When I was growing up, my family moved every two years. My father was a radar technician in the navy and he would be transferred from Victoria to Halifax, from Halifax to Victoria, from Victoria to the radar base on Matsqui prairie, back to Victoria. We never owned a house. We’d stay in motels for the first part of most transfers; having outgrown the family housing offered by the navy, my parents drove to possible rental houses with my three brothers and myself in the back seat of the station wagon. Our black Labrador, Star, accompanied us, in the very back, drooling as she hung over our seat.

Moving was exciting. For weeks, my mother made lists and tried to organize what we owned. My brothers and I chose favourite things to take with us on the journey — a book, a stuffed animal, baseball gloves for games of catch in campsites, binoculars. Then a moving truck would pull up in our driveway and teams of men packed up our belongings, wrapping breakables in creamy paper and fitting them into large wooden tea-chests, wrapping padded blankets around the furniture, then loading everything into the truck. The house echoed with the loss of our possessions and my mother did a last-minute sweeping of the floors, polished the windows with newspapers and vinegar.

…I’d lie in my bed at night and try to orient myself by remembering my old room. Closing my eyes, I pointed my finger in the darkness to the window. Waking, I was surprised for weeks by the unfamiliar light.

That same truck eventually pulled up in the driveway of the new house and everything was unloaded. My mother cried to discover that cherished plates had been broken or a lampshade crushed. The furniture was arranged in the rooms and I’d lie in my bed at night and try to orient myself by remembering my old room. Closing my eyes, I pointed my finger in the darkness to the window. Waking, I was surprised for weeks by the unfamiliar light.

There was always a moment I waited for, the moment when my mother replied, —Yes, I think so, to the question I posed daily after one of these moves: — Are we settled yet? Settled meant that we knew where things were — light switches, the spaghetti pot, a hammer to bang in nails for our pictures, our winter jackets. New friends knew where to find us. Letters arrived in our mailbox.

The last family move was in 1969 when I was fourteen. My father retired from the navy and we moved from Matsqui to Victoria where a job waited for him at the dockyard in Esquimalt. A house had been purchased, the first and only house my parents owned. The sale had been accomplished on a weekend trip to Victoria a month or so before we moved. There were a few requirements — enough bedrooms, a paddock for my horse (in Matsqui we rented a house on a farm and my life-long wish for a horse had been fulfilled), close to schools. There were also a few hopes — my mother wanted a dining room and a fireplace and two bathrooms. I had fond memories of a house we had lived in when I was in grades one and two, a house with a pagoda roof and an attic room accessible by ladder, a house with doors that opened with crystal knobs and a bark-burning stove in the kitchen, a greying cedar trellis in the leafy back yard, a small neighbourhood park right across the road; I imagined that such elements might be a part of the new house. None of these were to come true.

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.

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.

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.

The cedar roots ran along the trails like mountains on a relief map, emphasizing the verticality of the landscape. The trees themselves, or at least the ancient ones the park was known for, were heavily buttressed at the base. Their trunks were fluted and ridged, the bark coming away in places. It was not difficult to imagine oneself in a cathedral, one hung over with a ceiling of blue or cloudy grey, punctuated with birds. In the high canopy, waxwings and evening grosbeaks fed on seed cones and insects; fall and winter, scores of bald eagles feasted on salmon and surveyed the world from the tallest cedars.

Some of the cedars were more than five hundred years old. Older than the city I lived in, older than my country in the name given it by late-comers. In the infancy of these trees, explorers measured the altitude of the sun and other celestial bodies with their astrolabes as the oceans carried them to North America, John Dowland’s First Book of Songs and Ayres was the most often reprinted music book of its time, and native people on the islands off the western continent had been building houses of their broad planks stitched at the corners with their plaited branches for thousands of years.

