house: a (tiny) memoir

The afternoons I spent with old record turntable, dropping my Disney Mother Goose album, the Irish Rovers or my father’s old sound effect records, particularly the trains. I remember the lamp we still have, I would sit beside and listen, to old Mother Goose, the same voice from the ‘60s Winnie-the-Pooh, Sterling Holloway, oh bother. I remember the days in the rain listening to records when you could catch up the hook and the arm and stack one upon one, as they dropped one at a time to long play. There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead…

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

I remember the year that the laws changed, and farmers were required to wear hard hats for protection, even out in the barnyard. Fifty feet from the barn, and no way for the sky to fall, even had any of them tried to be under it. Under the weather, its said, as we all are. Photos of my father and the hired man in the barnyard, yellow dots protecting what said the strongest body of bone. The law didn’t last. Yellow hardhats by the door in the back shed, plastic curve and foam padding to keep it in place.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

The old John Deere Model B that he had, from the times before, and only a decade younger than he. It was my favourite; more classic and sleek; the two others since, were but bulky and large in comparison, tractor cabs with the headphones and radio, air conditioning and heater. More muscle, less heart. When he got me the toy set of tractors, it was that I liked most, Model B, now what left of the set in his office, lining bookshelf.

In junkyards the curve of the old metal seat.

There was always the divide, he would bring in the new, and I would pine for the old, whether tractor, truck, porch. Sometimes things are just fine as they are, even just as a black-and-white shade.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

There were the 4-H meetings at the house, when my father a leader and I was still small. My mother would have stayed in the kitchen, preparing snacks. Sitting on the floor between kids from the surrounding farms, early to mid-teens, in chairs around our living room. In 1974, he was even awarded a plaque for his years of 4-H service, to coincide with leaving; my year, then, in such would be far less impressive. Before they were married, my mother a boy scout leader in Ottawa, through the church they were married in, on Alta Vista Drive. Wedding photos of them as her pack of boys dressed and saluting on two sides, and they strolled out of the church, only married mere minutes. His smile more shy than hers; she strolled through them beaming, on the arm of the skinny farm boy a whole year younger than she, but for four days.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

There were the back stairs we were never allowed to use, from the kitchen to master bedroom, layered with cluster flies and coathooks overloaded with 1960s and early 1970s apparel. All the coats that we no longer wore. My pre-school brown jacket with fringes, or my father’s from Kemptville Agricultural College.

The last time he took a train, he told me, thirty years later, was coming home from Kemptville College in 1961.

The stairs we or just I would sneak through and around, tearing through the house in the way children do, but only allowed once a year to then use them, for Christmas. Once she knew we or just I awake, my mother would collect and walk us down, for the sake of avoiding the living room with stockings and such; for the sake of having to wait for him to come in from morning chores and go in as a group. Waiting sometimes so long for him to eat breakfast and put another log in the wood furnace, it was the longest I had waited for anything in my entire life, before and then since.

A living room stocking of Clementine oranges, socks and underwear, small toys and trinkets, and a Lifesavers Book, back when boxes of such held ten rolls, and not eight or then six.

I would always save the peppermint roll for last, since I liked those least. I really didn’t like them at all, but what child imagines ever giving away candy?

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

Every year an airplane low in the sky, and my father knew. Every year, the same man would come farm to farm selling aerial photos of homesteads, that you could even get framed; great pictures to hang over the mantle. The 1974 shot still looms large in the front porch, showing previous open-porch, the machine shop being built, and the red pick-up I loved, before he traded to blue. Wooden building upon building that stood still in the yard from his father’s time and before, including old machine shed where his heated now stands, and the husk of chicken coop, which even, at that point, hadn’t seen more than pigeons for years.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

There is a photograph of four-year-old me cradling a baby raccoon, bottle-feeding it milk. I remember my mother pulling out secreted glass bottles and nipples, left over from before. My father and the hired man, Steve, cut down a tree in the bush that, until too late, they didn’t realize held a nest with a female raccoon and two kittens. When the tree fell, the mother did too. My father brought the two young to the house so we could wean them. I remember the raccoons.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

