home

Yesterday, late afternoon, we returned home after spending 5 nights in Gatineau. Each day was full: swimming in Meech Lake, walking, making large meals, reading stories to the young grandsons, looking at A’s stamp album in which he detailed each stamp (it took awhile but what a lot he knows about geography and history at age 9…), helping plant the tomato seedlings in between pours of rain.

I was unpacking groceries and putting together a simple supper when John came downstairs to say that there was something beautiful on the upper deck, the one off our bedroom. While we were away, and while the cat was being cared for down the coast, a robin had built a nest on the elbow of downspout by the sunroom window.

You can’t see the perfect bowl, ready for eggs, but you can see the casual drape of lichen (and the little raw area above the blue window where the bear tore off the trim last weekend when we were in Kamloops for a few days). We used to have robins nesting around our house, on angles of grapevines under eaves, above a window in the printshop, on a beam carrying wisteria over the patio, and once on a railing by our front door. We’d stop using those doors and windows, delighting in the care the parents took as they kept the eggs warm, then the nestlings fed, then, when we were lucky, we’d see the young leaving the nest, encouraged by their parents perched in nearby lilacs.

I wondered if this nest was made by one of the descendants of those early robins, the ones before the cat (who is 10 years old), and I thought how careful they are in their choice of location: an east-facing downspout, sheltered by the eaves, looking out at the morning sun. There was no sign of the robins last night, though, and (more importantly) no eggs in the perfect bowl of dry grasses.

I walked around, thinking and remembering. Remembering the robins, their young. Our own young, their voices in the twilight. The young in Gatineau, calling in French and in English, wondering if the trampoline could be set up now, the swings on the big maples in the front yard. I thought about the work ahead — potting up more tomatoes today and tomorrow, replanting the arugula (the first pots have already provided us with spring salads and are now going to seed), coaxing the tendrils of sweetpeas to the netting I have wrapped around railings behind them. And yes, leaning down to smell the first yellow daylilies, as sweet as honey, a bee already sleeping in the throat.

Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
–Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space