Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  The mill arrived, pulled by a pickup truck held together with wire. The sawyer had been recommended by several sources — but always with the proviso not to get downwind of him. He had just been in hospital to have a steel rod inserted alongside his spine (can this really be possible?) so he’d reluctantly brought a helper, a staggering fellow missing several fingers. His job was to carry the enormous lengths of cedar log to the mill where they would be sliced into boards.

  The smell that day was not, as feared, of the sawyer’s odour (though it could easily be detected when I passed him coffee on their morning break — something extraordinary, like animal fat and mysterious unwashed corners of the body and clothing steeped in both wood and tobacco smoke), but of the spicy scent of fresh-sawn cedar. The boards were beautiful as they emerged from the end of the mill — pink and salmon, the grain an intricate story of age and weather. Several times I was horrified to see the sawyer lifting logs himself and imagined an emergency, the ambulance negotiating our rough driveway, paramedics removing his ripe body from the ground with a metal spike exposed at the back of his neck.

  The pile of lumber grew — the beam, some 2x10s, 2x8s (these were full dimensions, as the boards were unplaned), some planks which began as one dimension but then tapered as the logs narrowed. I could see them as benches or tables, balanced on stumps. I kept touching them. Their surfaces were damp, the inner mysteries of the wood released to light. On one chunk of wood, hardly a board, the grain formed an eye, elongated and ovoid — a god or a raven staring out. When I smelled my hands afterwards, the incense lingered, familiar and sibylline.

  I was inside, doing some task in the kitchen, when John came in with his fist closed over something. What, though? Too early in the year for tree frogs, too early for an unexpected gift of raspberries brought dewy from the garden on a July morning, their tang on the tongue a promise and memory of every summer.

  He opened his hand. Five seeds. His eyes shone. “They were inside an area of rot I was prodding at with a screwdriver in one of the big planks.”

  “Show me.”

  So we went outside to look at the board and its open hole, where the rot had been crumbled out with the screwdriver, a few cubes of diseased wood on the ground beside it. By a little bit of deduction, we realized the board had come from the inner section of the lower trunk. When we went to the remaining stump, we saw the corresponding section of rot right at the tree’s old heart. It looked like something called “brown cubical rot,” which forms a seam up the centre of the butt. It’s introduced by the mycelia of a fungus that grows on the trunk. When we first came here in 1980, the tree was young and stringy. I don’t remember a wound where rot could have begun, or a shelf of bright fungus — but given that we were building a house and raising three small children, there was a lot I didn’t notice in the course of my days. I do remember that, in later years, there was a cicatrice low on the trunk where the bark had healed. The tree was popular with squirrels.

  The seeds were obviously squash of some sort. Creamy, a little sticky with resin, a strange gift to show up in a clump of rotten wood at the heart of a tree. We spent time over coffee reconstructing the narrative of those seeds, remembering back to a particular summer, twenty-five years ago, when I’d staked out a vegetable plot, 25 feet by 25 feet, and tried to improve the rocky soil by digging in seaweed and anything else I could get my hands on: a bucket of chicken manure from neighbours, mulch from under the bigleaf maples, sandy run-off at the bottom of our steep driveway. Our two small sons played in the dirt that eventually was raked and seeded to what passes for a lawn, enhanced with wild moss. I planted pumpkins that summer, wanting the beauty of their orange globes to remind me of harvests. The plants had spread out with wild abandon, and a few of the pumpkins forgotten under salal beyond the boundary of the vegetable garden. What an opportunity for squirrels. And a few seeds tucked into a likely crevice, fresh and raw, in the trunk of a handy tree to provide a winter meal were forgotten, maybe after the tasty fungus had already been knocked off and eaten, forgotten as the tree healed around the small rent.