The snow we would trudge from the truck or the tractor to back of the two hundred acres, over creek into brush for the sake of a Christmas tree, until the mid-1980s relented, and responded with fake plastic replica. Every year, the operation of cutting and tugging, pine needles spread out through the kitchen and living room carpet and caught up in socks, decorating tree with glass baubles at least one less a year with the television on, watching Barney Miller or Fish, Charlie Brown and inevitable Grinch.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

But that's what exile does. It gives you your home.
— Ali Smith, Brick #81, summer 2008

There is something about recollection that makes the past come out, clear as sometimes mud. In a recent issue of The New Quarterly (104, fall 2007), Ottawa writer Elisabeth Harvor wrote a piece called "First Real Estate: The Childhood Bedroom." In it, she talked about teaching creative writing at the university level to first-year students, and giving them assignments on writing their first childhood bedroom. What comes out of such writing? For a couple of years, I'd been thinking about writing small prose sections or poems to go along with old family photographs, specifically an album of old Polaroids, wandering through the terrain of my own past, and my own childhood. It was terrain I haven’t really gone near previously in my writing, or even my own thinking, and hadn’t quite figured out how to begin. There was something about Harvor's piece that wouldn’t let go, as I started pouring through photographs and half-faded memories.

Still, I knew it wasn’t a new idea. Vancouver writer George Bowering had done a version of the same a decade earlier as a collaboration with his late wife, Angela, resulting in a series of pieces called "Pictures" from his poetry collection Blonds on Bikes (1997). Their series, instead, focused on each writing a piece on various photographs, some of which they hadn’t previously seen, or knew nothing or little about.

What is it about the past that compels, exploring or even discovering elements of one's own history? There was the American poet Charles Olson's posthumously published memoir on his late father, Post Office: A Memoir of His Father (1975), the memoir Ron Padgett wrote on his late friend, the poet Ted Berrigan, published as Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993), or even the memoir George Bowering wrote on the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe, The Moustache: Memories of Greg Curnoe (1993), where I realized, on the day I was born, the two were sitting with James Reaney in a London kitchen, surrounded by a party. I spent far too much of my twenties and into my thirties focusing on the hardships of growing up, whether real or imagined, through the years of my mother's illnesses, all coming out of the twenty-two years she hadn’t working kidneys, and was living on dialysis. She got quite sick around the time I was four or five, just before they adopted my sister, and her tenuous health was a trauma I have not quite recovered from.

There was the year I turned eleven, and our mother went into hospital on New Year's Day. We didn’t get her back until October. I spent the whole of March break at a friend's house in the village, where they even hosted a surprise birthday party. As I was told later by my friend's mother, my piano teacher, it was also the year of my mother's first failed kidney transplant, with a ten percent chance of her living off the operating table. How does one compete in such a household? I decided quickly: one doesn’t. I quietly taught myself to scrub sinks, do laundry, make meals, mend my father's work shirts.

My parents have stories, but they seem not to tell them. I realized that, for the period these pieces cover, from the mid-1970s to earlier, there would be no one else who could tell these tales to my sister, her children or even my own daughter. How would anyone else know about the abandoned chicken coop that used to live in the corner of the barnyard, or the time we weaned baby raccoons with a bottle? How would his grandchildren know of the time when my father still easily laughed, or crossed his eyes to amuse his wife and her visiting nieces? I've realized that around the time my mother's illness took over, family photographs became a rarity. Family trips soon stopped altogether, which were difficult enough before, considering my father's Scottish Presbyterian work ethic, and the fact of the dairy farm. Who would step into that work for days at a time, let alone any way for him to allow himself to step out? We once drove non-stop from Prince Edward Island back home at the end of a few days away, because he knew that he could. The rest of us were exhausted by the time we pulled into the lane. On the same trip, at a motel in Nova Scotia, my mother said she had to struggle to keep him in bed another hour, meaning he wasn’t up and ready to head out to a quick breakfast and the road until at least 8am. I remember seeing him dressed in the chair at the foot of my bed wondering what the hell he was thinking, and once back on the road, the stops we couldn’t make because it was too early, and nothing was open yet, including the World's Largest Lobster Trap in the distance.

