Mnemonic (13 page)

We moved into our unfinished house on the eve of John's thirty-fifth birthday: December 1982. The walls had been finished with plaster and painted, the windows were in place 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 truck and filled it with our bits and pieces of furniture from the house we had leased in North Vancouver. I went on ahead in the car with Forrest. I wasn't much help with the lifting because I was heading into the final month of the pregnancy that resulted in Brendan. 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 truck.

We hadn't counted on a windstorm. 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 power due to fallen trees on power lines. When I arrived at the house, I discovered that there was no power there, either — and the large picture window in the living room was leaking water around its edges.

Several people had commented that our house was the first they'd seen with the cedar shiplap siding applied horizontally. Most people used either bevelled siding or else they nailed the shiplap on vertically so that any water collecting in the channels would run to the 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? 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 over the battery-operated radio that ferry sailings from Horseshoe Bay were delayed, I waited for it to ring.

I remember how bleak it felt, 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. I waited for the sound of the truck. Many hours later, on the dark driveway, I stood in front of the sliding doors (which opened into space; the deck came later), holding the lamp and hoping they could determine the reason everything was black was that the power was out. I expected them to be hungry and tired, but knew I couldn't bake potatoes or do justice to a steak on the Coleman stove I'd brought in from outside. Forrest, twenty-one months old, was asleep in his temporary crib.

Gordon and John arrived cheerful and full of a dinner they'd treated themselves to in a Horseshoe Bay restaurant with a generator of its own. They 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. They were happy to eat bread and cheese by the fire, filling their wine glasses over and over again. But in our improvised bed that night, with my brother sleeping in a room nearby, John and I talked quietly about the storm, the leaking window, and how 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 gloomy and we were very far away from what we'd known and loved.

The next morning dawned brilliant and calm. The wind had died, the power was back on. Gordon and John got themselves organized to unload the truck and arrange our furniture in the bare rooms. 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 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. This was easily remedied.

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. 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 kitchen cabinets out of yellow cedar. We bought a sale lot of terracotta tiles for floors and counters — and the tiling was done in the summer, when I could take our young sons away for two weeks and let John tile day and night without distraction. 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.”
³
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, and a study for John and me, which also contained a sofa bed for houseguests. The entire second storey, a twenty by twenty square foot space 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 had intended to divide the space into two rooms, but once it was framed, we loved its views and airiness, and left it open.

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 rooms, reasoning that the boys could still share; we bought bunk beds for them. Once Angelica was old enough to need a room (she was sleeping with us while breastfeeding), she could move into the very small one between the larger one for the boys and their old room, which would become a playroom. The addition would have a flat roof that we could use as an upper deck, a small sunroom leading to it from our bedroom.

Sometimes the house grows and spreads
: that small addition lasted for a few years, and then it was clear we could use more room. 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 add 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 into a library to hold the bulk of our family's book collection.

By now John had 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 northeast 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 intense winter storms. Gradually, too, their fallen fronds soured the soil where I was trying to grow roses and there was too much shade for anything else to thrive.

It always feels a little wrong to cut down a healthy tree. We thought about it and talked about it. On the one hand, on the other. And then we 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 saw part of their demise. Even though the tree fallers went up and limbed the big trunks before cutting each in segments, 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
. It was the biggest tree. The log that came down so hard was a good size, and we arranged to have a portable mill and sawyer come to cut it into rough boards. We hoped to get a 16-foot length of 4x6 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 at the other end, a New Dawn rose spilled its soft pink flowers over the rough wood. The stump of the biggest cedar measured more than a metre across. The guys cut it level, using their huge saws as skilfully as cabinetmakers, so I could put a large planter on top.

The mill arrived, pulled by a pickup truck held together with wire. The sawyer 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 sawyer'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 sawyer lifting logs himself and imagined an emergency, the ambulance negotiating our rough driveway, paramedics removing his ripe body from the ground with a metal spike exposed at the back of his neck.

The pile of lumber grew — the beam, some 2x10s, 2x8s (these were full dimensions, as the boards were unplaned), 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 them. 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, 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.