I remember fifteen years ago a squatter friend telling Karen she was bourgeois to want a house. She said: “I want to rest. I want to retreat from this life. It’s too harsh. I want my son to have a roof.”
I can hear her saying it, clear as day, just as I can hear his scornful reply: “Cop-out.”
And Karen never got her house, least not when I still knew her.
Our Toronto apartment had a working fireplace. I remember one winter night I went to Alexandra Park and collected deadfall. It felt peaceful, a country thing, akin to our old life on the islands, gathering rosehips. I remember a passing man stopped, stared at me with pity and scorn, thought I was so poor I couldn’t afford twelve-ninety-eight for a fire-log, wrapped in plastic, printed in four toxic colours, from the corner store. Leave the deadfall to rot until the parks department guys came in their green trucks to clear it away. I was so offended. Yet it couldn’t have been the first time I suffered the disapproving stranger’s gaze: surely, before, I just didn’t notice, too scornful myself, a reverse contempt that suddenly, that snowy night, was no longer there to protect me. A fallen shield.
I’ll go home next week. But who is home?
They lost touch with Karen. Azalea was busy with the baby, with part-time classes, with starting a daycare centre in their village. Karen frightened them, each year poorer and more unkempt, skidding from restaurant work to welfare. But they didn’t say it, even to themselves: we are walking away from her, hand in hand. Not looking back.
Enzo fantasized he’d find Karen. A coming-home present for Azalea, so she’d stay. He knew real life didn’t work that way. And saw it then: he’d find Karen, give her the spare room, and still Azalea wouldn’t come. A shuddering laughing thought.
Thanksgiving morning.
Coasting in a borrowed kayak I found the cabin last night; my memory hadn’t failed me. It is still here, not fallen down. Someone has come, one year or another to make repairs. More importantly there’s kerosene in the lamps, stacked wood outside.
Someone has been here recently: strings of wild rosehips hang in the window, drying. Yet they’ve gone again: the ocean-facing windows are shuttered.
There’s a journal lying open on the table—I wonder whose it is? I’m writing in it but haven’t read it yet. If overly secretive, they wouldn’t have left it here lying open. I will read it tomorrow, a Thanksgiving present to myself.
I look out the window, see a witch’s moon, a crescent horned moon. My mother would have liked it, in the years before. It reminds me of the moons on that skirt her friend gave her. Stole it out of the household money Enzo gave her for groceries: fifteen dollars a week until there was enough; she didn’t dare tell him she wanted to buy a hundred-dollar skirt for my mother. She told me, though; I think I was twelve. She wasn’t working then; new motherhood had already burned through all her savings. Funny how I remember these details; surely these people have forgotten me entirely, and yet when I was a child they were so important.
I lived here when I was very small, when my mother was still happy. Used to watch her chop kindling while I strung rosehips for a useful game. Her friend took care of me when it was my mother’s turn in the kayak. What was her name? Oddly I remember her husband’s name but not hers.
A flowering bush.
Rhododendron?
My mother was happy here. Here she had a friend.
It is only here that the moon is my namesake. Writing helps.
In a boxcar in the decommissioned railway lands south of Richmond Street a woman sat wrapped in blankets. Reflexively she rummaged through her belongings for the little packet to see how much was left. Promised herself again that tomorrow she would find a detox program, check in.
She wore three layers of skirts, the bottom skirt a hippie treasure, an expensive item given her years before by a friend: midnight blue silk with stars and crescent moons printed in gold. The stars and moons were nearly washed away.
The woman never wore this skirt on the outside, but only as the bottom layer, next to her skin. She felt that as long as she never wore it on the outside, the street layer, she wouldn’t be murdered. Never reveal your true name.
What was the woman’s name, her friend who gave her the skirt? She didn’t remember.
A fat orange moon rising in the southern sky, through the open door of the boxcar.
Years ago, she lived in a place so different from this. They had a kayak, she and her friend. They took turns paddling the ocean waters, looking for whales.
Once she had a friend.
Once she had a son.
She remembered the son’s name.
My Mother’s Skeleton
MY DAUGHTER AND I SIT in the shade of wild apples, watching tiny garden snails. They are so small one feels a giant watching them, or perhaps as though one has microscopes for eyes. These tiny snails are lost in the vastness of a plank laid across the purple-stemmed cacophony of rhubarb.
I gently put the snails back under the rhubarb. “Snails need to be moist and slimy,” I tell my little daughter, “or they’ll dry out.” Rhubarb Hollow is our magic shady place beneath the wild apples. Sometimes I bring a notebook when we come out here to play even though I hardly ever write in longhand anymore, but on the first of June I am still too surprised by green’s return to sit in the dark computer room upstairs, even just for half an hour. I treasure this moment because next month or next year Annie won’t like this game anymore and because soon I must go inside and resume preparations for our party.
It is our annual Victoria Day weekend camping party. The hours blur by until, just after midnight, I sit with my sister Alice and our friend Sandra at a fire in a fieldstone pit, perhaps a hundred years old. We discuss the unknown purpose for this carefully made pit—a large bread oven perhaps, but why so far from the house? Or maybe it’s the foundations of a ruined grain silo. The hills are decorated with tents, some glowing like luminous mushrooms. The folks in the tents are late night readers or they’re afraid of the dark and think a flashlight left on will keep them safe from wild animals, which there indeed are, especially this far from the house. My black mutt Asteroid sits between us, keeping guard.
While other children went to church on Sundays we were marched to the art gallery, having required an equal amount of scrubbing as the churchgoers. We were expected to be very quiet, clean, and respectful, as if in the presence of the sublime. My father still has this religious hush when looking at large expensive art books, full of costly reproductions. I feel I know what it was to be raised religiously, yet art didn’t become my religion. That was something I was still in the process of discovering, or maybe rediscovering.
At twelve, Leni and I spent a summer on a farm near Sudbury. The land was rented by family friend Kerry McFarlane and his brothers, all working in the mines so they could buy land. Often that summer we built bonfires on huge outcroppings of shield rock, and sat around them half the night. We walked endlessly in woods and fields, canoed in rivers that seemed so miraculously different from Toronto as to participate in an alien landscape, one that would require a new language, a new metaphor, to divine. For instance, we saw moose.
My father sometimes mocks my choice to live in rural eastern Ontario, a place that after all isn’t important. Not the way Europe is allegedly important. It is true the towns are full of empty storefronts and video stores and submarine franchises, and lack four-hundred-year-old churches and art museums. At least our own: yet there is a four-hundred-year-old church and art museum nearby, the Anishinaabeg Teaching Rocks. One cannot visit them and not feel taught. And in spite of his mockery, my father comes and looks at my perennial gardens in disbelief each June. I never let him go home without greens or squash.