by Plum Johnson
Yes, I think to myself, I need to find you. Please reach back. Pelmo gives me a big hug and tells me to take good care of Sambo. I can tell she’s worried. She bends down to stroke him behind his ears.
“I come back … you be here?” she asks him. “Yes?”
On the kitchen table there’s a pile of Mum’s mail for me to sort through. The largest stack is from charities. Mum contributed to over thirty of them on a regular basis. She and Dad both followed the disciplined rule of donating ten percent of their income, and Mum had many favourites in addition to her church—usually having to do with teenagers in distress or homeless children around the world.
I can picture Mum sitting here each year before Christmas, trying to decide how best to apportion her money. I sit down with more coffee and begin to write “Deceased” across all the envelopes, then “Return to sender.”
Dad listed all his charitable giving in his account ledgers; it came off the top of his income, before anything else. Even when Dad was in his thirties and struggling to support five children, he regularly sent monthly cheques to both his widowed sister in England and his widowed sister-in-law in Portugal—five pounds each. Later, when he could afford it, he raised this to twenty-five pounds. Dad was frugal, but he was generous with what he had.
I look at a photograph of Mum and Dad, taken just before we moved into this house. They’d been born during the Great War, lived through the Great Depression, served in World War II, carved a life for themselves in the Far East, given birth to three of their five children, and were relocating to Canada. They look impossibly young to have done all this by their mid-thirties, the same age my children are now.
It’s incredible to think that with only one income they could have afforded this house. Dad paid $12,000 for it—close to his annual salary. Today it’s worth $2.5 million. This puts it out of reach for most young families and certainly out of my reach or that of any of my brothers. Gone are the days when the price of your home equalled one year’s salary. How many of us have a salary of $2.5 million?
When Dad retired in 1978, after more than forty years as an insurance executive with the same company, his salary was only $37,000. He gave modest raises to those under him but rarely took a raise himself. Still, he’d managed to pay off the mortgage and save enough for him and Mum to live comfortably here during his thirty-year retirement until they eventually died in their beds.
But the land taxes were the real killer. In 1953, they were $500. Over the years they steadily increased until, in 1977, they were more than Dad had paid for the house. He was a pensioner now, on a fixed income, and he accused the town of forcing him out of his home. Carrying a banner with his rallying cry of “Expropriation Through Taxation!” and armed with a long wooden pointer and more than twenty years of accounting ledgers, Dad staged a town-council filibuster. Nobody on council had ever seen account ledgers like Dad’s. In his elegant cursive script he’d kept a record of every penny he’d ever spent; even ice cream cones were listed.
Day after day, Dad trotted up to town council and interrupted their proceedings. Victor went with him as his “adviser.” Eventually, council got so fed up that they granted him a minor adjustment. When the house sells now, the land taxes will likely double.
There’s a note from St. Jude’s church about their upcoming spring rummage sale. They’re looking for stuff. Perfect timing, I think. This gives me a deadline. This house is so big I realize I’ll need a master plan for clearing it out. I can’t afford to get emotional. There are twenty-three rooms, so if I get caught up in the rigging, I’ll go down with the ship.
I go into the library and open Dad’s desk. All his stationery is there, in tidy piles. I take a few sheets of his paper, embossed with the family crest and its motto, HONOR ET VERITAS. I think about all the times Dad drummed “Honour and Truth” into us—it might as well have been carved into a permanent stone arch above our heads. Mum has a jar near the phone crammed full of pens, but none of them work. My first act of liberating the clutter is to dump the whole jar into the trash. I find a pencil and go out on the verandah to start my list.
The rain has stopped and the sun is out. The skies are clear and the tree branches are bare, the ground frozen with puddles of water on top. The lake shimmers in pastel shades of lilac and pink. The weather is unseasonably warm for southern Ontario at this time of year—warm enough to sit outside in the winter sun with only my jacket on. I start writing:
Master Plan:
1. Lock up valuables.
2. Empty closets and dressers upstairs.
3. Empty cupboards and drawers downstairs.
4. Sort documents.
I’m beginning to feel optimistic. Maybe it won’t even take six weeks.
