Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  Farther afield, the subdivisions that cover Broadmead meadows near Victoria or the fields where I rode my horse along West Saanich Road in the years of my girlhood hang across my vision like unwelcome curtains. I can just see through them, a trick of the eye, to the dry grass where I ate my lunch while my horse waited, the smell of him still in my nostrils as I write this. In youth, we rolled our eyes as the old people we knew (some of them younger than we are now) talked about their earlier years and lamented the changes everywhere they looked. Where did time go, they asked, and our imaginations were too green to even think that we might one day remember everything we hardly noticed as we went about our lives.

  And yet. And yet. I never expected to feel such physical loss as when I stand in the centre of my own still world and remember the past, which is almost always a landscape. Which is almost always what happened in a landscape. Camping trips with my brothers at Bamberton Beach, Englishman River, the shores of lakes where our father fished for our breakfast in his old jackets and our mother laid our Melmac plates on a picnic table and poured herself a cup of coffee from a battered aluminum percolator with a glass knob on top. Always there were trees which were gateposts to another world. The ponderosa pines I watched for in the Fraser Canyon, the spreading oaks on Quadra Street as I drove to my university classes or outside the window of the apartment I lived in on Fort Street, newly returned from a year in Ireland and waiting for the rest of my life to begin. Lying in my bed at night while car headlights illuminated the walls briefly, I’d dream my way back to Connemara, hearing the rasp of tough willow against the window of my cottage.

  A section of Irish hedgerow

  I’d cross over from Inishturbot by curragh to Eyrephort Strand and then walk up to the Sky Road where I might get a ride to Clifden if I was lucky. If not, I walked the eleven kilometres. Sometimes I borrowed a bicycle from the farmer whose cows grazed in the fields that ended at the sea. Either way, the road that led up to the Sky Road was narrow, a leafy tunnel through fuchsia, hawthorn, branches of black sloes hanging heavy from their stems, brambles, and gorse blooming in almost every month. I never knew all the birds that sang, or didn’t, in the dense lattice of twigs and greenery but sometimes I’d see a nest with a blue tit hovering, or I’d hear the flute notes of a blackbird. Spiders, butterflies, bees humming in the primroses of early summer, and once I glimpsed a badger emerging from a gap where the hedge met a stone wall. Cattle beyond the hedgerow grazed in sour fields while soft rain slicked their hides.

  There weren’t many large trees. Plantings of pines and yew near the farmyard of the bachelor who gave me rides a few times and who was handsome as sin but also rumoured to be dangerous. A few alders in the damp area where a seasonal stream came off the hills, the stunted willow by my bedroom window. I missed the dense forests of my native British Columbia raincoast during that year, though now I sometimes dream of walking up through that tunnel, fresh in spring or dust-worn in August, listening for birds, plucking a stem of fuchsia to tuck into my hat. Thirty-five years have passed, and still I remember white campion, dead-nettle, meadowsweet, and bryony lacing up into the sallies, and how I once dug up a small primrose to take back to my cottage where it bloomed in a blue teacup on the windowsill.

  Always trees, with their leafy shade on a summer afternoon or fringes of needles to filter light and provide the scent of balsam to carry on my hands. They stand for hundreds of years on rocky outcrops, reaching deep into soil to anchor them until eternity or until a great unpredictable wind topples them and forever after is remembered as the wind that brought down the big fir or the hemlock by the bend in the driveway. (Do you remember?) Birds collect in their steadfast branches, climb their trunks (See the red-breasted nuthatch as I write this, racing up that cedar?), and the smaller ones nest in the holes left by bigger ones drilling for insects and sap. A quick whirl of chickadees comes to buzz and dart as I fill their feeder. I hold my hand out for a few moments only and one of them perches on my index finger, the lightest possible weight, pecking sunflower seeds from my palm. I know I am too impatient to wait much longer and the one brave chickadee doesn’t return but scolds and agitates with the rest of them. Never mind. When I am old, I will stand for hours and let them choose from the seeds I carry. I’ll stand so still they’ll think I’m rooted.

