In my dreams, I’m always on our side, in the preserved oasis of childhood, where hot sun falls on bare shoulders, earth clings to toes burrowed deep, and poplar leaves sweeten the air.
I’m never on their side, never on the outside.
childhood
In Dreams, a Storm
In a confusion
(conflation)
of my then and my now
and a time that only exists
suspended in dreams,
I am in the garden of my youth
and you, in your youth,
stand inside looking out at me,
at my ancient garden.
A storm is coming;
I can hear it
feel it
see it
but still, I stay in the garden,
trying in vain to beat the rain.
While the grey clouds thicken overhead,
and the thunder rolls,
I clip at a bush –
waxy green leaves between my fingers –
I am trying to finish
just this one last plant
before I go,
but the boughs won’t give,
the clippers are dull and they stick.
As the first drops begin to fall,
I drop everything and run
and my run
feels fast,
the fastest I can go,
dream-fast,
as though I fear I would melt
from the rain.
But no matter how fast I run,
the scene slips by slowly,
the moment stretches out,
elastic;
the drops fall faster.
I run down the wrong side of the house
(But in this mirrored reality it is right),
I run around the corner
and see that in this time-place warp,
the front door is at the top of a hill
that never was,
up a long, winding, stretching staircase
I can’t hope to climb.
My limbs cry out
it is useless
until you –
a you that is you and me and childhood itself all rolled up together –
you open the door
and stand there giggling,
pure happiness smiling down on me.
My strength returns and,
straining against gravity,
I fling myself up
toward your smiling face
And wake as we collide.
Three Red Chairs
Glossy and red, the three chairs stand out in our white, white kitchen. They were the first coloured accent to grace our famously white house. Now, there are red accents all over our home. But the chairs started it all.
Their square and sturdy frames contrast with the natural sable-green of their woven rush seat pads. When you sit on them, they make the squishing, crackling sound you hear when you settle down on a patch of dry grass by the sea, or when you walk across a farmer’s field at harvest time. When you pull them out from the table, they make a dense scraping sound, a sound that echoes from the tile floors of my childhood.
They are among the few items in our house that have followed me through my life. When we bought this house, I insisted we had to keep them, find a place for them, use them. Of the few pieces of furniture I contributed to our blended collection, I fought hardest to hold on to these chairs.
They are clustered around a small, round white table in the corner of the kitchen, a table identical (though one size smaller) to the table they once clustered around in my childhood home.
Back then, we didn’t have a table in our kitchen. We didn’t eat in our kitchen. But we had a sunroom, an addition my Dad built off the kitchen, looking out over the back yard.
This was the room that we ate breakfast in year round, it was where we ate lunch on the weekends we stayed home from the cottage and it was the casual dining room, for warm summer days when we didn’t bother with the big dining room and didn’t eat outside.
The red chairs were there through it all, though back then, around the larger table, there were four of them: three without arms, one with arms. The armchair was my Dad’s while the other three were occupied by my Mom, my Great Aunt (who lived with us most of the time) and me.
Those chairs saw early weekday mornings of fruit and yogurt and toast. They saw weekend breakfasts of croissants and jam and cheese, or Sarah Lee coffee cake, or bacon and eggs.
They were dragged into the kitchen for me to stand on to help with the cooking, or to search for things in cupboards otherwise out of reach.
They were part of afternoons spent painting; sometimes it was my mother with her watercolours, sometimes it was me with my plump, child’s fingers gripping a broad brush, watching the pinks and purples of the guache streak across large pages of newsprint.
They saw the back yard change and grow. And they were there as I changed and grew.
Eventually, my Great Aunt moved back home with my Grandmother, leaving an empty chair and a silence that was louder than the sound of her stirring sugar into her coffee cup (plink, plink, plink) and her cheery chatter.
At 18, I moved out and into university residence. And then there were two empty chairs.
A few years later, my parents divorced and my mother sold the house. She downsized, and put the extra furniture into storage. Including the red chairs.
When I returned from my life abroad and was ready to buy a house, my mother offered me the chairs. They were chipped and banged and the seats were starting to come apart. They bore the scars of a lifetime of wear. But I was so happy to have them; a piece of my childhood.
I have gone through a divorce myself and have moved house several times since then, but the chairs have followed me along the way. Before my husband and I moved into our current house, my Mom and I had the chairs repainted and their seats re-woven. They look fresh and new again, the way they must have looked at the beginning of their lives.