What makes up home? Home is a series of recollections, of distances, as easily remembered as mis-remembered, and a blending of events that can sometimes never be confirmed. As Harvor wrote, "As for childhood, most university students don’t write about it at all; it's still much too close to them." Well, why would they? There is something about distance that allows a particular kind of perspective. Is it any accident, perhaps, that this project started suddenly, mid-way through my year in Edmonton? Arguably my first time away from home, I wrote the bulk of these pieces in the Garneau Pub on 109th Avenue, later showing sections to a friend over lunch at the High Level Diner. My subject matter may no longer be temporally close, but neither too distant, either. And why write as a "memoir" instead of calling them "prose poems"? I want these stories not to be misunderstood; I want them to be seen as what I remember, what I believe to be true, from my vantage point of some three decades later, and thousands of miles. It felt like reclaiming something that had been far away for a very long time, but no longer. It felt like bringing out the good out from underneath all the bad that came later, overshadowing so much of what had happened before.

related link: list of individual pieces on-line from "house: a (tiny) memoir"

house: a (tiny) memoir
I remember in the card and magazine store in the Brookdale Mall, small and separated from my mother, suddenly lost among the familiar figurines and comic book rack. How was I to know she was but one row over? I panicked, and turned into the mall, crying out, but couldn’t find her. Why was I so afraid? A quiet Saturday strip mall in a border town, doing our weekly groceries. I knew about safety, and talking to strangers. Eventually, a mall security guard found me, from the woman who found first and then passed me along, and took me back to his office, giving me some trinket in a vending machines plastic ball to keep me distracted, until my mother showed. Why did I panic so quickly, and so much? What is it about being lost, even in a place that was already so familiar? I knew everywhere I was, the entire time.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

There was the Christmas we got the blue organ; my mother, like all of her siblings and most of my cousins, had taken piano lessons, but we hadn’t yet ours. I remember playing it, poking it. Turning it on and the hum through my fingers, invading my ears; the minute or two it took just to warm up. It sat in the corner of the living room a long time, and then quietly disappeared. Where did it go?

It was there and as suddenly, gone. Or did it linger for years catching dust, simply falling out of my recollection through months of disuse?


house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

The girl next door and I would often climb up a tree and onto the roof of one of the sheds when we were around ten. My father would always yell at us to get off the sloping hot tin. I wonder if this is why he tore the shed down?

When he finally went in to clean it out, he found, under the layers of planks, a number of rusted horseshoes, metal milk cans, and various buckets and spigots, left over from his father’s sugar bush operation. There is a small rise in the bush once a mound of rotting wood once a sugar shack, gone well before I arrived, and my grandfather would produce maple syrup.

In the days still my father ate a bowl of syrup with a slice of bread to mop it.

The year I was thirteen, my father cleaning out the shed later took me days out to the bush, tapping trees and collecting the sap as it ran, between the beginning of warm weather and the end of the snow. When he boiled the pot on the stove, it needed to boil two-thirds or more out to syrup, and the steam kept setting off the smoke detector in the downstairs hall.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

There was the winter when everything froze; Christmas Eve, and the whole yard was ice. I remember, because of how it crunched when I stepped, depending on how much below was soft snow, a coating of sheer ice over buildings and trees, across driveway and lawn. We kept close to the house, if we went out at all, and as much as I liked it, I didn’t envy him the walk to the barn, whether he wanted or not.

He was always worried the pipes would freeze, and sometimes they did, cutting water off from the house; the well just behind the barn, and pipes that came in through the underground from one end of the yard to the next.


house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

When he remodeled the kitchen, removing wood stove and adding new cupboards, he turned large kitchen into smaller with office and laundry room, a space to leave boots. I remember it as the time that my mother would let me eat cereal in the living room, so I could watch my cartoons uninterrupted. This was 1974, and my mother and I on a Saturday morning watching cartoons as my father and hired man tore through the kitchen, and I tore through my multiple bowls of Count Chocula.

