Almost Home Again
I was taking a walk down by the water. It was a fall day, late afternoon, and the light was just starting to put on that Kodachrome glow it’s so good at around that time of year. There had a been a couple days of rain, and the grass had an eye of green again after a summer of brown, and the few trees we have on the west coast that can actually make a show of the season were doing their best. It must have been a Saturday, because normally I would have been at school at that hour, putting together my classes and sweating over how unprepared I was yet again. Why I was alone, I can’t remember, but my guess would be that my wife had better things to occupy her time. Ours is a long marriage, and we figured out at some point that we don’t have to do everything together.
It’s a good walk, with the mountains to the south and lots of shipping traffic to look at on the strait between. I passed dog walkers by the dozen and para-gliders hanging above the cliff face, catching the updraft that comes in off the water. Pretty interesting stuff most days, and time disappears just the way you want it to when you feel you don’t have enough. I left the crowd behind and started following the long bay in front of the cemetery where a lot of my relatives are buried, my father among them. Years ago the town built a seawall along the shore after a winter storm wore away enough of the land to expose a few coffins. Whenever I think of that story, I imagine the dead with their feet exposed and dangling over the water as though their blankets are too short for their beds.
The bay ends near the house where I grew up, on a short blip of a road with no more than six homes fronting it, and, even though I don’t have to, when I walk that way, I tend to pass by the place, out of habit mostly. I might cast a glance up at my bedroom, see if they’ve finally bothered to fix the window I put a hole in with my BB gun. The old man’s roses still line the front path, and I like to make sure that the renters are looking after them. The house has some decent feng shui, lined up the way it is on the points of the compass. Rising sun comes in the kitchen, and the front porch catches its exit perfectly. As a kid I’d look out my bedroom around the same time of year, when they used to burn slash in Sooke, and the sky at sunset was right out of the Inferno.
I must have had my head down this time when I passed, though, because I heard something that startled me, and I turned just in time to see an apple from the tree in the back yard drop from the roof of the garage to the ground. They’re big apples, Kings, and it always seemed like the whole neighbourhood jumped whenever one of those bruisers fell. The sound was more than a little familiar to me, and I stopped where I was on the sidewalk, trying to hold onto it a while longer. We were in the house for over twenty years, and every fall until my parents sold it, I would stand underneath that tree and use my father’s invention to bring down as many apples as there were to pick. It was a neat rig and simple, too, just a long cedar pole with a clothes hanger that had been bent into a large “O” fixed to the end. My father had sewn a cloth bag to the hanger’s rim, and all I had to do was reach up, give a little pull, and the apple dropped right into the bag, sweet as pie. Sometimes, if I was lazy or clumsy and pulled at the wrong time, the apple would fall, usually hitting the garage roof on its way down. It was a terrible thing when one did, just to think of the damage a drop like that would do, the waste. I used to wince when it happened, as though it was happening to me, and maybe it was, because more often than not my father would cuff me a good one on the ear for it.
When I saw that apple hit the ground on my walk that day, the taste of it rushed into my mouth all at once, how crisp they used to be and the gush of juice that always exploded in my mouth when I’d bite into one. Damn, I thought. I’d like to have one of those. I guess I was thinking I might never know what it felt like to eat an apple from that tree again, and the idea of “never” struck me as sad, sadder than usual, and the next minute I found myself knocking on the door of my former home with the notion that I would ask whoever was living there if they’d mind my picking one for old times sake. Even a windfall, I was thinking, I didn’t care, and before I had time to reconsider, a girl about sixteen answered.
“Hi,” I said. “I grew up here a long time ago, and I was wondering if you might let me pick an apple from the tree in the back. I saw them when I was walking, and I just had a . . . ” the word that was on my lips at that moment was ‘desire,’ which seemed the wrong thing for a man of my years to say to a teenage girl, so I said “ . . . hankering,” instead.
“That’s so cool!” the girl said. “You want to come in and look around?”
“Yes,” I said, so quickly that I have to believe some other part of my brain answered, the part that says people normally don’t get to do this, not ever, and I should just shut up and take her at her word. “Yes, I would, if you don’t mind.”
The next thing I knew, I was standing in the hallway, far too aware of my job as a teacher in a local high school, an English teacher at that, talking to an attractive girl and telling her as fast as I could get the words out where I worked, who my children were, my wife’s name, the courses I taught, my great love of literature, anything I could think of to assure her she was in no danger, that her mother who was probably due home any minute was in no danger and that it had been lovely seeing the place and thank you very much.
“Which was your bedroom?” she asked when I finished.
“The front one,” I said, “with the balcony.”
“That’s mine!” she screamed. “You have to see it!”