We began to build a house with only a hammer and a few chisels. Maybe a multi-headed screwdriver — I can’t remember; it might have come later. Of course we bought tools as soon as we knew we needed them. A Black and Decker 5¼ inch circular saw. An Estwing hammer. A line level and a carpenter’s level and a brass plumb bob. There was so much measuring and leveling that it’s all a blur now though I remember how hard John worked. We’d come to our land for three or four days a week at first, loading up tools and food in our car, along with our newborn baby and everything we needed for him — diapers, clothes, blankets. The first night we camped with him in the tent we’d set up on a platform of plywood, tarps over it, tied to small cedars on each side, he was the only one who slept. He was two weeks old. We were worried he’d be cold or, well, we didn’t know what exactly. We hadn’t been parents for long. We had a foamie for our bed, sheets and a down sleeping bag for a comforter, and it was warm. But it was also April so I remember it rained more than not. I’d lie awake, waiting for him to cry. John was waiting for the tent walls to let in water. The baby, who was Forrest, slept between us, his head warm in a little knitted toque. When it began to get light, loons warbled down on Sakinaw Lake and once something screamed nearby, uncannily like a baby, and our large English sheep dog cross, who was sleeping under the tarp on her rug, struggled to get under the tent platform. Later, I realized it must have been a cougar.

First we built an outhouse. This was a requirement; and in fact we realized that if we could build four walls with a shed roof over them, if we could hang a door with the obligatory quarter-moon screened for ventilation, then we could probably build anything. And what luxury, to sit on a toilet seat with literary magazines at hand, instead of crouching in the woods, the dog sniffing at our butts as we did so, and then discreetly burning used paper in the fire.

We scraped our building site clean of salal and Oregon grape, and measured. Then we made batter boards — each corner of the house-site framed with two horizontal boards at 90˚ angles, attached to stakes, and perfectly level. We used the carpenter’s level for this, setting it on the boards until the small bubble in the glass vial holding ethanol balanced in the centre of the tube, telling us we had horizontal level. When the baby cried, I’d run to the tent to nurse him, wrapping us both in a blanket as I pulled my shirt aside. The tent was cosy but cramped. Everything had to be kept from the sides so we wouldn’t have rain seeping in.

After the batter boards, we dug holes for the footings. John rented a rock drill and drilled into rock for the footings which needed to be anchored with rebar. Some did, some didn’t; it depended on how far down we needed to dig, where grade was, where rock was. Wooden forms were built for several footings. When we didn’t need to drill, the rebar was sunk into the concrete which John mixed in a wheelbarrow and shoveled into the sonotube or wooden form. The plumb bob was used to find the centre of the footings, a vertical level.

We made our meals at a table we’d built out of ship-lap nailed to a frame of small cedar logs. We had an old Coleman stove, and a large enameled pan — for a sink, a salad bowl, a bathtub for the baby. We also made a campfire in a ring of stones and kept a pot of coffee warm on the stones; we cooked meat on a wire grill over the fire. We could also boil a kettle on the fire if we weren’t in a hurry for the water. The water came from Ruby Lake. We’d take down our big twenty litre container and dip it into the deeper water. Sometimes a little gravel ended up in our mugs.

Every step was wondrous. The cedar posts on the footings, then the long beams of strong fir. At that point, our building site looked like sculpture, silent prehistoric animals waiting on the bluff. We built the walls on the platform created by nailing joists to the beams on 16 inch centres, then setting plywood on top, using chalk line to tell us where to nail. The dark red chalk stained my hands, the mark of a builder. We lifted the walls ourselves, apart from one or two very heavy ones. And then we’d ask a neighbour or a friend to help. John would carefully brace the walls with two by fours so that they couldn’t fall over the side of the platform but each time there was anxiety as we lifted and held, one of us reading the level and suggesting adjustments, the other nailing down the bottom plate.

Every step was wondrous. The cedar posts on the footings, then the long beams of strong fir. At that point, our building site looked like sculpture, silent prehistoric animals waiting on the bluff.

Every step — the sheer weariness of holding ceiling rafters in place (it took some time to figure out how to create a bird’s mouth notch), strapping for the cedar shakes for the roof, framing a doorway, nailing down plywood. Understanding the role of lintels, those horizontal structural members supporting a load above a window or door.

