My brother helped us move. He and John rented a trunk and filled it with our bits and pieces of furniture from the house we rented in North Vancouver. I went on ahead in the car with our baby son, Forrest. I wasn’t much help with the lifting because I was heading into the final month of the pregnancy that resulted in Brendan. But the plan was that I would take an early ferry and have time to prepare a hearty dinner — steak, baked potatoes, salad and crusty bread — for John and Gordon to enjoy once they arrived with the trunk.

It’s a good story now but I remember how bleak it felt to be sitting by the fire in an unheated house, a single oil lamp providing limited light, knowing that this would be my life — this house on this bluff facing into the wind.

We hadn’t counted on a wind-storm. My ferry sailed on time but they were delayed in Horseshoe Bay because the ferry’s generator was supplying power to the village which had lost its own power due to fallen trees on the line. When I arrived at the house, it was to discover that there was no power there either, and the large picture window in the living room was leaking water around the edges. Several people had commented that ours was the first they’d seen with the cedar shiplap siding applied horizontally. Most people used either beveled siding or else nailed the shiplap on vertically so any water collecting in the channels would run to ground rather than sit in the grooves and perhaps seep behind into the building paper. Was our insistence on doing it our own way proof of our naivety? And now folly? The wind was blowing hard. I made a fire in the woodstove, though smoke kept blowing back into the kitchen, and I lit the oil lamp — we only had one in those days. At least the phone was still connected and after hearing on the battery-operated radio that ferry sailings from Horseshoe Bay were delayed, I waited for it to ring.

It’s a good story now but I remember how bleak it felt to be sitting by the fire in an unheated house, a single oil lamp providing limited light, knowing that this would be my life — this house on this bluff facing into the wind. How bleak to wait for the sound of the truck, many hours later, on the dark driveway, and to stand in front of the sliding doors (opening then into space; the deck came later…), holding the lamp and hoping they could see that the reason everything was black was because the power was out. Expecting them to be hungry and tired and knowing I couldn’t bake potatoes or do justice to a steak on the Coleman stove which I’d brought in from outside. Forrest, twenty-one months old, was sleeping at last in his temporary crib.

In our improvised bed that night, with my brother sleeping in a room nearby, we talked quietly about the storm, the leaking window, the fact that we might have made a terrible mistake, and not just with the horizontal shiplap siding. Holding onto each other in the dark as the wind battered the house, we wondered if maybe we should have bought something in the city, harnessing ourselves to a mortgage and the necessity of two incomes for the rest of our lives. Everything seemed very black and we were very far away from what we’d known and loved.

Yet the next morning dawned brilliant and calm. The wind had died, the power was back on, Gordon and John — who’d actually arrived cheerful and full of a dinner they’d treated themselves to in Horseshoe Bay in a restaurant with a generator of its own; who’d brought laughter into the darkness, immediately opening wine and regaling me with stories of negotiating the winding highway up the coast, past fallen trees and branches rushing by in the wind; and who were happy to eat bread and cheese by the fire — got themselves organized to unload the truck and arrange our furniture in the bare rooms. But first we ceremoniously laid our wool carpet over the bare subfloor in the living room where it brightened the plywood and caught the light streaming in the picture window.