  Standing Dead

  How curious it would be to die and then remain standing for another century or two. To enjoy “dead verticality.” If humans could do it we would hear news like, “Henry David Thoreau finally toppled over.”

  — Gary Snyder, “Ancient Forests of the Far West” in The Practice of the Wild

  There are many holes in the standing dead cedar on the curve of our driveway near the top. I’ve always wondered which birds nest there — red-breasted sapsuckers? Chestnut-backed chickadees? It’s too far from the house for me to keep an eye on the comings and goings of the winged couples in spring, but I expect such perfect real estate is in high demand. Some birds no doubt return year after year. Not wanting to disturb their privacy, I instead imagine reaching into one of the high cavities and touching eggs among the hair-and-moss nests within the crumbling heartwood.

  For years I loved to see another huge dead cedar near my home, part of a route we walked regularly with our wonderful dog Lily. I thought of all that tree had seen over the centuries on its slope above Sakinaw Lake. The water itself, alive with loons and trout. Canoes of the First Nations people, some of the paddlers painting messages on a tiny rocky island not far away. House-building by the people who are now our neighbours, then gardens blossoming in the mild air. Fireworks in winter. It was a perfect tree for a bear to stretch to, to sharpen its claws on the silver wood. For ants to enter, and colonize. For birds to perch on and nest in, for eagles to watch for merganser chicks and snap them up, one by one, on early summer mornings.

  One winter afternoon, thirteen years ago, not long after a storm, we were walking the trail towards the dead tree when Lily stopped in her tracks, her ears alert. We expected to see an animal ahead but instead, the big tree lay across the trail. It had fallen in the storm, too far from our house to hear the crash. (If a tree falls and no one is listening . . . ?) Horizontal, it came up to my chest, heart-high, and the bush adjacent to the trail was very dense and impenetrable. We certainly could have climbed, or detoured, but what about Lily, who was twelve and very arthritic, her hips creaky?

  Finding long sturdy pieces of bark that had come away from the ancient trunk, we made a ramp for her and helped her climb to the top; then I held her while John scrambled to the other side and arranged the bark for her descent. It took some time. She wasn’t happy about having to walk the plank, particularly as her eyes were cloudy with cataracts, and it was another moment — there are many when one is in the presence of an aging animal — when I realized that animals apprehend and navigate the world very differently from us. In youth this is true, and in age.

  We didn’t walk that trail again until the fallen tree had been cut into lengths by the neighbour who owned that piece of land, some lengths ending up milled into lumber, for the heart was clean and usable. The smell beside the area where the portable mill had been was heady — incense, spice, richly arboreal.

  Not long after the tree toppled — we called it the fallen warrior — a dear friend died. He was a writer and his legacy is a shelf of books in my study. I look at them. “Dead verticality” or “dead, reclining,” depending on how I arrange the volumes on my pine shelves. His name, Charles Lillard, on the thin spines, his dates bracketed in my memory.

  And within a year, Lily died too. She has no literary legacy, nor offspring (she was spayed when we brought her home), no “dead verticality.” But I do keep the bone of her pelvis on my desk. This is not as macabre as it sounds (or maybe it is). We had nowhere to dig a deep enough grave for her body so we dug out salal from beneath a big cedar on rough ground and laid her body among the roots and moss. We covered her with quantities of cedar boughs, moss, and slabs of bark w
e’d found near the tree. After two years, I reached into the area and pulled out a section of her skeleton which proved to be her pelvic girdle. It was quite clean but I put it into a bucket of water with a bit of bleach and let it sit for a week, then dried and aired it before bringing it into my study. I keep the long wires from the various accessories plugged into my computer – the mouse, the wire providing my Internet connection, the printer — coiled and nested in the open area near where her sacrum had gathered the fused bones of her vertebrae.

  As a girl, I’d fractured my own pelvis when my horse fell on me after rearing on a hill in wind. In Lily’s beautiful ivory bones, I see my connection to her, to my children (whom she loved and guarded like a mother), to the threads of life and death that hang close enough in our lives to touch at any moment.

  As for Charles, I have his poems.

  The stars sang in the twilit garden;

  morning was moonlight,

  raspberries, wine clear as the wind and cold.1

  And all along the length of that remembered tree, sawdust fell from the cavities where birds had nested in springs older than memory, deeper than love.

