Mnemonic by Theresa Kishkan Page A

tallest cedars.
    Some of the cedars were more than five hundred years old. Older than the city I lived in, older than my country in the name given it by latecomers. In the infancy of these trees, explorers measured the altitude of the sun and other celestial bodies with their astrolabes as the oceans carried them to North America; John Dowland’s First Book of Songs and Ayres , first published in 1597, was the most often reprinted music book of its time; 1 and First Nations people on the islands off the western continent had been building houses of their broad planks — stitched at the corners with their plaited branches — for thousands of years.

    When I was growing up, my family moved every two years. My father was a radar technician in the navy, and he would be transferred from Victoria to Halifax, from Halifax to Victoria, from Victoria to the radar base on Matsqui Prairie, back to Victoria. We never owned a house. We’d stay in motels for the first part of most transfers, having outgrown the family housing offered by the navy; my parents drove to possible rental houses with my three brothers and me in the back of the station wagon and our black Labrador, Star, in the very back, drooling as she hung over the seat.
    Moving was exciting, and also a little sad as I thought of all I would miss — the fields behind our home in Matsqui; fishing with string and bent pins at Herring Cove near Halifax; and the cemetery in Fairfield where I squeezed into crypts and communed with the dead. For weeks, my mother made lists and tried to organize what we owned. My brothers and I chose favourite things to take with us on the journey — a book; a stuffed animal; baseball gloves for games of catch in campsites; binoculars. Then a moving truck would pull up in our driveway and teams of men packed up our belongings, wrapping breakables in creamy paper and fitting them into large wooden tea chests, wrapping padded blankets around the furniture, then loading everything into the truck. The house echoed with the loss of our possessions and my mother did a last-minute sweeping of the floors, polished the windows with newspapers and vinegar.
    A truck eventually pulled up in the driveway of the new house and everything was unloaded. My mother cried to discover that cherished plates had been broken or a lampshade crushed. The furniture was arranged in the rooms and I’d lie in my bed at night and try to orient myself by remembering my old room. Closing my eyes, I pointed my finger in the darkness to the window. Waking, I was surprised for weeks by the unfamiliar light.
    There was always a moment I waited for, the moment when my mother replied, “Yes, I think so,” to the question I posed daily after one of these moves: “Are we settled yet?” Settled meant that we knew where things were — light switches, the spaghetti pot, a hammer to bang in nails for our pictures, our winter jackets. New friends knew where to find us. Letters arrived in our mailbox.
    The last family move was in 1969, when I was fourteen. My father retired from the navy and we moved from Matsqui to Victoria, where a job waited for him at the dockyard in Esquimalt. A house had been purchased, the first and only house my parents owned. The sale had been accomplished on a weekend trip to Victoria a month or so before we moved. There were a few requirements — enough bedrooms, a paddock for my horse (in Matsqui we had rented a house on a farm and my lifelong wish for a horse had been fulfilled), close to schools. There were also a few hopes — my mother wanted a dining room, a fireplace, and two bathrooms.
    I have fond memories of a house we lived in when I was in grades one and two, a house with a pagoda roof and an attic room accessible by ladder, doors that opened with crystal knobs, a bark-burning stove in the kitchen, a greying cedar trellis in the leafy backyard, a small neighbourhood park right across the road; I imagined