When I was a child living near the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, I never saw deer lying on the graves. Never saw peacocks, or peahens, away from the lawns of Beacon Hill Park. Later, when my family lived at Royal Oak, we sometimes watched deer on the trail by our house, maybe heading for the apple orchards still productive in the area, the ones now turned into subdivisions. Never bears. Sometimes pheasants.
But it’s different now. I pulled off Cook Street onto one of the quiet side-streets to park while I did some errands and there was a peahen with her half-grown chicks. There was a peacock on a fence on Menzies Street, some distance from the Park. And deer? They are everywhere. John and I did our ritual walk in the Cemetery while I told the same stories of riding my bike as a six-year old on the quiet lanes, of listening for the buried creeks under the soft grass and graves, of hovering over the men working on gravestones at Stewart Monumental Works at the top of our street, watching them carve the names of the dead into pink stone or grey. Once my brothers buried me in the sand hoardings under the building–I imagined that it was dust from the stones themselves but learned later that it was sand used to make cement for installations — and how I had to lie there for hours until they remembered me and dug me out. The elderly woman walking with her husband in the Cemetery was telling these stories for at least the tenth time and somehow she was still the girl waiting for her brothers to return. Smelling the iodine sting of the ocean, she remembered Saturday mornings when her mother would give each child a bag and ask them to walk the shore at Ross Bay and collect bark for the wood burner in the kitchen. And she remembered leaving her teddy bear Georgie on Moss Rocks after an afternoon lying among the shooting stars and camas and her father going out in the dark to find him.
I’ve been walkin’ in my sleep
Countin’ troubles ‘stead of countin’ sheep
Where the years went I can’t say;
I just turned around and they’ve gone away
I know I’ve linked to this song before but I was the woman humming it as she walked the Odgen Point breakwater, I was the one so filled with memories of childhood, and later, as we drove past Faithful Street, down Memorial Crescent to find a place a park, I was the one quiet, briefly, in my seat as we passed the old familiar houses. And this song knows about memories. It knows about worn stuffed bears lying in a crevice in the rocks, patient, while a father searched with a flashlight, the family dog to keep him company.
The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It’s when the darkness rolls away
...Theresa Kishkan 