There’s a small closet upstairs where we can add a padlock. We’ll use it to store all the obvious things—the silver flatware from the dining room, silver trays that Mum has scattered all over the pantry and kitchen, Dad’s war medals, Mum’s jewellery. It’s not the greatest solution but it’s only temporary. And since it’s mostly metal we won’t have to worry about it catching fire, if there is a fire. This house is made entirely of wood. Fire is a big concern of mine and it was always a concern of Mum’s, too.
Upstairs in their bathroom Dad kept a mammoth coil of fat sisal rope, which sat thickly at the ready for decades. In the event of fire when Dad was away, Mum was to drag the monster pile to her bedroom window, tie one end to the leg of her four-poster, heave the other end outside to the ground—a distance of almost thirty feet—and shimmy down … presumably, in the early days, carrying a baby. Her bedroom window has a heavy aluminum storm window, bolted on from the outside, but I assume Dad never considered this minor obstacle. I make a note to check all the batteries in the fire alarms.
My plan is to keep the framed photographs and books on the shelves to give the illusion that the house is still occupied when it’s shown to prospective buyers, even though all the cupboards and drawers will be empty. By the end of the day I have a long list of items to buy, mainly garbage bags and storage bins.
By the time I have dinner ready and wine poured, my younger daughter, Jessica, has arrived. She’s offered to spend the first week with me, commuting by train from work each day. All three of my children seem concerned about me staying alone in Mum’s house. My older daughter, Virginia, is planning to bring her infant son out on the weekends and I’m receiving constant supportive emails from my son, Carter, in Turkmenistan. When I tell him I fall asleep apologizing to Mum, he writes, Why are you apologizing to her?! Shouldn’t she be apologizing to you? You have a very weird and complicated guilt relationship with your mother. You need to take a step back and look at both of you from a fresh angle. You’ll see that she had everything to be grateful for, having a daughter like you!
Jessica is supportive too, but she defends her grandmother. Whenever I discuss my tattered relationship with Mum, Jessica says, “She just felt misunderstood by you.” I feel a twinge of recognition and regret. Jessica’s right—and the truth hurts.
I warn Jessica that she and I might be headed down the same wrong track, as in a Greek tragedy, the Fates paying me back.
“Don’t wait until you’re sixty-three and lying on a therapist’s couch,” I tell her. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong now … Have the conversation with me while we still have time to fix it!” But tonight it happens all over again. In the dining room our conversation slides sideways and Jessica is exasperated with me.
“Why do you always colour outside the lines?” she says. “We start talking about one thing and then you go off on these tangents that have nothing to do with what I’ve just said!” Then she stops. She sighs sympathetically. “It’s just the way your mind works, I guess.”
I used to be sweet and empathetic like Jessica—where did it go? Why couldn’t I have been so accepting of my own mother?
After dinner, Jessica and I go upstairs. She puts on one of Mum’s old flannelette nightgowns, I fill the hot water bottles
, and we climb into Mum’s four-poster canopy bed together. The house feels so cavernous and the rooms so lonely, it’s as though we need to camp together on the same island tonight. The lake is quiet, but I sleep fitfully.
My sense of Mum feels as cluttered as this house, and I can’t seem to get to the bottom of it. There were layers of misunderstandings on both sides, but I can only try to scrape away my own now. The ones that make me want to turn away are the very ones I know are the most important. I’d been horrified by Mum’s growing infirmities—afraid of the road map she was showing me. I knew it wasn’t easy for her to relinquish this life and slide into the next. For years she’d been hanging on like a forager vine, entangling her shoots around a grove of host trees. It took all her strength to let go. Now I wonder if I’ll be as strong when my turn comes.
As if reading my thoughts, Jessica lifts her head from her pillow and says quietly, “You know, there’s one thing everybody’s born knowing how to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Everybody’s born knowing how to die.”
