Lambsquarters (34 page)

AS THE GROUND CHANGES
and the season changes, so do the faces I see at my morning table each day. They change ever so slowly, moving from the crook of my arms to the raised cane chair to the booster seat to the pressback, until suddenly they are grown, they are going, they are gone. And the familiar face left is crowned in grey. It has lines now, mirroring my own.

The hands that move over the table have changed too. From the first grip with chubby palms, the first grasp of spoon or crayon, the first fist of displeasure, to the expressive movements of creative thought, the manual illustration of rational thinking, the cursive writing, the keyboard tapping, the filling in of applications and forms, the tentative opening of mail announcing acceptances, scholarships and imminent departures. And the hands left behind have callouses and veins and tracks leading from all the elements of this place. Scars and
memories of the thorns and nails, the softest down of newborn children and lambs, the bites of hay and brambles and the lashes of wire and stone, the knowledge of countless skills. And still the hands fold on my table. Our table. And reach across to each other.

The quest—that need to discover this land, to learn to create, to steward our piece of earth—stays with me, with us. But the players age, they grow, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the number we started with. Just two. The children we never even dreamed of when we first came here are now setting off on their own.

The bus still travels our road. It’s a tad later now that it doesn’t have to stop here, and it goes by a lot faster. I don’t miss marking my day by its schedule. Sometimes I see it from my bed while lying barely awake, or reading, my tea steaming in its mug. No more wake-up calls, packing lunches, doing last-minute laundry. I do not miss those stresses, though the void they leave is filled by other holes, tiny vials of blank space, tiny vacuums pulling part of me, tugging gently, relentlessly.

WE HAD
a number of bus drivers over the years. The religious, the righteous, the reverser, the hunter who craned for deer every fall. They broke down, got stuck, got ornery, got stubborn and got my kids safely to school and back, and they were saints to do it. At the start we were cautioned that the children might have to
walk to the corner, not too far, but along a hilly gravel road where pickups travel too fast. I would not have been able to watch them waiting at that corner, nor shelter them, nor trust in their safety, but it never happened. The bus always came to the lane. The ancient maple was threatened when it prevented one driver from turning the bus. But it just presented a challenge to another, who would simply back up to the door. The gift of reverse. The bus still goes by and the maple remains, though it loses limbs in each storm and its crown grows thinner each summer. The tree stands, shades, shelters and safeguards this place like a sentry.

The bus house, which saw small children enter its door, peer up at its back window and press noses on its front one, housed my daughter and son through elementary and high school. It housed more and more items as more of its space was taken up by the children’s growth: mouse nests, fossils, a collection of rocks and papers too important to pitch away. In bad weather I could watch from the kitchen on days when even the dog wouldn’t venture down the lane. My kids would be blown sideways, hands to their hoods, lunch boxes flapping against their thighs as they disappeared altogether in a sudden whiteout. They would gingerly open the door of the shelter, scramble inside and close themselves in, fogging the glass with their breath.

On snowy days the bus is difficult to hear. Its hard wheels roll on soft roads, often making the first track of
the day. I would know it was coming only by seeing the children emerge from their house, stop to latch the door so it wouldn’t blow open and away, then turn to meet the bus pulling up, its lights flashing, its rat-trap colour glowing.

At the end of the day I would await its return and watch the children jump off or sometimes trail off, dragging their stuff. They would run or saunter, heads up or down, depending on their day. My daughter would chatter to her brother, who tended to be taciturn. She was energized by the ride while he was subdued. Or sometimes the reverse. They’d bring me the news of their lives. Or not.

They avoided the bus house after school, though occasionally I saw them stow something inside, stash it for later retrieval perhaps. Or for protection from censure. The building soon became a fixture, stained pale green, blending with the grass and the trees, its greyish-brown door in tone with the shingles, camouflaged with the stone wall that went up beside it, the gate built behind it, the gravel of the road it bordered, the lane.

At first incongruous, the house’s height eventually made sense as my son grew and grew to six foot six. And how, I wonder, did Thomas know he would get so tall? Perhaps through the formula of prediction that doubles the height of a two-year-old, or is it a three-year-old? That code could have been a hint, but we live by science here, not tales. Or do we?

Science and nature and nurture and history. Community and wisdom and education and knowledge. Skill and intuition. Earth in the blood, like bagpipes. You have it or you don’t. Precognition and synesthesia. And just plain knowing. Or guessing. Or acting on a hunch. These are all things we garner while living here. And the outsized bus house, which reached farther into the atmosphere than anyone could expect a child to grow, proved perfect in the end. When I checked the door frame in the mudroom with my metal tape, I was astonished to find it exactly right. At three he was exactly half of six-and-a-half-feet high.