She would let me do that, or Boo Berry or Trix, but drew the line always at Cap’n Crunch; just what was the difference? The cereal I could only get at her own mother’s house, up in Ottawa.

I always wanted the toys in the box, but she never let me order away, and didn’t always pay attention to just what I was missing (the pan-flute, individual flutes in the boxes you could line up in a row; I had only the longest one, yellow, and shortest one, red. How can you make any song up with those?). I had to wait for my twenties to order away, when I could write my own cheques.

The kitchen, when I was still two years away from a sister. At that point, she wasn’t even a glint.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

The circle of grass that made up a part of the yard, as the lane followed down from dirt road into lower case “b,” curving between house and garage, shed, barnyard and barn, gas pump and shed, before turning back. Where he used to snowblow the yard in a mound and a mountain sometimes two storeys tall, if the snow was enough. It was perfect for snowforts and sliding, toddler sister in pink snowsuit bulk and I throwing snowballs at whoever came by, whether neighbour or hired man. Cold so cold cutting eyebrows like hot knives and dropping chimney smoke low to the rolling ground, and the end of a day always hot chocolate thick marshmallows, waiting.


house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

I remember our dog Heather. She was pregnant, a black lab mix that our two other dogs brought home around 1972; Snoopy, the mutt, and Sandy, our Collie. My mother used to tell stories of hating Snoopy, because he kept peeing in the kitchen, even after she’d felt sorry for him and finally let him back in from the cold. We had no idea where she came from, just appeared with the others and stayed. My father suggested someone had probably driven her out into the country and released her, as we were just a couple of miles south of the 417 highway.

Just what we needed, a pregnant stray pooch, but somehow we kept her. I think he’s always had a soft spot for dogs, keeping a single black lab most of the years since. She had her puppies in the barn, all given away when they could (apparently three dogs at once was enough). Within a year or so, three would go down to her one, and she would poke her right eye purple with a stick, permanently blinding her.

I don’t remember what happened to the two other dogs; they simply removed themselves from my memory.


house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir
I remember my toddler self when small enough to ease between slats around the front verandah, circumventing the baby gate my mother had across the top of the steps. I remember the snow fence around the back yard, and how Snoopy, my dog, had dug a hole under a break to slip free. When I slipped from the porch, small enough to edge across the side to the steps instead of jumping down to the ground, my mother was beside herself. When they finally found me, I was in one of the fields, tending to a cow that was sick, and having difficulty standing. I remember the crunch and the give as the wild grass finally tore, that I pulled from the pasture to pile under her snout.

house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir



When my mother wanted to get my father’s attention in the back field, planting or plowing or picking stones, she would put a single white bedsheet on the clothesline in the back yard. It was usually when someone had turned into the front lane, a neighbour, a salesman or otherwise friend, but half the time he had seen the truck pull in, and was already turning into the back lane to return. My mother, herself, caught between answering the front door and putting the sheet on the line. These were the days before cellphones.

Whenever a vehicle that my grandmother didn’t know would turn into our lane, she would call the house wondering who. This would drive my mother crazy, something I wouldn’t fully realize for years. At least when the corn rotated to the front, she wouldn’t be able to see. Where started this insistence to meddle? I don’t think she got over losing her first child. Not ever.

A year and a half before my father, his mother gave birth to a girl that my father claims no knowledge of. There was even a newspaper entry, Baby Girl McLennan, left with clippings in a small wooden box. She lived less a day. Originally, when I was not yet in my teens, my grandmother told me the girl’s name, but I no longer remember it. There isn’t anyone else left alive who would know.

My great-aunt Harriet, a nurse, was there but there was a problem with the delay of the doctor, telling them not to let the baby come until he had arrived. Is this something I remember properly? I think this is something my mother once told me. Who would even have told me?

Later, my father born in the back room of the house my sister now occupies with husband, their children; his father bellowing happily into 1941 phone to his wife’s only sibling. When are you coming over to see my son?


house: a (tiny) memoir