Mnemonic (33 page)

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.

And then the lilies:
Lilium columbianum
in the grass at the edge of the path, many blooms to a stalk, smelling like mandarin oranges; the fawn lilies (
Erythronium oregonum
) above their dappled leaves in the shade of arbutus and shore pine at Francis Point and Quicks Bottom every Easter, late or early, so many of them I want to weep for their beauty; and once, driving back from Campbell River, we decided to walk at the Oyster River estuary and saw hundreds of
E. revolutum
, a deep pink form. On the slope where we stop to sit in sunlight, the eerie
Zygadenus venenosus
, or death camas, in the grass already drying in late May; a few
Fritillaria lanceolata
are hidden among them, speckled like birds' eggs. It looks like a perfect place for blue camas but I've never seen it here, though in Victoria, drifts of
Camassia quamash
cover the meadows of Beacon Hill Park, the roadsides in Metchosin. I remember driving to see Forrest at Lester Pearson College of the Pacific and stopping the car because the camas was in full bloom, shades from pale to deep blue, as common as grass. In the graveyard of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, fawn lilies covered the ground under the Garry oaks.

As a child, near Clover Point, I sat on rocks by the sea and idly ate grass stems, as a child does, and was surprised that some tasted of onion. I didn't know then about
Allium cernuum
, the nodding onion, but thought of it later, in Ireland, when I found wild garlic in the ditches under the hedges or other damp places, its flowers as lovely as any spring bulb. I used to pick it and keep it fresh in a glass of water in my island kitchen because I was so poor I often couldn't afford to buy food and relied on nettles, mussels, and the buckets of potatoes my neighbour brought from his garden. Boiled together and flavoured with snippings of wild garlic, they were my dinners for weeks at a time.

How to watch the ground at my feet, the footnotes, and walk at the same time? What have I missed, trying to protect my footing on the mountain trails? Clubmoss sprawling across the gravel, wild ginger, enchanter's nightshade on the shady path by the waterfall, rattlesnake plantain rising from its rosettes on a rubbly turn where the trail switchbacks to the summit, mimulus and mouse-eared chickweed, long strands of honeysuckle straggling through the ocean spray. What have I missed, waiting for the first cerise salmonberry blossom, as early as February 23 one year,
²
or brushing away debris to find the tiny prince's pines under the firs on the Hallowell loop trail? Whole lives have passed me by while I bend to uncover a trillium, a clump of
Viola adunca
in our orchard where the ground is like the carpet of wildflowers in Botticelli's
Primavera
, violets, self-heal, vetch, everlasting pea, and Columbia lilies in the soft grass. It is always spring and I am always young — though right now it is winter and I am newly fifty-five, dreaming that I am filling my hands with beauty.

Always spring; or always winter — the scent of evergreens, scarlet hips on the climbing roses, grouse feasting on small scabby crabapples, a long fluid line of elk running up the mountain when we walk on the high Malaspina trail.

Abies grandis

Walking on that high trail in the fall of 2008, we noticed a single grand fir growing behind a huge stump — this is in the area kept clear because of hydro pylons overhead — and decided it would make a wonderful Christmas tree. Perhaps two metres tall, it was full and symmetrical, its branches dense. Every week we walked up there with our dog Tiger and every week we'd check the beautiful tree, crush some needles in our hands for the balsam odour, and reassure ourselves that no one else would see the tree there hidden in huckleberry and salal. In truth, the area is a good place for tree hunters as small firs grow in the open under the hydro lines and free permits are available for those who want to cut their own Christmas trees. Most of these trees are
Pseudotsuga menziesii
, the Douglas fir, not true firs at all, but the source of fine timber on the coast. There are also some pines up under the hydro lines, and hemlocks. But our tree was well-concealed.

We always decorate our tree on the afternoon of the day before Christmas. Years ago this was a way to fill the day with practical activity when we had three small children eager for what would come the next morning. In those years we usually cut a tree on our property. We have more than three hectares and the expedition to find exactly the right tree could take an hour or two, John armed with the folding pruning saw and accompanied by helpers. They'd look for a tree growing very near another, reasoning that the thinning was good for our woods. The trees were often bare of branches on one side but that made it possible to place them against a wall where they'd take up less room and no one noticed that the back was a little sparse. I'd stay behind and heat cider on the stove, festive with slices of orange pierced with cloves, sticks of cinnamon broken into the pot. Out would come the boxes of ornaments stored in a dark cupboard for the rest of the year and we'd drink the cider while decorating the tree. Each year the delight, as old and new favourites emerged from the box — the Paddington bear, stained glass stars created by our friend June, each one more exquisite than the last, the paper lanterns sent to John's family from his grandmother in Suffolk their first year in Canada, the angels and Santas made at school and decorated with macaroni. Some years there would be family members to help: my parents often came; John's mother and father (separated and living in different cities so a bit of juggling was required to invite one and not the other); friends or relatives who were free that year to join us.

Even though our children have grown up and gone away, they still come home for the holiday and we still save the tree cutting and decorating for the afternoon of Christmas Eve. But it snowed the week before Christmas in 2008, heavy falls, and the roads iced up to the extent that our highways maintenance workers couldn't keep up with the clearing. It was the year Forrest successfully defended his PhD dissertation and treated himself to a train trip home on the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. Heavy snow in Ontario and the American Midwest made that both a disaster and an adventure, and he arrived two days later than anticipated, sleep-deprived, at night, on the bus, with us at the side of the frozen highway armed with flashlights to show the driver where to stop as every familiar post or driveway was covered by about a metre of snow. Our plan to drive up the mountain on Christmas Eve to cut the grand fir had to be quietly abandoned and a tree was cut close to the house, a wispy inelegant Douglas fir that I insisted was “lyrical” when it was laden with its lights and ornaments. Anyway, we said, the grand fir would be there next Christmas, even nicer for the wait.

Several days before Christmas Eve, 2009, John and Brendan went up for the tree — we'd kept an eye on it all the next year, watching it grow even more beautiful, and more hidden as the wiry huckleberry sheltered it — reasoning it was better to bring it home a little early in the event snow fell or something else happened to make it impossible. It could wait for a few days in the woodshed, its trunk in a bucket of water.