I awake before Jessica and carry Sambo downstairs. I try to clear a place on the kitchen table for breakfast, but Mum’s clutter is everywhere. I replace her plastic daffodils with a glass bowl of mandarin oranges. With the dryness of the furnace, the mandarins will petrify after several weeks and stay hard and colourful for a long time. Dad always refused to add a humidifier. Instead, he placed pans of water on the floor beside every hot air vent, which only hydrated the dogs. We used to joke that the reason Mum and Dad looked so young was that the dryness had mummified them, but since Dad rarely turned up the furnace, it’s also possible they were simply freeze-dried in the permafrost.
As I pop bread into the new toaster, I can hear Jessica stirring upstairs. I’ll soon be driving her to the train. When she comes downstairs, I can tell she’s been crying—her eyes are rimmed red. All three of my children had a unique bond with Mum: Virginia as the first grandchild she doted on; Carter through his shared love of politics and history; and Jessica through a mutual understanding. She seemed to bring out the best in Mum—perhaps the extra generation gave them space to breathe. Dad said they were “simpatico.” Jessica was deeply affected by Mum’s death, and small things can suddenly trigger her grief. This morning she’s been ambushed by a photograph: Mum’s head is tilted into Jessica’s neck and the two of them are laughing with their arms around each other. I’d moved the picture onto the hall table, where she didn’t expect to see it.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” I say, and I fold her to me.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I just really miss her.”
I look up at the windows. Every frame drips with icicles that thaw and freeze and thaw again in our wild, unpredictable winter. Sometimes they all melt away to nothing. Then, forty-eight hours later, the icicles are so long it feels like I’m imprisoned behind bars.
When I get back from the train station, I go upstairs to make the bed. I empty the hot water bottles into the sink and remember that Dad used to turn the furnace off at night. When we awoke, icicles had formed not only on the outside of the windows but on the inside, too. We slept in woollen socks, hats, sweaters, and nose cozies—my own invention that I started to knit as soon as I was old enough to hold knitting needles. They were cone-shaped affairs that covered our noses and had loops to hook over our ears. Dad supplemented with hot water bottles, but he’d pour in only a tablespoon of boiling water, and so they’d lie flat and floppy on our bellies. “Waste not, want not!” Dad would say. Then he’d climb into bed beside Mum, who he claimed was the best kind of furnace there was.
I pass by the open doors to all the bedrooms and reality finally hits. How am I ever going to untangle this mess? How am I ever going to separate the trash from the treasure in the overstuffed contents accumulated during Mum and Dad’s combined lifetimes of more than 180 years? Some of the valuable items I know none of us will want, while junk of no apparent value has such memory-laden significance that we’ll have to draw straws to see who gets it. All the grandchildren tell me they want the plastic sign of the gun on the mudroom window. I wonder where the nose cozies are?
I stomp down the wooden stairs to the basement with my load of dirty towels, keeping my head down low so my hair won’t brush up against any spider webs lurking in the ceiling. Light filters in through the laundry-room windows behind pots of wispy dried geranium plants, casting splinters of cold morning sun on the concrete floor. A cat’s cradle of empty clothesline zigzags across the room. The ironing board sits forlornly in the corner, an old flannelette cover clipped over it with wooden clothes pegs.
Then I look up. There’s Mum’s hornet’s nest, which she saved in a brown paper bag to show to her grandchildren. It’s grey and papery, about the size of a football. She’d found it in the garden, fallen from the eaves, and sliced it in half. She marvelled at its architecture, its complex geometry, and the sheer intelligence of the hornets that built it.
“Isn’t it fascinating? Look at all those compartments! All those thin layers of paper packed together! Did you know hornets spend their whole lives flying back and forth just to build nests like this for their children?”
Mum used to take it in her car to show members of her bridge group, her Bible study group, her belly-dancing class, and her Alzheimer’s support group after Dad got sick. She even called the mayor’s office to see if they wanted it for their education department. The rest of the time it hung in its bag from the basement ceiling, along with an envelope of Dad’s hollyhock seeds.
What should I do with it?
I can hear Mum’s voice: “You can’t throw that away!” And it stops me in my tracks.
