"There should be nothing here I don't remember...."

 

364 Christleton Avenue

"There should be nothing here I don't remember."

In my mind, it is always there: my place of safety,
of deep peace and familiar, reliable routine,
the hours noted by the metal clock
on the kitchen windowsill, the cottage so quiet,
its tick-tock could be heard
in every room.

When I was small, Grandma watched me
while my parents worked. After we moved away,
I spent my summers there.

My grandma moved so peacefully
through her mornings.
I woke to the slap of the hose
hitting the wall of the cottage
as she watered everything down
against the coming heat,
lowering the canvas awnings
like sleepy eyelids
over the front windows.

When I wandered outside, I'd sink
into the hammock under the weeping willow -
the willow tree of remembrance,
under which I read and dreamed away
the summer mornings of my youth,
as Grandma cleaned her kitchen,
started things cooking for lunch,
perhaps making fruit preserves:
stewed rhubarb that we'd eat with toast.
My bathing suit, draped over the clothesline,
was still damp from my last swim, 
when I pulled it back on for the next.

Sometimes, Grandma hosted canasta games
in the afternoon,
the ladies arriving in hats and white gloves,
card tables set up in the small living room,
tea in fancy cups and saucers, dainty sandwiches,
the ladies, all from the prairies, remembering
Saskatoon berries - no western berry
ever measured up, in memory, to the berries
of their young womanhood.
They called each other by their formal names
 - "Mrs. Marr, Miss Hicks", - and my grandpa
was referred to as "Mr. Marr", always.
It was said he never saw
my grandma's naked body
out of her flannel nightgown.
What horror for this modest,
turn-of-the-last-century woman to find herself,
at the end of her life, a body in a bed,
Depends being changed by strangers,
no modesty, no privacy left,
each change a violation.
She withdrew deep within herself,
waiting for the release of death.

"There should be nothing here I don't remember,"
and so, each time I go back to Kelowna,
I make that trip down Christleton Avenue,
to make sure the bedrock of my childhood
is still there. It is covered with stucco now,  
but the small houses along that street remain,
have not been knocked down and replaced
by giant houses. Yet.

The street still bears the reassuring imprint
of familiarity, the repository of my childhood
and young girlhood memories,
the place I return to in memory again and again.
Whenever I think of childhood, it is to this small cottage
that I come, the slap of water
against the side of the house
that woke me every morning, all the years
I spent my summers there,
smell of lake-scent and roses,  sweet pea and pinks.
I can almost see, in earlier years,  that four year old
still hanging on the front gate, 
under the arched rose trellis,
waiting for her parents to arrive
in the falling twilight to take her home.
And remember the nights
they did not come.

Inspired by "Looking for the Gulf Motel" by Richard Blanco, and Wild Writing by Laurie Wagner