How did we ever do it? How did two poets with a small baby build a house when they had no experience beyond building book shelves out of pine? I don’t think it ever occurred to us to buy plans or consult an architect. We had the building code and that told us what we needed in terms of requirements and standards. But I marvel at how John could envision our house from his drawings – we’d both agreed on sizes for rooms and their placement but I was no help at all with the actual plans; he drew them and got them blueprinted and then approved by the Regional District’s building inspector. — Will I like what it will look like? I’d ask, trying to imagine a kitchen from the plans, how the windows might let in light. — Where will the sink be? Where will our bed be? The drawings showed the dimensions, elevations, each room’s relative size, to scale. “For, in point of fact, a house is first and foremost a geometrical object, one which we are tempted to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fitted framework. It is dominated by straight lines, the plumb line having marked it with its discipline and balance.”^[1] I had no spatial sense at all but nailed and lifted with blind trust, not able to translate structural materials to interior space. Drawings spoke of rectangles, clean and elegant. — But will there be a windowsill for a plant? Where will we sit to look at sunsets?

I found the plans for nestboxes in a gardening magazine. The plans were simple, the little houses constructed of rough cedar, a clever arrangement for opening the top (a sloping length of cedar board which would repel water like a shed roof), and there were several dimensions given, depending on the birds one wanted to attract. Some birds like an oval entry, some prefer a round one. Some like a perch whereas a perch can also be a means for larger birds to rob the contents of a nest. Some birds, like purple martins, will live in multi-family constructions but others, like swallows and finches, like privacy.

How did we ever do it? How did two poets with a small baby build a house when they had no experience beyond building book shelves out of pine?

We were hoping for violet green swallows. For years a pair had nested in a box nailed to the top of a post holding some of the wire which surrounded my vegetable garden. That box had been a gift to our children from an elderly friend. We’d see the pair swoop in come April, excitedly exploring our house and garden, then entering the painted box with little squeaks and chirps. They’d disappear, only to return a few weeks later. The male sat on the wire which conducted electricity into our house while the female carried nesting materials through the opening. Then the male brought in a few bits and pieces and spent time examining and adjusting the nest while the female sat on the wire. They’d take a break from this pattern for a few minutes of ecstatic flight, their wingtips touching in the air, their ardor breathtaking to those watching from the ground. Eventually both of them took up residence in the box. I thought of that aria sung by Magda in Puccini’s opera, La Rondine, its notes echoing the beauty of the flight, the courtship, their residency in the shelter of our garden. When the swallows first appeared, I’d play the opera as homage, Montserrat Caballe recounting her dream of a revelatory kiss.

I don’t know very much about the mating habits of swallows although I understand they are monogamous. Our pair seemed quite affectionate with each other. When the young began to peep in the box, the parents were very solicitous, removing the fecal material, bringing endless supplies of insects to the open beaks we’d see through the opening. A little more than three weeks after we first heard the peeping of babies, the young would fledge. The family still remained together, the parents teaching flight maneuvers, the young practicing over our garden, the entire family feeding on swarms of insects. Then one day they’d all be gone.

The original box began to fall apart. The roof split apart at the top and the bottom began to rot. Two winters in a row I removed it from its pole and cleaned out the mess inside, drying it afterwards and fitting roofing felt over the cedar shakes, hoping that it would last one more season. In the meantime, I put another box up in another location but no birds went near it. And the time came when the swallows rejected the original box too. That led to me seeking out plans specific to swallows because I missed their presence, the high and tremulous swoop as they courted, the eager noise as they chose their seasonal home, the chorus of infant birds asking for insects. It was as much a part of spring as the first rhubarb or Appledoorn tulips opening their golden bowls to the sun.

We moved into our unfinished house on the eve of John’s thirty-fifth birthday in December, 1982. The walls had been finished with gyproc and painted, the windows were in but had no trim or sills, the exterior doors were hung, of course, but there were not yet interior doors, apart from the bathroom. We had a long trestle in the kitchen with a makeshift sink, though a new stove and fridge gleamed, plugged into the electrical outlets that John and my father had laboriously wired into place, long strands taking power to all the rooms, a chart detailing their journey from the panel on the wall by the fridge.

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.

In the clear day, John could see that the problem with the water coming in that one place by the big window wasn’t because of the application of the siding but because he’d hadn’t caulked that particular place adequately to seal the window flange.