  Go back, I tell myself. Go farther back, to the origins of the bike that took you to the very edges of the known world of Fairfield, along Dallas Road where the missionary sat among his spiders and plundered artefacts, past Clover Point. Dream your way back to the time when your brother came up from the swamp with your rocking horse over his shoulder, a beloved toy that had disappeared from the porch a year or two earlier, and which he found while out hunting frogs with his friends. It could not be restored, but you never forgot its return across the fields, even as you were yearning for something else to ride.

  Juglans spp.

  It was the autumn I was five years old and we lived in Matsqui, near the radar base where my father worked. Ten identical houses in a row provided housing for the families of the men at the base. There was a narrow boulevard running in front of the houses and a grassed slope led up to the main road. Small trees were planted where the grass met the boulevard.

  A neighbour’s child, a year older than me, had received a bicycle for her birthday that fall. There was something so bold about the way that girl pedalled her bike back and forth along the boulevard and I was so jealous I wouldn’t come out to play with her and the other children of the row. In later years, my parents confessed they hadn’t intended to give me a bike of my own that Christmas, but there didn’t seem to be any other solution to my anguish. This surprises me now, because it would never have occurred to me that my actions would ever warrant such results.

  But there was a bike, a small blue bicycle, under the tree that Christmas, and I was ecstatic. I didn’t know how to ride it. If I hadn’t spent the weeks leading up to the holiday in my bedroom, green with envy, I’m sure the child next door would have taught me to ride her bicycle.

  I don’t know what gave me the notion that I should take my new bike to the top of the grassy slope, once I’d learned how to balance myself briefly on the seat, toes to the ground. Maybe other children were present and suggested it, but in my memory, I was alone on that rise — which was probably very minimal in any case (I’ve revisited hills that I remember as treacherous in my childhood and realized that their mild incline was such that I didn’t even have to shift gears to drive up them). After balancing for a few moments at the top — in triumph — I let myself go and coasted down the hill.

  It was thrilling in the extreme — the speed, the freedom of rushing through cold air, the way I felt as bold as that neighbour girl a month or so earlier. But then I realized I would have to stop or else I’d crash into the house on the opposite side of the boulevard. In panic, I steered my new treasure into a tree at the bottom of the slope and collapsed as the front wheel hit the trunk hard enough to bend the bike frame slightly.

  I may have hurt myself — I don’t remember this — and I know that my father was not happy to have to straighten the frame of my new bike in his workshop so soon after its arrival into my life, but after all these years, I still remember the smell of the bruised bark of that tree. Walnuts! Somehow it had never occurred to me that nuts grew on trees, and that the young trees outside our house might be that very kind. On my hands and scraped legs, I crouched by the tree and pressed my face to the bark. Yes, walnuts.

  We didn’t have nuts very often, but at Christmas a bowl of them sat on our coffee table with a nutcracker and a metal pick to extract every morsel from the shells. Brazil nuts, filberts, almonds, pecans in their shiny deep red shells, and the walnuts, my favourites. Such luxury to sit on the rug and eat nut after nut while watching Looney Tunes on our television while the Christmas tree glittered in its corner, dressed in tinsel and lights.

  In later years, I walked along Victoria’s tree-lined streets, eating fruit from the ornamental plum and cherry trees. Most of this fruit was sour, but the notion that a tree could provide bounty was magic to me. And in some of the backyards of the many houses we lived in over the years, there were apple trees — fruit following the sweet blossoms as regular as clockwork every year. Such a gracious gift to a child, boughs drooping with apples or small hard plums or best of all, the possibility of walnuts engendered by bruised bark on Christmas Day in 1960.

  Acer macrophyllum

  In fall, the samaras whirl to the ground: time to be grateful for fire, the woodshed neatly stacked with fir and bigleaf maple. Bringing in logs, I sometimes see areas of spalting within the chunks of maple I carry. This is a bacteria that causes veining in the wood, a kind of scribbling, like pen lines on paper. The bacteria can be introduced to felled maple, and cultured or managed for a time, to create beautiful patterns which woodworkers value. We have a cutting board in our kitchen made by a local craftsman, featuring strips of both spalted and clear-grained maple. When I clean and oil the board, I marvel at the intricate text in the wood we use to cut our bread. Like those beetles that wrote obituaries to the ponderosa pines near Kamloops, something lively is at work to leave its story intact for the future to read as loaves are sliced, fish boned or trimmed of their fins.