  I planted the seeds, and three germinated within a week. I transferred them to the vegetable garden once it was warm enough. I’d love to say that they thrived and produced a huge crop of pumpkins (for they were in fact pumpkin seeds), a testament to my green thumb and the seeds’ inherent fertility. The truth is, they didn’t do much of anything. They grew a little, sent out tendrils to hold fast to the stems of kale. A few blossoms, a few tiny green pumpkins which never matured.

  I was disappointed — but too busy with jam-making and canning to linger too long on this failure. I decided that the true magic was in the finding. That hidden in the heart of a tree was unexpected treasure, a mnemonic to take us back to our beginning days on this property, when our garden grew beyond us, when we carved the thick skin of pumpkins into faces on the night of All Hallows, lit from within by a short length of candle, to stay off the spirits that crossed the boundary between the living and the dead.

  How the time passes quickly so that a sapling — I just looked out to see it — leaves a trunk almost a metre across when felled, its years, the weather contained in a narrative of rings. A seed waited for twenty-five years inside that tree to have its chance to become a pumpkin, however small and green the result, and the children who crouched under the limbs to while away a hot summer day have become scholars and lovers, their lives elsewhere except for a few days a year when they walk the old paths, sit by the fire that continues to draw us to it each morning, a fire started with split shakes of the original roof, now silver with age. How time passes, how everything we knew is stored in our own bodies — the dull ache of sleepless nights, the sharp yearning for love, the sorrow of these empty rooms once filled with children laughing, fighting; their books, their toys, their filthy socks, and tiny overalls. One boy still sits under the original nest box (though I know it’s not possible, he lives in Ottawa) with his notebook, trying to sketch the swallow nestling that hangs out the opening, saying, Don’t fall out, Parva! Be careful. And I stand out among the trees, under stars, while the moon thins and fattens, turns soft gold in autumn, hangs from the night’s velvet in February, draws me out on summer evenings to drink a glass of wine while owls fill the darkness with that question: Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all? It was always me and I never once minded.

  I’ve been watching robins this year. One pair built its nest on the downspout of our print shop, a short distance from the house. From the kitchen or the porch, we could see the progress of the nest and then the familiar sight of the female perched on it. There were robins in the same place last year and that couple raised two broods. I love peering out, with binoculars for the best view, to see the patient bird incubating her eggs, rising to perch on the side of the nest to turn the eggs, then taking a short break to find a meal for herself while her mate stays near to protect the nest. It takes about two weeks for the eggs to hatch, and then the mother robin never seems to rest, darting out and back to bring worms and insects to the increasingly active brood.

  Sometimes all I can see are three beaks open to the air. And then three gangly young birds carousing in the small space and calling for more food. It only takes two weeks for them to grow to adolescence and leave the nest, each perched on its woven precipice and then soaring out into the world.

  Once we were lucky enough to see the last of the clutch leave, a sweet moment as the bird leaned forward eagerly while a whole gaggle of robins called and flapped from a nearby cedar. Finally it just . . . flew. Imagine just knowing how! Just pushing off from the nest and flying, something many of us dream of doing. I’ve read that the male robins continue to feed the offspring for two weeks after they’ve left the nest and then they’re on their own. Depending on the time of the season, the female will be nesting again, prepared for the hours of waiting for her eggs to hatch; then willing to feed the rapidly growing chicks for the two weeks it takes them to mature.

  This year, the
downspout couple raised one family and then either they disappeared or else they are the same birds who built on the other side of the house, on an elbow of wisteria just outside my study window. I watched this nest from my desk, looking up from my work as I’d hear a rustle — the mother returning with food for the three young. After the babies finally left, the mother spent some time rejuvenating the nest; she brought fresh moss, fresh grass; and I thought how wise she was to have chosen the site in the first place. The wisteria leaves make a shady canopy over the southwest facing nest. But she didn’t stay, perhaps deterred by John who was building new steps for a reconstructed sundeck nearby. (He’d put off this project until the young had flown.)