Before he grew so tall the bus house provided him with a step on the way into the maple tree beside it. He’d climb from the fence to the roof of the bus house to the thick branch and on up to the trunk of the tree and beyond, as high as high. It was his solitary place above us all, where he got ready to suffer heights for the rest of his life. One day he went farther, higher perhaps, and he could not get down. His father got the extension ladder and went up after him. Never, Thomas told him, is it wrong to ask for help, to accept rescue, to admit your limits. There is no cowardice in safety. A lesson I hope he will always retain.

Over the years the bus house weathered. The glass was broken when boys made a swift exit from the roof; the paint on the door peeled. The mice moved in. The chairs disappeared. They were stripped and refinished,
repaired and reglued and taken to live in the city with my daughter.

One spring, during the final final exams, the bus made its last stop, its last pause since its first all those years ago for a swimming lesson. And shortly after, my son and Thomas, men together, decided to take the bus house away, move it on to a different spot, a different life. They took off the door, put the house on tilt, tried to perch it on the trailer to move it, but it defeated them. Too big, too heavy, too stubborn to leave, it lay stuck in the lane, upended, rugged, determined and stationary.

It wasn’t long before the flying Dutchman
—de vliegende Hollander
—arrived, by fate, by luck, by his innate skill at knowing when he’s needed most. With the front-end loader at the ready, and skill and daring ever present, he gently tipped the house into the bucket, tilted it just so, and took it down through the Meadow, along by the Swamp, through Knock-down Corner and into the sugar bush. Together they set it back up, put stones beneath the corners, turned it at an angle and settled it in to its new work in the woods. It no longer harbours children each morning, stores their treasures at night or witnesses the to-ing and fro-ing of the bus. Retired as a bus house, it awaits rebirth in March, when the sap begins to run and the fires start to burn under the kettle. It will keep our equipment safe and dry, give us shelter in the sugar bush, remind us of the shifting stages of our lives here in this place.

So I look out my kitchen window and see the stone wall, the gate beside it, see the cedar hedge, the gravel lane and the maple tree. The bus house is gone, as if it had never been there. But like the children it sheltered, it lives on in a new place with a new life. Its future lies before it like a well-loved carpet that has been gathered up gently and freshly rolled.

DAGS

THE WINTER HAS BEEN BITTER
this year. We’ve had storm after storm, grey upon grey, snow and sleet and treacherous conditions. The roads have been closed, the winds cruel and the sun scarce. The days are creeping longer, but spring is hiding in a maze, not perching around a corner.

I think about endings. About my children leaving home, about my book’s last pages, about my youth paid out and spent here on the farm. All the disjunctions and connections, trajectories bleeding off into the distance and circles meeting up. Continua humming like cicadas, which sound like singing wires, taut and vibrating. Intersecting lines travelling at their own speeds and following divergent courses, but meeting for a moment. A brief kiss in one place, a small dot of focus.

So much of what I do here is contradictory. Sheltering and slaughtering. Planting and harvesting.
Conservation and consumption. Solitude and community. But perhaps that’s exactly what this life is, a delicate balance of disparate and warring concepts, brief moments of harmony in the dissonance of nature and culture.

Lambsquarters is a snug harbour for its animals. The sick and the wounded are sheltered within its gates. Helen, daft lamb that she was, wouldn’t have survived in other barns. But here she was cherished, nurtured and coddled into her limited life. Her enthusiasm and tenacity carried her along after our hand-rearing was finished. Eventually I did get to the fleece that we carefully removed from her cooling skin the day she died in the barnyard. It took me some time. But for the last Christmas of the century I carded and spun it and formed the necks of sweaters for my children and their father. Like the Victorians who wore jewellery woven with the hair of the dearly departed, my beloveds wear Helen’s wool around their necks. Helen was knit into their lives first as a lamb and then into their sweaters. And on my needles is a cardigan whose collar will be Helen as well. That lamb who warmed my heart will warm me again. A mourning cloak. She’s a legend, my Helen, living still in a poem by a friend. There’s a good chance she would be in the flock still, had she not been afflicted. But her brother went for slaughter, as do most of the rams. And how can I justify that contradiction? The ways of the farm. The lives of animals who would never exist but for their value as meat and wool.