Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  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 boy, Forrest, 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 with tarps over it that were tied to small cedars on each side. The tent was cosy but cramped. Everything had to be kept from the sides so rain wouldn’t seep in. Forrest was the only one who slept. 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, with sheets and a down sleeping bag for a comforter, and it was warm. But it was also April, so I remember it rained more often than not. I’d lie awake, waiting for the baby to cry. John lay awake, waiting for the tent walls to let in water. 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 sheepdog 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 of the Regional District building code; 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 ninety-degree 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 Forrest cried, I’d run to the tent to nurse him, wrapping us both in a blanket as I pulled my shirt aside.

  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 was made in a wheelbarrow and shovelled into Sonotube or a 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 tongue-and-groove boards nailed to a frame of small cedar logs. We had an old Coleman stove, and a large enamelled pan — for a sink, a salad bowl, a bathtub for Forrest. 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 sixteen-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 2x4s 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 holding the level and suggesting adjustments, the other nailing down the bottom plate.

  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 bookshelves out of pine? It never 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 had 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.2

  I had no spatial sense at all but nailed and lifted with blind trust, unable 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 watch sunsets?

  We built four nest boxes in the year leading up to my fiftieth birthday — nearly half a lifetime away from that kiss. Three were for us and one was for friends.

  I found the plans for the nest boxes in a gardening magazine. The plans were simple — 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.

  We were hoping for violet green swallows. Fifteen years ago, elderly friends gave our young children a nest box which we nailed to the top of a post holding some of the wire which surrounded my vegetable garden. For several years, swallows nested in that box. 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 would sit on the wire that conducted electricity into our house, while the female carried nesting materials through the opening. Then the male would bring in a few bits and pieces and spend 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 ardour breathtaking to those watching from the ground. I thought of an aria sung by Magda in Puccini’s opera La Rondine, its notes echoing the beauty of the swallows’ flight, their courtship, their residency in the shelter of our garden. When the swallows first appeared each year, I’d play the opera as an homage — Montserrat Caballé, 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 faecal material, bringing endless supplies of insects to open beaks through the opening. A little more than three weeks after we first heard the peeping of babies, the young fledged. The family still remained together, the parents teaching flight manoeuvres, the young practising over our garden, the entire family feeding on swarms of insects. Then, one day, they’d be gone.

  The original box eventually began to fall apar
t, about thirteen years after our friends brought it to our children and several years after they’d died. 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 and fitting roofing felt over the cedar shakes, hoping it would last one more season. In the meantime, I put another box up in another location, but no birds went near it. Perhaps the opening was too big or the wrong shape.

  And the time came when the swallows rejected the original box, too. I sought out plans for nest boxes specific to swallows because I missed their presence — the high, 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 Apeldoorn tulips opening their golden bowls to the sun.

  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.