Mnemonic (14 page)

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.