This house I am now slicing apart is theirs—the place that we’d taken for granted would always be here as a backdrop to our lives.
Where do I start? I worry that one piece of pocket litter will lead to another until I’m following flakes of memory so deep into the woods I may never get out.
On the other hand, maybe I have this opportunity—this temporary stay of execution—to sift through a half-century of stuff, to see what everything means. Maybe I’m looking for answers instead of exits.
What answers?
How could I still have questions?
Friends warned me of this. They said, “When your mother dies, you’ll wish you’d asked her some questions.” I had more than sixty years to ask questions, but the questions didn’t form until after she’d gone.
Now there are questions I didn’t even know I had.
Point O’ View
Mum loved to name her houses. They all had spectacular views, so just as she’d named our Hong Kong house “Taipanorama,” she named our new one in Canada “Point O’ View.”
When World War II ended, Dad finished his stint in the British navy and returned to his old job in Hong Kong. As a young war bride, Mum eagerly followed him out there with me in her arms. By 1950 we’d moved to Singapore and I had two little brothers. If Dad had had his way, we might have lived there forever—he loved the tropics—but during the final days of 1950, Singapore exploded into what the colonial government called “The Malayan Emergency.” To Dad it must have seemed that the Anti-British National Liberation War had entered his own living room, because Mum packed us all up and left him. We landed at Rokeby—her family’s historic home in King George County, Virginia.
Despite Dad’s entreaties, Mum refused to return. Dad’s British relatives had warned him about the folly of taking on an “American wife with independent spirit,” and he soon found out what that meant. Mum dug in her heels, backed up by her formidable clan. Their separation lasted a year; it was Dad who surrendered.
I remember the night he walked in. Christmas festivities were in full swing at Rokeby and the massive front hall was packed with people laughing and drinking. In the music room, I and the other small cousins had just heard Leon, the farm hand, clomp on the roof with horseshoes—a family tradition that signalled the arrival of Santa’s rein
deer. Suddenly, an uncle leaned down and said to me, “Your daddy’s here! Your daddy’s arrived!” The crowd seemed to move in a wave of excitement towards the front door and I was swept along with it. Through the forest of adult legs, I glimpsed in the distance a man in a grey fedora and a long dark coat. He’d been gone for a fifth of my lifetime—a locked-away memory from a faraway place. I hung back and waited.
He moved into the downstairs bedroom with Mum and baby Robin, and early the next morning Sandy and I tiptoed in to find him dressed in a sarong, standing at the marble sink in their bathroom, using Oriental toothpaste from a little round tin. Mum lay in bed, snuggled under the quilt, smiling.
Over the next few weeks, they discussed where to go next. It became clear that Dad wouldn’t live anywhere “American,” and Mum wouldn’t move to England, so after many discussions, they agreed that Canada would be their cultural compromise: it was close enough to Mum’s America, yet part of Dad’s British Empire. Canada seemed a vast unknown, appealing to their penchant for adventure, yet only a few days’ driving distance. Mum’s family worried we might get lost in the wilderness: they’d read the popular new book Mrs. Mike, so as far as they knew, the only things north of the border were Mounties and grizzly bears.
Dad took Mum on a train ride across Canada to decide where to settle. Mum took along her windup Bell & Howell movie camera and Dad filmed her in her coonskin coat, knee deep in virgin snow, waving to miles and miles of empty railway tracks with nothing but pine trees in the background. It was a far cry from the lush landscape we’d left behind in Singapore, but just outside Toronto, they met someone on the train who recommended a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario. They decided to call it home.
Oakville had the feel of an artistic summer-camp community—sleepy and rural, surrounded by farmland, not unlike Rokeby. It had one traffic light and a couple of gas stations. The short main street had a Woolworth’s department store, a grocery store, a drugstore, and a candy store—Donna Lee’s—where the owner’s son sat in his wheelchair at the back, fixing clocks. Early each morning horse-drawn wagons from Gilbrae’s Dairy clipped-clopped from house to house, rattling glass bottles. At the end of town, near the bridge, the police station had a friendly two-room jail that doubled as a homeless shelter.