What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  In the far corner of the garden the Clematis armandii has put out its stunning white flowers from among its oval evergreen leaves. In the evening it is rich with scent. I have it mixed in with honeysuckle and the two balance each other beautifully, the clematis blooming in early spring and the honeysuckle in early summer.

  Outside my parent’s bedroom window was a honeysuckle. It climbed the front wall of the house and lay its long tendrils along the sill of the second-story window. The window was always open in summer as was the one at the back of the house where I slept. The upstairs was impossibly hot in summer and the spare breezes from the north played through from front to back, bringing with them the dense bloom of the honeysuckle’s scent. The flowers were the sprung mouths of a thousand thousand birds whose call was smell and smell alone. There were many nights I woke to them.

  The south wall of the house stared straight at the summer sun and the heat bathed the wall all day. Wasps lived there and in my bedroom. From early summer on they gathered in ever-increasing numbers so that by fall there were thousands of yellow jackets festooned on the walls in sagging drapes of living insects. When I went to bed I would brush their bodies off the covers onto the floor and crawl under the sheet to sleep in the drenched perfume of the honeysuckle vine. I remember the summer when I was sixteen and woke to a full moon. I lay on my back and stared down at the white sheet. It was alive with slow wasps. They had formed a second cover for me and their many wings fanning had cooled me as I slept. I lifted my arm and the wasps upon it rose with it. It was as if my hand were covered in rings with yellow stones polished smooth by the moon’s bright light. I let my arm fall gently back. I was not afraid. I had lived among the wasps for two summers and knew that if I did not disturb them they would not disturb me. What a strange joy that was to sleep among their deadly bodies and know there was no danger. I fell back to sleep, the drift of honeysuckle sweet in the night.

  Basho said once that in the end we are all the bamboo’s children. There are many bamboo thickets in and around the temples of Japan, just as there are many here on Vancouver Island. The bamboo is one of the most revered plants in Asia and stands with the pine, plum, willow, lotus, and chrysanthemum, all of which represent the deep virtues of lasting peace. The bamboo stands for endurance. We are what resembles us, in the garden as in our lives. The bamboo’s leaves stay green all year and its culms bend and move with the wind. They symbolize the strength of the compliant. They give way to the forces around them, but after the wind they lift back straight again. Having this kind of flexible strength is to have a bamboo mind.

  In Japan the most noble plants are the bamboo, pine, and plum. They are called the three friends. Bamboo symbolizes the Buddha, the emptiness at the center, the strength that conquers through yielding. How many times have I not yielded and how many times have I paid the price for such obduracy? Now I try to move as the bamboo moves. How many years it takes to learn the simplest things and how difficult my life has been because of my refusals. It’s called doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.

  A few years ago I spent some time in Kyoto and Nara in Japan. I wanted to visit the temples and gardens there. It was a humbling journey. The peace of the garden at Ryoan-ji will stay with me forever. I went very early in the morning to the Zen temple and was led to the garden by a kindly little woman from the Christian nunnery across the road. She meditated each morning in a bamboo grove at the temple. She was serene as all such monastics are. Her smile was gentle and without rancor or guile.

  I had an hour alone at Ryoan-ji, a gift of solitude I treasure yet. The garden’s simplicity of stone, moss, and raked sand is a great beauty. My own garden is not Ryoan-ji, but it is my garden and I have made small rooms in it for quiet and meditation. A garden can only be itself and the gardener must travel by instinct as well as knowledge to allow it to be so. A garden should never be an imitation, only a variation on the thousands of years of gardening. Imitations are always less. There is only one Ryoan-ji.

  Tonight Gemini perches on Orion’s sword tip and gazes across the sky at Libra and Virgo. There is a bit of glow from the city just a few miles down the highway and its slow weight dims what is above. The stars as they were before the city put them out. I remember writing that as I thought of my youth. The city’s glow hazes the night sky with artificial light, yet I can still see most of the larger stars, however faint, in their classical arrangements. Everywhere on this earth the stars have been a blessing to me. I used to know most of their names, but time has dimmed my knowledge and I need a star map now to identify many of them.

  I allow myself wonder as I always have. The pleasures and pain of childhood have never left me for long and I can still lose myself in the dark infinities. Would that I could make wondering a part of my daily life. I remember that moment at the treatment center when I said, I surrender, to the starry night. It was such a simple moment, yet one I’d yearned for all my life. I’d searched for such surrender in the jungles of Peru and Brazil, in the thunderstorms of Saskatchewan and Montana, in all and every place, from mountain peaks, deserts, and oceans, and I had never been able to let go of myself.

  My surrender was just a moment, perhaps a few seconds of looking up into the night sky, and then I walked on into the treatment center and started to live. It had everything to do with my addiction and, more, everything to do with my life. I changed that early morning and I knew I could never go back to who I’d been before. I have had visions and moments of transformation before, but this was unlike any other. Strange how the simplest things cannot be expressed. I had struggled against surrender all my life. It took sixty years of dying to finally be alive.