  Reading about robin mortality rates, I was surprised to find out that only 25 percent of robins survive until early November of their first year. Life expectancy is two years. The hard work of the industrious parents, raising up to three clutches a season, is not well-rewarded. Yet robins seem ubiquitous. Driving along the highway in spring, one sees so many of them at the roadside, flying up in challenge as the car approaches. (This rash bravado might be the very thing that limits their survival rates, or at least for those 25 percent who survive past November. In spring and early summer, I often see dead robins on the side of the highway, though the ravens and vultures make short work of the carcasses.)

  And there are predators. One night, before the wisteria family had flown, we were awakened by two barred owls very near the house. I know they are capable of taking robin eggs and chicks. For about two hours they chorused back and forth to each other, their eight-note call — Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all? — with its drawn-out final quavery note becoming shorter, more urgent: four notes. And finally just a long descending throb, right by our bedroom window. I wondered if the parent owls were perhaps teaching their offspring to hunt, and if nesting birds near our house might be the prey.

  So now it’s back to the downspout and the mother is on that nest as I write. I loved watching her prepare the nest back in April. There had been one there in the past and I know that sometimes robins simply build on top of an old one but that earlier nest had fallen, a perfect construction of woven twigs and moss, held together with mud, and then lined with grass. The new nest took a few days to build and, at the end, the bird crouched in it and plumped out her body, turning as she did so. This formed a cup to the dimensions of her body. She carried wisps of grass to it and then I think she laid her eggs, one a day for three days.

  This time around — it’s early July — she simply reoccupied the nest that she had used in April, bringing a little fresh grass for her new family. If we get too near, she glides out and is back again before we know it. I love to hear her mate singing morning, noon, and night, the long rising and falling notes clear and bright.

  Of course by now you will know that I am talking about my own family — three children raised in our homemade house, nurtured and loved, and coaxed easily from the nest with every hope for their long survival. Oh, and their return! “So there is also an alas in this song of tenderness. If we return to the old home as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.”4

  Think of those chicks crowded in that bowl of moss and mud, jostling and agitating for the food from their mother’s beak. That first glide from the nest into thin air, the vast blue yonder, must’ve been heaven. Yet for days after, I see the mottled immature robins perched in the cedars near our house, uncertain about the future, perhaps, and reluctant to leave the actual palace on its elbow of wisteria or downspout.

  This spring we cleaned out the nest boxes again, propping a ladder against their respective trees — an arbutus, a fir, and a small cedar cut down a few years ago, limbed, and set in place as a garden post. This last location was where we’d nailed the first box, the one that welcomed swallows and where Forrest called to Parva on summer days long ago. Each box contained remnants of a nest, a small cup of dried grass and moss and a certain amount of hair from our golden retriever.

  At least one chestnut-backed chickadee couple nested in one of the boxes last year. We saw them checking it out, darting in and out excitedly; and then one of the pair sat on the clothesline while the other took in threads of moss or lichen plucked from branches of ocean spray.

  Maybe the other nests were older. Maybe I never noticed. The years pass and the summers enter the rich tapestry of memory so that we ask, When did we plant the ornamental cherry tree? Or the fig tree, laden with green fruit as I write, or when did we swim by moonlight, or cook sausages in a grove of trees on White Pine Island among flowering yarrow and sweet golden grass? Which was the last year we all lived in this house, dogs eager for the children to run with them or take them up the mountain to enter the cool creeks in early morning while spiderwebs jewelled with dew hung across the water?

  I am still hoping for the swallows to return, though it’s too late this year. We saw them for a few brief days in spring, flying ecstatic over our roof and garden. And we know they nest in multitudes down by the lake, where a fervent birder has erected dozens of houses, painted bright red, in the trees overlooking the water. Later, they appeared at our place again — the parents, perhaps, taking the young on their maiden flight.