Because my childhood friends always had kitchen tables and for some reason I felt like I was missing out on something, I asked my husband if we could leave space for a table in our kitchen. And that is where three of the chairs are now. In a nod to that sunroom of my childhood, they sit by the back window, overlooking our back garden.
This is where I sit each day when I write. It is where we sit for many of our weekend lunches. My son and his friends sit there for lunch when he has playdates. We decorate our Christmas cookies there. My son does his homework there in the evenings, or hangs out and watches me cook. When he was younger, and lighter, he used to stand on one of the chairs in the kitchen to help me, just as I did as a child. And I still stand on them to reach things in the highest cupboards.
Sure, the grass seats may shed a bit, may catch crumbs and leave bits on the otherwise pristine, white floor underneath them, but I’m sure they did that way back when, too. We could have them re-covered in a more practical, solid covering. But then they wouldn’t be the same chairs. For the sake of my nostalgia, we put up with the mess.
Those three chairs remain at the centre of our family life, just as I always remember them.
Consistent. Glossy. Red. Comforting.
* * *
Written for this week’s writing challenge, Object: The writing challenge this week is to begin with an object. Take something small, and concrete — a thing, a noun — and use that as a starting point. You may simply want to describe the object: what does it look like, how does it feel, does it have a scent, a flavor, does it make a sound? Or you may want to use an object as a focal point to expand into something bigger.
Reckless
I am twelve. It’s a morning in early May. I am in my family’s sun-dappled back garden in downtown Toronto. Leafy shadows blow softly on their branches, matching the dance of the new, bright leaves on the trees overhead.
The bright green seeds from the mulberry tree, not quite mulberries themselves, have all begun to fall and the backyard is carpeted in a soft, pale layer of them. In a few months, the berries themselves will litter the ground, leaving dark, jarring splotches wherever they fall.
It’s finally warm enough to have breakfast outside and we’ve just finished eating. My parents are still sitting at the table while I poke around looking at flowers and worms and whatever else is moving in the earth.
“Can I go for a bike ride?” I ask, longing for the freedom of being out, on my own.
“Yes but your friends will be here in a few hours, so be back by noon,” my mother answers.
I nod and disappear down the mossy concrete steps on my way to collect my bike from the basement.
Out on the streets of the city, I’m free. I ride on the sidewalk, up and down the streets, smelling the sweet scent of spring, looking at the earth, which not long ago was muddy and half frozen and dripping. Now the gardens are being planted, there are leaves on the trees and flowers blooming. It is warm and sunny.
I cross over one road and go up another that snakes around behind the corner store, and then runs parallel with the train tracks, in front of the small old houses that must have once been home to railway workers.
The train tracks are up a hill, partially fenced off from the little narrow green space that runs along just below them, and just above the street.
I push my bike up the steps into the green space and spend some time exploring the overhanging vines, the trees, the benches that no one seems to know are there. Unseen, I watch people go in and out of the houses, I watch cars drive down the small street and people head out with their small children for a walk or a bike ride.
Just another Saturday in May.
I leave my bike where it is and climb further up the embankment, emerging out onto the gravel that forms the surface where the train tracks lie. There are no trains coming at the moment and I wander up and down, looking off into the distance in each direction. I balance on the rails. I bend down and put my ear to them to see if I can hear anything coming. All is silent, other than the distant rumble of street traffic.
Eventually, I go back down to get my bike and dutifully return home on time.
A few hours later, when my friends arrive for my birthday – three girls from my class at school – I lead them back up the little hidden road, up past the green space and onto the tracks again.
They are more adventurous than I am. Or maybe it is courage in numbers. They venture further, even out along the rails that pass over the busy road along a narrow bridge.
One girl explains that if you put a penny on the rail, it rattles when a train is coming.
“So that way, we’ll know when to get off,” she explains. But of course, no one stays to watch the penny, so we won’t know if it starts to rattle.
They start daring each other.
“I dare you to go to the other end of the bridge.”
“I dare you to go alone.”
“I can walk with my eyes closed along the rail, can you?”
“I bet I can go farther without opening my eyes than you can!”
I know it is dangerous, and stupid. But for a while, I say nothing.
Eventually, though, I risk my reputation because I am scared that something bad will happen. I climb off the rails and stand over by the fence line, calling to my friends, telling them they should get down, trying to entice them to come exploring in the trees.
But they can’t hear me, or don’t want to.
Two of them are halfway across the bridge, their eyes closed, their arms stretched out rigidly at 90 degree angles for balance, when a train rounds the corner behind us.