We had our first Christmas in our new home with my parents and my brother as our guests. We had a big fir tree in the entrance hall, and who needed kitchen counters to make a feast of roast turkey and all the traditional accompaniments, including John’s famous sherry trifle? By the time Brendan was born in late January, we’d had a friend build cabinets for the kitchen out of yellow cedar, we’d bought a sale lot of terracotta tiles for floors and counters — this would happen in summer when I could take our young sons away for two weeks and let John tile day and night without distraction; and there were doors for all the rooms.

“Sometimes the house grows and spreads,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, “so that in order to live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydream that is less clearly outlined, are needed.” What wasn’t included in our plans, so carefully drawn by John by the light of small reading lamp at his desk, drafting ruler at hand, and a selection of sharpened pencils, was the eventual arrival of a third child. There was one bedroom for our sons to share, a study for John and me which would also contain a sofa-bed for houseguests. The entire second story, a 20 x 20 square with plumbing roughed in for the day when we could afford time and materials to finish a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, was our bedroom. We’d intended to divide the space into two rooms but once it was framed, we loved its views, its airiness, and left it open.

What wasn’t included in our plans, so carefully drawn by John by the light of small reading lamp at his desk, drafting ruler at hand, and a selection of sharpened pencils, was the eventual arrival of a third child.

After Angelica’s birth, we began to plan an addition. By pushing out the south wall of the boys’ room, we then built two more small rooms, reasoning that the boys could still share — we had bunkbeds for them — and once Angelica was old enough to need a room (she was sleeping with us while breastfeeding), she could move into the very small room between the larger one for the boys and their old room which would become a playroom. The addition would have a flat roof which we could use as an upper deck, a small sunroom leading to it from our bedroom.

“Sometimes a house grows and spreads”: that small addition lasted for a few years and then it was clear we could use more room as personalities grew as rapidly as limbs. Out came the drawing paper, pencils, special ruler, and a plan to extend in another direction. By taking out part of the eastern wall of the playroom, we could make two more rooms, one with a small step up to accommodate the rise of rock beneath it. By knocking out the wall between the two earlier rooms, we could create a larger room there for one child and then each of the others would have a room in the new addition. The flat roof on top extended the deck off our bedroom and it was also a good idea to build a cosy study for John. The playroom evolved to a library to contain the bulk of a reading family’s book collection.

By now John had such familiarity and skill with his tools. He knew how to make the best use of materials and how to set priorities, rather than daydreaming of windowsills and sunsets, the way I did.

We decided to have a few of the cedars on our property cut down. They were on the north-east side of the house, small trees when we’d first built in the early 1980s, but now towering and full-branched, and too close for comfort during the intense winter storms. Gradually their fallen fronds soured the soil where I was trying to grow roses and they provided too much shade for anything else to thrive.

It always feels a little wrong to cut down a healthy tree, though. We thought about it and talked about it. On the one hand, on the other. And then called in a team of guys. They had no qualms about taking down cedars. “Weeds, they’re weeds in this climate,” one of them said as he prepared his saw.

I tried not to be home on the day the cedars came down. But inevitably I saw part of their demise. Even though the tree guys went up and limbed the big trunks before cutting each section of trunk in sections, there was a moment when one section — I’d come home expecting everything to be done but the team had arrived late — hit the ground with a big whoomph. That was the biggest tree and the part that came down so hard was a good size because we’d arranged to have a portable mill and its sawyer come to mill the sections into rough boards. We hoped to get a sixteen foot length of 4 x 6 out of the big trunk to replace a beam across our patio. A wisteria, nearly twenty-five years old, clambered across the beam from the woodshed end, creating a green bower, and from the other, a New Dawn rose spilled its soft pink flowers over the rough wood. There was some rot in the existing beam and we figured we could somehow slide a new one through the embrace of the vines without them really noticing.

The stump of the biggest cedar measured more than three feet across. The guys had cut it level, using their huge saws as skillfully as cabinetmakers, so I could put a large planter on top.