  This year, a chickadee couple seemed to be building a nest in the box on the arbutus tree but something must have frightened them — or else they found a location more to their choosing. There has been a pair around this summer, though, appearing suddenly in clematis or perched briefly on a wire; maybe it’s the same couple, raising their brood in a tree cavity somewhere in the vicinity of the house. We hoped they’d choose one of our boxes to nest in but all we can do is make sure each is ready, the cedar sides weathered to silver, each roof intact, and wish for the best.

  Platanus orientalis

  Raven Libretto

  Xerxes, who chose this way, found here a plane-tree so beautiful, that he presented it with golden ornaments, and put it under the care of one of his Immortals.

  — Herodotus, The Histories1

  I was driving down the Coast to do some shopping, and the car radio was on. It was tuned to the CBC’s Richardson’s Roundup. Bill Richardson introduced a piece of music briefly, saying its performer was the American countertenor David Daniels. I’d heard of countertenors, I think, but had confused them with castrati. Certain pop singers used a falsetto voice and I wondered if that was similar. Anyway, nothing — knowledge or ignorance — could have prepared me for what came next. One minute I was driving on an empty highway and the next I was sitting in the car by Homesite Creek, crying into my hands, ravens assembled in the trees above me.

  Bill had chosen to play “Ombra mai fu” from David Daniels’s Handel Operatic Arias, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, an ensemble I have since grown to love for the clean pared-back austerity of their sound. But that day I only knew I was hearing a voice and an aria that pierced right to my heart. I knew so little about music, only a kind of blind joy when hearing Bach, sorrow when listening to a Górecki symphony, and wistful nostalgia as the Chieftains played their jigs and laments. But this aria reached down deep, bringing forth those tears, and something else: a desire to know more about singers.

  I ordered the CD and listened to it over and over. I loved every piece on it. “Ombra mai fu”,2 of course — that love song to a plane tree. In my travels through Europe, I’d grown accustomed to squares in the middle of towns, a single plane tree, or perhaps several, providing leafy shade on hot afternoons. Often a few benches were arranged underneath the trees and invariably someone sat with a bag of shopping at his or her feet, face lifted to the cool leaves. In Greece, old men played backgammon on tables pushed as far into the shade as possible, glasses of ouzo at hand. We stayed several times on the Left Bank in Paris and walked through one such square on our way to shop on the Rue Moufftard. Tables from one little bistro were set with gay cloth and crockery under two big plane trees. I thought of those trees
as I listened to the aria.

  ombra mai fu

  di vegetabile

  cara ed amabile

  soave Plù

  (Never was the shade

  Of a plant

  More dear and lovable,

  Or more soothing.)3

  And the others: “Cara sposa, amante cara, / dove sei” . . . (“My love, my dear betrothed, / where art thou?”) The riveting “Dall’ondoso periglio / salvo mi porta al lido” (“From the peril of the waves / I have been brought safely to the shore”). I bought some of the operas from which the arias had been extracted: Serse, Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare in Egitto. A dear friend with great musical knowledge watched approvingly and sent recordings of other countertenors or entire operas in which I’d expressed interest. Handel and Purcell, music of all sorts sung by Daniel Taylor, Michael Chance, the Deller Consort, and much more: Dowland lute songs, Bach cantatas, Benjamin Britten’s folk song arrangements for low voice (I was learning how ravishing the minor chords can be).

  It was thrilling to listen to this music in my quiet house, the volume turned up, the voices filling the space between floor and ceiling, mind and heart. I was nearly fifty years old, and I’d somehow always imagined that opera really meant sopranos. I’d only ever really heard the high voices before — Kiri Te Kanawa, Maria Callas, Renée Fleming. Soprano voices have a way of claiming the space, soaring to those high Cs and beyond, bright and brilliant as filigree. I confess I am exaggerating a little and in any case my ear was so green. So yes, I’d heard tenors, baritones, the low melodic alto voice of Kathleen Ferrier; and when attending operas, I’d enjoyed the duets between the soprano and the lower male voice leads. But here, in my sunlit house, I was listening to something that interested me even more: countertenors and mezzo-sopranos. The range was warm and dense with possibility.