that such elements might be a part of the new house. None of these were to come true.
The house we moved to was an ordinary 1950s bungalow. There were three bedrooms, a small bathroom, a small kitchen, an adequate living room. But there was also a basement, and a plan to rough in some rooms down there behind the furnace where small windows, non-opening, gazed out to the carport. There wasnât a paddock, but the house stood on nearly an acre, the back part of it wild, so we would fence an area for my horse; he remained behind in Matsqui at the farm of a friend until we were ready for him. A few junipers in the front yard, a hawthorn, some pines in the backyard. A vegetable patch which my father would annually rototill and whack with a shovel, swearing at the clumps of hard clay that refused to crumble.
We moved to that house well after the school term had begun. It seems my father had gone through a kind of crisis, half-wanting to buy into a sporting goods shop in Abbotsford, where he could have worked as a gunsmith â his hobby â but knowing also that a job waited for him in Victoria with known income, benefits, the things he was accustomed to and upon which his family depended. My parents argued in the night those last few months in Matsqui and finally we moved to Victoria to the house which didnât fulfil anyoneâs dreams, and where a patch of overgrown sour grass waited to be fenced for the arrival of my horse. We stayed in the Cherry Bank Motel while we waited for the moving truck to arrive, and we were registered in schools in the area, our father driving us each day from the motel. It was painful to be the gawky girl introduced to the class a month into the term.
All my life, I have wondered at the feeling I have in particular houses, usually ones in which no one lives any longer. Iâve felt it in Point Ellice House in Victoria, where members of the OâReilly family lived for nearly a century and where the rooms are arranged in tribute to those days; felt it in abandoned farmhouses on Sumas Mountain when weâd come across them on blueberry picking expeditions and where a tattered remnant of wallpaper, neatly cut (if mouse-eaten) squares of newspaper on a nail in the outhouse; or a rusty cookstove spoke to me of the deep legacy of belonging and loss.
Once, in Utah, I wandered around a cabin in the Dinosaur National Monument Park and felt the presence of the family that had lived in that place so vividly that I had to wipe tears from my eyes. A tire swing hung from an old cottonwood, clematis covered the roof of the cabin and foamed over the windows in cascades of white blossom, and a few milk cans stood battered and empty outside the collapsing barn.
Sometimes a house seemed as though it was waiting for its family to return, furniture still in the rooms, a kettle on a stove. There was a low clapboard cottage in the woods near Elk Lake, where I rode my horse, and its windows seemed to me a study in patience, as did the lilacs which bloomed in spring, in anticipation.
I would think, Entire lives have been lived in these houses, and would be filled with something like sadness, but not quite. Later the word nostalgia settled into my lexicon with such ease that I knew I had been waiting all my life for it.
When I was a young woman, I travelled through Europe with a change of clothing in a knapsack, and imagined myself into a shepherdâs hut on the south coast of Crete, my lover Agamemnon bending to enter its single room and showing me its hearth, a small opening in the roof to take away the smoke.
There was a room in the commune near Grasse, in France, where I was taken by friends for lunch. We were served food grown and prepared on the property â even a glass of the brandy made in the cellar, barrels scented with oranges from the trees providing shade to the terrace.
Later, I lived in a cottage on an island off the west coast of Ireland and planned to live there forever,
The house we moved to was an ordinary 1950s bungalow. There were three bedrooms, a small bathroom, a small kitchen, an adequate living room. But there was also a basement, and a plan to rough in some rooms down there behind the furnace where small windows, non-opening, gazed out to the carport. There wasnât a paddock, but the house stood on nearly an acre, the back part of it wild, so we would fence an area for my horse; he remained behind in Matsqui at the farm of a friend until we were ready for him. A few junipers in the front yard, a hawthorn, some pines in the backyard. A vegetable patch which my father would annually rototill and whack with a shovel, swearing at the clumps of hard clay that refused to crumble.
We moved to that house well after the school term had begun. It seems my father had gone through a kind of crisis, half-wanting to buy into a sporting goods shop in Abbotsford, where he could have worked as a gunsmith â his hobby â but knowing also that a job waited for him in Victoria with known income, benefits, the things he was accustomed to and upon which his family depended. My parents argued in the night those last few months in Matsqui and finally we moved to Victoria to the house which didnât fulfil anyoneâs dreams, and where a patch of overgrown sour grass waited to be fenced for the arrival of my horse. We stayed in the Cherry Bank Motel while we waited for the moving truck to arrive, and we were registered in schools in the area, our father driving us each day from the motel. It was painful to be the gawky girl introduced to the class a month into the term.
All my life, I have wondered at the feeling I have in particular houses, usually ones in which no one lives any longer. Iâve felt it in Point Ellice House in Victoria, where members of the OâReilly family lived for nearly a century and where the rooms are arranged in tribute to those days; felt it in abandoned farmhouses on Sumas Mountain when weâd come across them on blueberry picking expeditions and where a tattered remnant of wallpaper, neatly cut (if mouse-eaten) squares of newspaper on a nail in the outhouse; or a rusty cookstove spoke to me of the deep legacy of belonging and loss.
Once, in Utah, I wandered around a cabin in the Dinosaur National Monument Park and felt the presence of the family that had lived in that place so vividly that I had to wipe tears from my eyes. A tire swing hung from an old cottonwood, clematis covered the roof of the cabin and foamed over the windows in cascades of white blossom, and a few milk cans stood battered and empty outside the collapsing barn.
Sometimes a house seemed as though it was waiting for its family to return, furniture still in the rooms, a kettle on a stove. There was a low clapboard cottage in the woods near Elk Lake, where I rode my horse, and its windows seemed to me a study in patience, as did the lilacs which bloomed in spring, in anticipation.
I would think, Entire lives have been lived in these houses, and would be filled with something like sadness, but not quite. Later the word nostalgia settled into my lexicon with such ease that I knew I had been waiting all my life for it.
When I was a young woman, I travelled through Europe with a change of clothing in a knapsack, and imagined myself into a shepherdâs hut on the south coast of Crete, my lover Agamemnon bending to enter its single room and showing me its hearth, a small opening in the roof to take away the smoke.
There was a room in the commune near Grasse, in France, where I was taken by friends for lunch. We were served food grown and prepared on the property â even a glass of the brandy made in the cellar, barrels scented with oranges from the trees providing shade to the terrace.
Later, I lived in a cottage on an island off the west coast of Ireland and planned to live there forever,
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