The mill came, pulled by a pickup truck held together with wire. The owner of both had been recommended by several sources — but always with the proviso not to get downwind of him. He had just been in hospital to have a steel rod inserted alongside his spine (can this really be possible?) so he’d reluctantly brought a helper, a staggering fellow missing several fingers. His job was to carry the enormous lengths of cedar log to the mill where they would be sliced into boards.

The smell that day was not, as feared, of the owner’s odour (though it could easily be detected when I passed him coffee on their morning break, something extraordinary, like animal fat and mysterious unwashed corners of the body and clothing steeped in both wood and tobacco smoke), but of the spicy scent of fresh-sawn cedar. The boards were beautiful as they emerged from the end of the mill — pink and salmon, the grain an intricate story of age and weather. Several times I was horrified to see the owner lifting logs himself and imagined an emergency, the ambulance negotiating our rough driveway, paramedics removing that ripe body from the ground with a metal spike exposed at the back of his neck.

And I decided that the true magic was in the finding. That hidden in the heart of a tree was unexpected treasure, a mnemonic to take us back to our beginning days on this property, when our garden grew beyond us…

The pile of lumber grew — the beam, some 2 x 10s, 2 x 8s (these were full dimensions as the boards were not planed), some planks which began as one dimension but then tapered as the logs narrowed. I could see them as benches or tables, balanced on stumps. I kept touching the boards. Their surfaces were damp, the inner mysteries of the wood released to light. On one chunk of wood, hardly a board, the grain formed an eye, elongated and ovoid — a god or a raven staring out. When I smelled my hands afterwards, the incense lingered, at once familiar and sibylline.

I was inside, doing some task in the kitchen, when John came in with his fist closed over something. What, though? Too early in the year for tree frogs, too early for an unexpected gift of raspberries brought dewy from the garden on a July morning, their tang on the tongue a promise and memory of every summer.

He opened his hand. Five seeds. His eyes shone. “They were inside an area of rot I was prodding at with a screwdriver in one of the big planks.”

“Show me.”

So we went outside to look at the board, its open hole where the rot had been crumbled out with the screwdriver, a few of the cubes of diseased wood on the ground beside it. By a little bit of deduction, we realized the board had been come from the inner section of the lower trunk and when we went to the remaining stump, we saw the corresponding section of rot right at the tree’s old heart. It looked like something called “brown cubical rot” which forms a seam up the centre of the butt. It’s introduced by the mycelia of a fungus that grows on the trunk. When we first came to this land, in 1980, the tree was young and stringy. I don’t remember a wound where rot could have begun or a shelf of bright fungus, but given that we were building a house and raising three small children, there was a lot I didn’t notice in the course of my days. I do remember that, in later years, there was a cicatrice low on the trunk where the bark had healed. It was a popular tree with squirrels.

The seeds were obviously squash of some sort. Creamy, a little sticky with resin, a strange gift to show up in a clump of rotten wood at the heart of a tree. We spent time over coffee reconstructing the narrative of those seeds, remembering back to a particular summer, twenty-five years ago, when I’d staked out a vegetable plot, 25 x 25 feet, and tried to improve the rocky soil by digging in seaweed and anything else I could get my hands on: a bucket of chicken manure from neighbours, mulch from under the big-leaf maples, sandy run-off at the bottom of our steep driveway. Our two small sons played in the dirt that eventually was raked and seeded to what passes for a lawn, enhanced with wild moss. I planted pumpkins that summer, wanting the beauty of their orange globes to remind me of harvests. The plants had spread out with wild abandon, a few of the pumpkins forgotten under salal beyond the boundary of the vegetable garden. What an opportunity for squirrels. And a few seeds tucked into a likely crevice, fresh and raw, in the trunk of a handy tree to provide a winter meal were forgotten, maybe after the tasty fungus had already been knocked off and eaten, forgotten as the tree healed around the small rent.

I planted the seeds and three germinated within a week. I transferred them to the vegetable garden once it was warm enough and I’d love to say that they thrived and produced a huge crop of pumpkins (for they were in fact pumpkin seeds), a testament to my green thumb and the seeds’ inherent fertility. The truth it, they didn’t do much of anything. They grew a little, sent out tendrils to hold fast to the stems of kale. A few blossoms, a few tiny green pumpkins which never matured.

