Mnemonic (12 page)

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.

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 apart, 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.