and one for friends. The swallows arrived and excitedly flew to the openings, never entering, and then they disappeared. We were disappointed but philosophical — you can lead a horse to water… This year, after much inspection of exteriors and interiors, there were three couples housekeeping in our trees — though only one pair of swallows. I will tell you the story of the nestboxes and what happened with the string, the plumb bob, the piles of lumber we ordered (a sling of north species “2 x 4″s; we culled the cedar out for decks) and then arranged into the makings of a house. Each pile contained within it the dimensions a heart tells to the hands, to the saw, to the hammer and nails, the rooms accumulating until there were enough for a home.

I grew up with cedars. To some degree they defined the way I apprehended space and time. The ones I remember best were at Goldstream Park. Huge and shaggy, they grew near the river where I went to look at spawning salmon each fall and returned to in spring to look at the fry darting through the clear water. A trail meandered through the cedars to a salt marsh and the estuary of Goldstream River. The park was very lush. In spring, the smell of black cottonwood leaves unfurling was heady, their resins scenting the entire area. Moss-hung bigleaf maples and their honeyed blossoms were alive with warblers — orange-crowned; yellow-rumped; black-throated grey; Townsends, MicGillivray’s, and Wilson’s. I remember it was a good place to see trilliums and the beautiful shooting stars with their swept-back magenta petals. There were also skunk cabbages in the low damp areas and occasionally I saw bears. In fall they feasted on the salmon and in early spring, newly awake, they ate bright green leaves, their scats glowing with chlorophyll.