  I have begun my sixty-second year. As I do, I feel at peace for the first time in many, many years. Old days and old ways swim through me and though they can be a torment I ride the memories through, reminding myself I am here, not there. I try now to learn.

  PLANTS

  Arbutus

  – Arbutus menziesii (Pacific madrone)

  Bamboo

  – Bambusa sp.

  "

  – Chusquea breviglumis

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  – Hibanobambusa tranquillans “Shiroshima”

  "

  – Phyllostachys aureosulcata

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  – Phyllostachys nigra

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  – Pleioblastus fortunei

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  – Sasa veitchii

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  – Shibataea kumasasa

  Bulb iris – Iris reticulata

  California lilac – Ceanothus spp. “Puget Blue”

  Clematis – Clematis armandii

  Day lily – Barbara Mitchell – Hemerocallis

  "

  – Hyperion – "

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  – Jungle Princess – "

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  – Purple Down with Gold – "

  "

  – South Seas – "

  "

  – Sun on Red Cloud – "

  Foxglove – Digitalis

  Heather – Glenfiddich – Calluna vulgaris

  "

  – Hammondi Aureifolia – "

  "

  – Silberschmetze – Calluna vulgaris

  Honeysuckle – Lonicera periclymenum “Graham Thomas”

  Jack pine – Pinus banksiana

  Lodgepole pine – Pinus contorta

  Lotus – Fabaceae (Leguminosae)

  Paper birch – Betula papyrifera

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Bald eagle – Haliaeetus leucocephalus

  Black ground beetle – Pterostichus spp.

  Black widow spider – Latrodectus mactans

  Pill bug – Armadillidium vulgare

  Recluse spider – Loxosceles reclusa

  Red-winged blackbird – Agelaius phoeniceus

  Sow bug – Oniscus asellus

  Striped garter snake – Thamnophis spp.

  Tricolored blackbird – Agelaius tricolor


  Western diamondback rattlesnake – Crotalus atrox

  Wet wood termite – Zootermopsis angusticollis

  Wolf spider – Lycosidae spp.

  4.

  Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

  Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “SONNET 3”

  A MOTHER’S HAND still lives in me, the one that turned the soft soil on an April day and planted flowers, pushing at the season long before all fear of frost was past. Her urge to trouble just-warm ground is brought back to me and I can turn upon another phrase from Shakespeare (“Sonnet 30”), “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.”

  I was a child in my mother’s prime and I still can conjure her up on the porch of our wartime home in Nelson, legs sheathed in silk, a tartan skirt, a sweater, and a simple necklace at her throat. She leaned back with an enigmatic smile for the photographer who might have been my father, but is more likely her lover who gave her solace during those lost years. Where is that image now but in my mind? Has it gone to crisp and dust like her? And where are they who sang—mother, lover, father—and what of the three small boys who smile so roguishly in the same memory? Too many years ago to tell.

  While my father was away in Europe my mother took a lover. The years were long and my father’s return was farther away at times than her heart. My mother’s friends were all mothers of young children and like her, their husbands had gone away to fight. They sat around the kitchen table listening to the war news on the radio, talking and taking drinks of whiskey that one or another had bought with her monthly ration stamp or had as a gift from some soldier who had passed through and spent the night. I think my mother’s lover was Czechoslovakian. My mother called him our uncle, just as other women explained their lover’s presence to their children. Some of the children I knew had many uncles during the war.

  When my father returned from Europe, her lover disappeared. My mother told me later he wrote her one love letter. She answered it and he never wrote again. She told me she had loved him but had chosen my father instead because of us. She told me she learned again to love my father and that she had a few truly happy years with him. I realized when she told me that those years were the four between my brother’s and my father’s deaths.

  The early years in Nelson seemed happy ones for us boys as were the few years that followed. In the Okanagan after the war, the summers were golden. Our days were spent in the hills and at Kalamalka Lake, where we played and swam from eight in the morning until we returned home for dinner. My father gave us a tractor inner tube for the lake. We played with it for weeks until it was punctured, stolen, or lost.

  Swallows threaded the air above the lake. Their slender bodies made a calligraphy in the air as intricate as the brushstrokes of the old men who sat in the sun outside the Dart Coon Club across from the Goon Hong restaurant. Every few moments a swallow skimmed the still surface of the lake and drank, leaving a thin wake that spread outward. The water was covered with pollen from the trees in the mountains. It seethed on the surface. It was gold dust suspended in blue.

  The swallow’s young had left their mud nests under the railway trestles and bridges. Miniatures of their parents, they were wild in the freedom of the air. They were tiny dark jewels flung against the sky. Their mothers searched the air for insects, mosquitoes, flies, or the rare moth that had stumbled into the day and lost itself over the waters. When a swallow took a moth it carried it in its beak for a moment or two, the moth’s wings spread on either side of its beak so that it was if two creatures flew there, one within the other. When a breeze lifted from the south, the birds doubled upon themselves in pure pleasure.

