“How long will you stay?” I asked the woman from San Francisco. “Forever,” she said, quickly finishing her second glass of wine. “We can’t afford to leave.”
When I was passing the Acrocorinth on that beautiful morning, archaeologists were still excavating the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on its north slope. The excavations had been ongoing for decades, revealing more than a millennium of use, the sanctuary’s origins in Archaic times transformed by Roman and then Christian use but intact at its core. This suggests a numinous quality to the place itself. That morning, if I’d looked up, I might have seen fieldwork involving various buildings associated with the Sanctuary — banquet rooms, a temple, a theatral area cut into rock, a room with a lustral basin for ritual cleansing. Excavation reports I’ve read since show a site with a history of intense Demeter cult activity involving votive offerings of cereals and other foods on terracotta trays, as well as sacrifices. Young initiates to the cult left figures at the site — thousands of these have been found by archaeologists, both intact and broken.
Demeter is generally accepted to be the goddess of grain, of fecundity, as well as the deity who presides over the mystery cults, foremost being the Eleusinian mysteries (“mysteries” came from mystes, an ancient Greek word for initiate). The rituals observed and performed at Eleusis sprang from Demeter’s loss and recovery of her beloved daughter Persephone (also known as Kore) who had been abducted and taken by the god of the underworld. Inconsolable, Demeter neglected her responsibilities to ensure the success of crops. Eventually, she was reconciled to the return of her daughter for half the year and the Eleusinian mysteries celebrated this return in the form of elaborate springtime rituals. Feminine fertility, the earth’s fertility: these were entwined, each mirroring the other.
This is the story of young women — not exclusive to that time and place — taken or lured from their mothers (often gladly, willingly) by the masculine force, no longer protected from their own incipient sexuality. I was fascinated to learn that some of the votives found at the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Acrocorinth were ephedrismos figures. It seems such a natural thing for an initiate to bring to the goddess: emblems of childhood, some of them alluding to the moment when a young girl might find Eros on her shoulder, rather than the harmless boy with whom she thought she was playing. I recognize that moment in myself — a late bloomer, sitting by the sea with my book. Two men approaching me, an old man and his son, and I swear I never saw them coming. Wind filled with the fragrance of orange blossom and basil, lamb roasting in a nearby taverna . . . When Agamemnon took my hand, I knew what was inevitable. If the olive groves didn’t exist / I would have invented them.
Return flows calmly
Forward and you follow
Feigning indifference but pulling
The rope to a deserted myrtle cove
Not missing an olive tree
Oh sea
You wake and everything renews!
— Odysseas Elytis, Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems
I have a bottle of Cretan olive oil that tastes of those months so long ago. Drizzled over tomatoes and white cheese, it has the power to transport me for a moment to those trees, bathed in sea air, nets spread under them to catch their bitter fruit. Angela is there, Yianni nearby, filling the donkey’s panniers. Beautiful Eleni dreams of Demitreos while we finish our lunch.
Transported back to the grove where I lay with Agamemnon, a girl not ready for children herself, though eager for his body on mine, his calloused hands lingering a little too long on my buttocks. I renewed myself over and over in the clear sea and once saw a dolphin swimming so close I could touch it. Could have followed in its wake.
The young woman with Eros on her shoulder looks up to see the god, her cheek against his soft belly. I imagine her warm breath, the anticipation in her throat as he points to where they’re going. On that bus from Herakleion, I watched the hills and villages of the island from the window, “little churches grazing / grass before the air,”6 yearning to know their secret histories. I drew the goddesses, hoped for their strength, and all these years later, I still recall the smell of myrtle and the sight of olive trees rooted so deeply that it was unimaginable they would ever fall. If I close my eyes, I can still hear their leaves rustling.
Thuja plicata
Nest Boxes
We must first look for simplicity in houses with many rooms.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
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 Provincial Park. Huge and shaggy, they grew near the river where I went to look at spawning salmon each fall and returned 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 the Goldstream River. The park was densely green. 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; Townsend’s; MacGillivray’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. 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 latecomers. 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, first published in 1597, was the most often reprinted music book of its time;1 and First Nations 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.
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 me in the back of the station wagon and our black Labrador, Star, in the very back, drooling as she hung over the seat.
Moving was exciting, and also a little sad as I thought of all I would miss — the fields behind our home in Matsqui; fishing with string and bent pins at Herring Cove near Halifax; and the cemetery in Fairfield where I squeezed into crypts and communed with the dead. 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.
A truck eventually pulled up in th
e 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 had rented a house on a farm and my lifelong wish for a horse had been fulfilled), close to schools. There were also a few hopes — my mother wanted a dining room, a fireplace, and two bathrooms.
I have fond memories of a house we lived in when I was in grades one and two, a house with a pagoda roof and an attic room accessible by ladder, doors that opened with crystal knobs, a bark-burning stove in the kitchen, a greying cedar trellis in the leafy backyard, 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 1950s 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 in the front yard, a hawthorn, some pines in the backyard. A vegetable patch which my father would annually rototill and whack with a shovel, swearing at the clumps of hard clay that 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 and upon which his family depended. My parents argued in the night those last few months in Matsqui and finally we moved to Victoria to the house which didn’t fulfil 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, our father driving us each day from the motel. It was painful to be the gawky girl introduced to the class a month into the term.
All my life, I have wondered at the feeling I have in particular houses, usually ones in which no one lives 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 felt 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. 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 live there forever, finding in its stone walls and windows facing the north Atlantic a solace of long occupancy. People had inhabited 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, but the 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 among 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. On the shore, hermit crabs awkwardly drag 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 whiskered fish. Even octopi have their dens, the larger ones choosing underwater caves and the smaller ones, old bottles and moon snail 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 to 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 local streams.
“Home,” my 1974 Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English 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. The house itself and the circumstances did not characterize home. 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 came 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. In my essay, 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 in 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 expected to return to Ireland, where I’d been happy, once I’d earned enough money. To that end, I was working in a bookstore in the mornings. In the afternoons I’d cycle back to the tiny apartment on Fort Street where I was trying to find my writing voice at a desk under the window looking out onto Garry oaks. Then I met a poet in Victoria — he’d come from Vancouver to give a reading at the Open Space Arts Centre — 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 car seat to be moved into the tent wrapped in a swaddle of blankets. In the back of the car, among the bags of diapers and the week’s provisions, 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 southwest. We ordered piles of lumber (a sling of north species 2x4s. We culled the cedar out for decks.) and then arranged them 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.
Spirit Level, Plumb Bob
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, a carpenter’s level, and a brass plumb bob. There was so much measuring and levelling that it’s all a blur now, though I remember how hard we both worked, falling into our bed at night, exhausted, muscles we didn’t even know we had strained and aching.
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