I was disappointed — but too busy with jam-making and canning to linger too long on this failure. And I decided that the true magic was in the finding. That hidden in the heart of a tree was unexpected treasure, a mnemonic to take us back to our beginning days on this property, when our garden grew beyond us, when we carved the thick skin of pumpkins into faces on the night of All Hallows, lit from within by a short length of candle, to stay off the spirits that crossed the boundary between the living and the dead.

How the time passes quickly so that a sapling — I just looked out to see it… — leaves a trunk thirty-eight inches across when felled, its years, the weather contained in a narrative of rings. A seed waited for twenty-five years inside that tree to have its chance to become a pumpkin, however small and green the result, and the children who crouched under the limbs to while away a hot summer day have become scholars and lovers, their lives elsewhere except for a few days a year when they walk the old paths, sit by the fire that continues to draw us to it each morning, a fire started with split shakes of the original roof, now silver with age, while blue metal replaces those shakes. How time passes, how everything we knew is stored in our own bodies — the dull ache of sleepless nights, the sharp yearning for love, the sorrow of these empty rooms once filled with children laughing, fighting; their books, their toys, their filthy socks and tiny overalls. One boy still sits under the original nestbox (though I know it’s not possible, he lives in Ottawa) with his notebook, trying to sketch the swallow nestling that hangs out the opening, saying, — Don’t fall out, Parva! Be careful. And I stand out among the trees, under stars, while the moon thins and fattens, turns soft gold in autumn, hangs from the night’s velvet in February, draws me out on summer evenings to drink a glass of wine while owls fill the darkness with that question: — Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all? It was always me and I never once minded.

I’ve been watching robins this year. One pair built their nest on the downspout of our printshop, a building a short distance from the house. From the kitchen or the porch, we could see the progress of the nest and then the familiar sight of the female perched on it. There were robins in the same place last year and that couple raised two broods. I love peering out, with binoculars for the best view, to see the patient bird incubating her eggs, rising to perch on the side of the nest to turn the eggs, then taking a short break to find a meal for herself while her mate stays near the protect the nest. It takes about two weeks for the eggs to hatch and then the mother robin never seems to rest, darting out and back to bring worms and insects to the increasingly active brood. Sometimes all I can see are three beaks open to the air. And then three gangly young birds carousing in the small space and calling for more food. It only takes two weeks for them to grow to adolescence and leave the nest, each perched on its woven precipice and then soaring out into the world. Once we were lucky enough to see the last of the clutch leave, a sweet moment as the bird leaned forward eagerly while a whole gaggle of robins called and flapped from a nearby cedar. Finally it just… flew. Imagine just knowing how! Just pushing off from the nest and flying, something many of us dream of doing. I’ve read that the male robins continue to feed the offspring for two weeks after they’ve left the nest and then they’re on their own. Depending on the time of the season, the female will be nesting again, prepared for the hours of waiting for her eggs to hatch; then willing to feed the rapidly growing.

This year the downspout couple raised one family and then either they disappeared or else they are the same birds who built on the other side of the house, on an elbow of wisteria just out my study window. I watched this nest from my desk, looking up as I’d hear a rustle – the mother returning with food for the three young. After the babies finally left, the mother spent some time rejuvenating the nest; she brought fresh moss, fresh grass; and I thought how wise she was to have chosen the site in the first place. The wisteria leaves make a shady canopy over the south-west facing nest. But she didn’t stay, perhaps deterred by John who was building new steps for a reconstructed sundeck nearby. (He’d put off this project until the young had flown.)

Of course by now you will know that I am talking about my own family — those three children raised in our homemade house, nurtured and loved, and coaxed easily from the nest with every hope for their long survival.