  The pines and firs and spruce on the mountainside above the lake felt the first touch of the breeze, and their long branches swayed with the air that moved them. The branches’ sound was a soughing wheeze as millions of needles clicked against each other. The trees were ready to give off their pollen to the waiting cones, and yellow clouds drifted from the high branches in rivers of seed. They boiled slowly in the breeze and reached out like golden banners from the mountain’s side. The sky filled with pollen. It was like a living breath that rose from another kind of fire. As the breeze lifted, the pollen clouds stretched out across the lake and then began their long, slow falling into the waters below.

  We swam out from among the cattails at the edge of the lake. We were brown with summer. Dick straddled the huge inner tube while Johnny and I hung on and beat the water behind us with our thin legs. The tube floated farther and farther out into the lake as we played our tumbling game, each of us trying to climb up on the tube and each of us falling off in unison or alone. Our falling was mostly laughter. Nothing was as beautiful as our young bodies. We had lived our weeks in the sun until our skin had turned into bronze that shone in the slick of water.

  My brothers had red hair like my father, but mine was blond turned silver by the sun. In the water world we were one animal, our flesh one flesh, our bones one cage holding all our hearts. We fell, flew, and twined among ourselves like young otters. Dragonflies hovered near us amazed at this creature thrashing in a lake of aquamarine and turquoise and a blue so deep it was a darkness below us where trout and kokanee swam in our other world.

  The pollen from the mountains settled out of the sky. Suddenly tired, we climbed onto the tube’s back. We sat so the tube was balanced, each with our legs on the inside so that we faced each other. We said nothing because there was nothing to say. Our heads were down as we breathed slowly and deeply. After a few minutes, one of us would suddenly flip backward and the tube would turn over and throw the others into the lake. But not at that moment. As we rested there the pollen cloud settled upon us turning our skin from bronze to gold. Our hair glinted with a thousand points of light and our shoulders and backs became the carapaces of golden water beetles.

  In a moment or two we would return to the waters that surrounded us. High on the mountainsides, pollen drifted among the branches of the great trees. Swallows darted among cattails at the lake’s edge. Red-winged blackbirds screamed at a single crow who searched out their nests. A coyote, fat from eggs and nestlings, rested among the grasses on the slope above the lake’s edge. She watched us as we drifted among the amber waters. Her ear flicked once and a fly lifted and settled again on the black-tipped hairs. The coyote lowered her head to her paws and began her first sleep of the day.

  The afternoon stretched out under the sun. On the lake we took breath after breath and then we slid forward in unison into the tube’s center and down into the cool waters, pollen lifting away from our skin in flakes and scales. We rolled on our backs in the deep and stared at the opening above us, a circle of light we would swim toward when we could no longer hold our breath.

  Summer at the lake is in the far past, but it is spring here on the coast and April has come with a mix of storm, sun, wind, rain, and all the vagrancies of this tempestuous time of year. The buds on the Japanese maples are open and the first leaves push their way into the air in soft, furled points of the palest green. Their colors are as delicate as the fabric they are woven of. The young maple leaves are diaphanous, a trembling so fragile I think they cannot live.

  The leaves are the same as a butterfly’s wings when it first crawls from its hard carapace. The wings are crumpled and if you did not understand their fragility you would think them dead. Then the butterfly pumps blood into its wings and the frail sails expand into the colors we love to emulate in our fashions. Leaves are the same when first they lift into the air.

  I have just come into the house after gathering dandelion leaves to mix with our salad tonight. Washed, they rest in the colander, a tonic for spring. They will be a little bitter now. Only the very earliest of leaves are sweet, but a wisp of bitterness is good in spring. It clarifies the blood. A little vinegar and herbs, some extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, and the leaves of spring augmented by some early red-leafed lettu
ce. Was there such pleasure in spring before I quit drinking? Did I kneel in wonder in the garden then to pick dandelion greens, arugula, and herbs?

  What this healing has done is bring the past from obscurity into light. It appears in me in stunned cameos, in anecdotal fragments. Each memory seems colored like some mad child’s painting of spring. What is it in me that can make of a memory joy and of others regret and shame?

  The simple task of going to the garden for fresh salad makings has brought back old ways this morning. It’s hard to lift myself out of the past. I find I have to go back with a will toward remembering and so understand not only why I was alcoholic and sick but also who I am now that I am sober. I can remember looking around like a feral dog as I lifted a hidden bottle of vodka to my lips and drained it of thirteen ounces of alcohol. This garden was the garden of a drunk. Now I can sit on my haunches and pick single leaves from an early arugula plant and not have my arms and hands tremble with the effort.

  Everything is up and growing. Hostas push their hard tips through the damp earth. They are fierce spears much like Cadmus’s teeth in the fields of ancient Greece. I think of warriors rising from the dead to do battle with the turbulent air. Would they came to battle the ubiquitous slugs. I’ve spread benign bait around the hostas in anticipation of the annual scourge. The invasion has already started but hasn’t reached its peak yet. The baby slugs are hatched from their eggs where they have rested under stones, boards, logs, and leaves, and they slide, voracious, across the garden in search of midnight meals. Like the snails, they will eat triple and more of their weight in a night.