The forgotten penny is probably rattling, I think, but I can’t hear it.
The other girl, who is standing closer to me, jumps off the tracks and we both run forward, calling to the other two to come back. But the traffic under the bridge is loud and drowns out our voices.
We continue to call to them because we can’t think of anything else to do. I look back at the approaching train, then forward at my friends. I am trying to judge the distance and the time it would take to run to them and then back again. I won’t make it. My mind starts to imagine horrible scenarios, having to return home and tell my parents – or worse, the girls’ parents – that they were killed by a train because we were being stupid and hanging out where we weren’t supposed to.
The train’s bell starts ringing. Next, its horn sounds.
That gets the girls’ attention. Their eyes fly open, their heads whip around and they stumble off the rails. They have made it pretty far, which would be impressive if they weren’t about to be run over, or blown over the bridge by the force of the train that is about to come screaming past us.
The girls start running back toward us, toward the oncoming train, along the narrow strip of gravel between the tracks and the low wall at the edge of the bridge. They may make it, but if they do, it will be close. Otherwise…well, otherwise they won’t make it.
The train continues to plough towards us, ringing its bell and honking its horn.
The girls reach the end of the bridge and fling themselves down on the gravel that covers the hilltop, rolling away from the tracks and towards the edge of the fence at the top of the green space.
At the same time, the train roars past, blasting us with the hot wind generated by the force of its movement.
When it disappears over the bridge and around the corner, we all sit up and look at each other.
I’m annoyed and angry that they were stupid enough to go out so far, that they didn’t listen to me. That they could have been killed. That they’ve ruined my birthday.
I’m convinced they think it’s my fault they were almost killed, or that I’m boring and a scardey cat. Either way, I don’t much feel like having a birthday party with them anymore.
Once our heartbeats have returned to normal, we go back down the stairs, past the trees and benches and vines, and we make our way back to my house. Along the way, our conversation resumes as the feelings of awkwardness, of unease, of the muddle of emotions that have passed between us, slowly ebb away.
When we get home, we have cake and I open the presents they have brought me. It is almost as if nothing happened. Almost.
An agreement passes between us, unspoken, a pact to never talk about what happened up on the train tracks.
I don’t know if they kept up their end of the bargain, but I did. Until today.
Notes on a Piano
The pink and peach sunset has set the rooms in the front of the house aglow. Everyone is puttering around after dinner doing their own thing. It is peaceful.
And then, from upstairs, the sound of the piano, notes tinkling on the cool air.
My son had his first piano lesson last night. Tonight, he is playing a simple scale, but it sounds beautiful and throws me back to my childhood. Home feels more like home than it ever has – familiar – just because of the sound of the piano drifting from above.
This ode to my son’s scale-playing is rather ironic.
I took piano from a very young age. And hated it. Originally, I think it was my idea. I wanted to be like my mother’s best friend, the girl I had heard so much about. She was a concert pianist by the age of 12.
I’m not sure that I actually wanted to be out there on the stage, but I did think I wanted to be like this girl who my mother thought so highly of. I was always interested in my mother’s childhood and in emulating it somehow.
There were two problems with this particular attempt at recreating bits of my mother’s childhood. First, I was only 5 and fickle and lazy – I lost interest in the piano as soon as it became work. So, right away, basically. Practicing? Blech.
The other problem was that I had (and have) no musical ability whatsoever. I believe it’s something to do with music’s kinship to math and that side of my brain is simply whimpering somewhere in a corner of my skull, overshadowed by the other non-mathematical, non-scientific side.
I remember my mother saying to me often when the classical radio station would play a piano piece, “don’t you wish you could play like that?”
My answer was always a resounding no. No I didn’t. I liked listening to it, but I didn’t want to do it myself.
Her follow-up response was always “if you quit, you’ll regret it, you’ll always wish you could play.”
I doubted her then and, sorry to say Mom, I still don’t wish I could play.
Despite these somewhat grave stumbling blocks, I continued to take piano lessons until I was about 14. At that point, I managed to convince my parents that they were wasting time and money.
What I now understand as a parent, though, is how important it is for children to play and understand music. Well, most children. I maintain that I just didn’t have it in me.
On a deeper level, I also finally see how moving it is to hear your child create music. Real music. And, after tonight, I realize that there was something I must have enjoyed about playing the piano because hearing my son play those few notes brought me so much joy, warmth and happy reminiscences.
So, I guess I got something out of those lessons after all. Just not the ability to make music.
The Silver Leaf Journal 