  There are many maples in our woods, some of them mossy with age . . . The bigleaf maple is one of the glories of these western forests. Their honeyed flowers in spring are loud with bees and the fallen ones are dense with small flies. In summer they provide canopies that keep temperatures a little more moderate than surrounding areas. The edges of Sakinaw Lake Road are thick with their humus in fall, habitat for the rough-skinned newts we’ve found in the decaying leaves. And in winter we see the beauty of their bare architecture, the revelation that their trunks and branches host fern colonies and even smaller trees growing from deep mossy pockets established in clefts and crotches.

  A whole area of study, called canopy biology, concentrates on the ecology of these arboreal communities of epiphytes, hemiepiphytes, climbers, insects, amphibians, etc. Remembering how we climbed maples as children, spread ourselves along their mossy boughs, I wonder if I could climb again to enter that upper realm, the flowers just opening and yellow-rumped warblers trilling among them.

  The past is almost always a landscape — what happened in groves of trees, those suede hills trembling with aspens on the road out of Lillooet or north of Merritt, the ancient cedars fertilized with centuries of salmon carcasses at Goldstream Park. I remember that love song inspired by a plane tree as Xerxes led his army to Greece and the silvery olive trees as I sat by the window of a bus hurtling across Crete, wondering at the next chapter of my life. Or earlier, the scent of walnuts, the beautiful shape of Garry oaks in winter, the ones on the hill by the Protestant Orphanage in Victoria settling into darkness like a herd of elk, the night and everything else tangled in their antlers. Their afterimage stays with me. Some nights, it’s the last thing I see before sleep.

  The world changes, and never changes. In the time that is always mine, I walk home from school down Haliburton, across Pat Bay Highway, along Elk Lake Drive where slowly a field becomes a
hotel, a few houses disappear, and the trees I knew as a girl recede into the hazy line that is no longer a horizon but a dream. Fences articulate such small space! The area that was once the Yale estate, known as Colquitz Farm, has long since been subdivided. Still, a few old trees, a deodar cedar and a tulip tree, remember the old days on their corner where traffic races past, not far from a storefront built by grandsons of Hannah and Richard Maynard. Those trees remember the children and grandchildren of Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor James Murray Yale on their way to the schoolhouse at Royal Oak, and Mr. Kinnaird going to choir practice at the Wilkinson Road Methodist Church. The imprint of history is everywhere I look, though I am late in realizing it. The Quick farmhouse on its hill above Wilkinson Road, daffodils running down to the road each March, where cattle once grazed and rested — so often I rode my horse along that road and never thought about the people who had cleared the land and planted the lilacs and other ornamentals. Who sold milk to the community and who campaigned to have the municipal and community halls built in their neighbourhood and who were active in both organizations. Later I walked down into Quicks Bottom, now a wildlife sanctuary behind the original farm, where blackbirds whistled in the canary grass and blue camas covered the ground under Garry oaks and black hawthorns. I bent to look at a bee in an open fawn lily, suddenly seeing low mottled leaves everywhere in the filtered light. A rabbit watched, bemused, from the other side of the fence, and a small snake dozed in a pocket of sunlight.

  Underplantings

  Through the allée on the Klein Lake trail, where masses of Viola sempervirens bloom in early to late March, clusters of the heart-shaped leaves cradling the sweet yellow violets. Where thick mats of Linnaea borealis, favourite of its Swedish namesake (and father of the binomial system of classification), bloom in May and June, the shady path a distillation of the perfume rising from each nodding twinned flower. “Ahh,” we say, falling to our hands and knees to plunge our faces into the tiny groves, “just like almond extract!” Where Trientalis latifolia, the western starflowers, are carried aloft on their thin stems to form airy constellations, anchored in earth by little potatoes.