Reading about robin mortality rates, I was surprised to find out that only 25% of robins survive until early November of their first year. Life expectancy is two years. The hard work of the industrious parents raising up to three clutches a season is not well-rewarded. Yet robins seem ubiquitous. Driving along the highway in spring, one sees so many of them at the roadside, flying up in challenge as the car approaches. (This rash bravado might be the very thing that limits their survival rates, or at least for those 25% who survive past November. In spring and early summer, I often see dead robins on the side of the highway, though the ravens and vultures make short work of the carcasses.) And there are predators. One night, before the wisteria family had flown, we were awakened by two barred owls very near the house. I know they are capable of taking robin eggs and chicks. For about two hours they chorused back and forth to each other, their eight note call —Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all? — with its drawn-out final quavery note becoming shorter, more urgent: 4 notes. And finally just a long descending throb, right by the bedroom window. I wondered if the parent owls were perhaps teaching their offspring to hunt and if nesting birds near our house might be the prey.

So now it’s back to the downspout and the mother is on that nest as I write. I loved watching her prepare the nest back in April. There had been one there in the past and I know that sometimes robins simply build on top of an old one but that earlier nest had fallen, a perfect construction of woven twigs and moss, held together with mud, and then lined with grass. The new nest took a few days to build and, at the end, the bird crouched in it and plumped out her body, turning as she did so. This formed a cup to the dimensions of her body. She carried wisps of grass to it and then I think she laid her eggs, one a day for three days. This time — it’s early July as I write — she simply reoccupied the nest that she had used in April, bringing a little fresh grass for her new family. If we get too near, she glides out and is back again before we know it. I love to hear her mate singing morning, noon and night, the long rising and falling notes clear and bright. The bird books transcribe it as Cheerily, cheer up, cheerily cheer up, cheer up but I don’t hear it that way. I hear clean notes, like the Bourée anglaise from the Bach sonata for unaccompanied flute.

Of course by now you will know that I am talking about my own family — those three children raised in our homemade house, nurtured and loved, and coaxed easily from the nest with every hope for their long survival. Oh, and their return! “So there is also an alas in this song of tenderness. If we return to the old home as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.”^[2] Think of those chicks crowded in that bowl of moss and mud, jostling and agitating for the food from their mother’s beak. That first glide from the nest into thin air, the vast blue yonder which must’ve been heaven. Yet for days after, I’d see the mottled immature robins perched in the cedars near our house, uncertain about the future, perhaps, and reluctant to leave the actual palace on its elbow of wisteria or downspout.

In spring, we cleaned out the nestboxes, propping a ladder against their respective trees — an arbutus, a fir, and a small cedar cut down a few years ago, limbed, and set in place as a garden post. This last location was where we’d nailed the first box, the one that welcomed swallows and where Forrest called to Parva on summer days long ago. We’d see them checking it out, darting in and out excitedly; and then one of the pair would sit on the clothesline while the other took in threads of moss or lichen plucked from branches of ocean spray. Each box contained remnants of a nest, a small cup of dried grass and moss and a certain amount of hair from our golden retriever. I know at least one chestnut-backed chickadee family nested in one of the boxes last year. We’d see them checking it out, darting in and out excitedly; and then one of the pair would sit on the clothesline while the other took in threads of moss or lichen plucked from branches of ocean spray. Maybe the other nests were older. Maybe I never noticed. The years pass and the summers enter the rich tapestry of memory so that we ask, When did we plant the ornamental cherry tree? Or the fig tree, laden with green fruit as I write, or when did we swim by moonlight, or cook sausages in a grove of trees on White Pine Island among flowering yarrow and sweet golden grass? Which was the last year we all lived in this house, dogs eager for the children to run with them or take them up the mountain to enter the cool creeks in early morning while spiderwebs jeweled with dew hung across the water? I am still hoping for the swallows to return. We see them for a few brief days in spring, flying ecstatic over our roof and garden. And they nest in multitudes down by the lake where a fervent birder has erected dozens of houses, painted bright red, in the trees overlooking the water. Later, they appear again — the parents, perhaps, taking the young on their maiden flight.

This year, a chickadee couple seemed to be building a nest in the box on the arbutus tree but something must have frightened them — or else they found a location more to their choosing. There has been a pair around this summer, though, appearing suddenly in a clematis or perched briefly on a wire; maybe it’s the same couple, raising their brood in a tree cavity somewhere in the vicinity of the house. We hoped they’d choose one of our boxes to nest in but all we can do is make sure each is ready, the cedar sides weathered to silver, each roof intact, and wish for the best.