I have no memory of going up the stairs themselves, but anxious as I must have been standing in my old room, I did take the time to look up at the ceiling to see if the singular arrangement of cracks in the lath and plaster still formed the shape of a scimitar that used to occupy my fantasies when I was young. It was. And I looked for the pencilled signature I’d left in my closet before we moved. It was there, too. On the hall landing as we descended, I looked through the red prism of the stained glass and saw once again a hundred crimson versions of the neighbour’s house. I saw everything and nothing: the living room where I watched the news of the sixties flash by in black and white, the dining room fireplace where my sister and I hung our stockings. It was all too much and I was too unprepared. The last thing I did was to follow the girl into the basement where she produced a tool from Lee Valley, a telescoping aluminium pole with a cloth bag at the end.
“You won’t believe how easy it is,” she said.
We left the house through the basement door, the same one I had learned to jimmy open on nights when no one was home and I had forgotten my key. Outside, the air had turned a little cold, a taste of October to come. I could have been ten, sent into the backyard by my mother to pick a dozen for a pie. Someone drew the blinds in the neighbour’s house where I used to babysit. An empty freighter was churning the waters far out in the strait, its propeller like a big bass drum. Under the apple tree, I looked up in a daze, reached high into the branches and chose a big one. I was almost home again before I took a bite.
I was taking a walk down by the water. It was a fall day, late afternoon, and the light was just starting to put on that Kodachrome glow it’s so good at around that time of year. There had a been a couple days of rain, and the grass had an eye of green again after a summer of brown, and the few trees we have on the west coast that can actually make a show of the season were doing their best. It must have been a Saturday, because normally I would have been at school at that hour, putting together my classes and sweating over how unprepared I was yet again. Why I was alone, I can’t remember, but my guess would be that my wife had better things to occupy her time. Ours is a long marriage, and we figured out at some point that we don’t have to do everything together.
It’s a good walk, with the mountains to the south and lots of shipping traffic to look at on the strait between. I passed dog walkers by the dozen and para-gliders hanging above the cliff face, catching the updraft that comes in off the water. Pretty interesting stuff most days, and time disappears just the way you want it to when you feel you don’t have enough. I left the crowd behind and started following the long bay in front of the cemetery where a lot of my relatives are buried, my father among them. Years ago the town built a seawall along the shore after a winter storm wore away enough of the land to expose a few coffins. Whenever I think of that story, I imagine the dead with their feet exposed and dangling over the water as though their blankets are too short for their beds.
The bay ends near the house where I grew up, on a short blip of a road with no more than six homes fronting it, and, even though I don’t have to, when I walk that way, I tend to pass by the place, out of habit mostly. I might cast a glance up at my bedroom, see if they’ve finally bothered to fix the window I put a hole in with my BB gun. The old man’s roses still line the front path, and I like to make sure that the renters are looking after them. The house has some decent feng shui, lined up the way it is on the points of the compass. Rising sun comes in the kitchen, and the front porch catches its exit perfectly. As a kid I’d look out my bedroom around the same time of year, when they used to burn slash in Sooke, and the sky at sunset was right out of the Inferno.
I must have had my head down this time when I passed, though, because I heard something that startled me, and I turned just in time to see an apple from the tree in the back yard drop from the roof of the garage to the ground. They’re big apples, Kings, and it always seemed like the whole neighbourhood jumped whenever one of those bruisers fell. The sound was more than a little familiar to me, and I stopped where I was on the sidewalk, trying to hold onto it a while longer. We were in the house for over twenty years, and every fall until my parents sold it, I would stand underneath that tree and use my father’s invention to bring down as many apples as there were to pick. It was a neat rig and simple, too, just a long cedar pole with a clothes hanger that had been bent into a large “O” fixed to the end. My father had sewn a cloth bag to the hanger’s rim, and all I had to do was reach up, give a little pull, and the apple dropped right into the bag, sweet as pie. Sometimes, if I was lazy or clumsy and pulled at the wrong time, the apple would fall, usually hitting the garage roof on its way down. It was a terrible thing when one did, just to think of the damage a drop like that would do, the waste. I used to wince when it happened, as though it was happening to me, and maybe it was, because more often than not my father would cuff me a good one on the ear for it.
When I saw that apple hit the ground on my walk that day, the taste of it rushed into my mouth all at once, how crisp they used to be and the gush of juice that always exploded in my mouth when I’d bite into one. Damn, I thought. I’d like to have one of those. I guess I was thinking I might never know what it felt like to eat an apple from that tree again, and the idea of “never” struck me as sad, sadder than usual, and the next minute I found myself knocking on the door of my former home with the notion that I would ask whoever was living there if they’d mind my picking one for old times sake. Even a windfall, I was thinking, I didn’t care, and before I had time to reconsider, a girl about sixteen answered.
“Hi,” I said. “I grew up here a long time ago, and I was wondering if you might let me pick an apple from the tree in the back. I saw them when I was walking, and I just had a . . . ” the word that was on my lips at that moment was ‘desire,’ which seemed the wrong thing for a man of my years to say to a teenage girl, so I said “ . . . hankering,” instead.
“That’s so cool!” the girl said. “You want to come in and look around?”
“Yes,” I said, so quickly that I have to believe some other part of my brain answered, the part that says people normally don’t get to do this, not ever, and I should just shut up and take her at her word. “Yes, I would, if you don’t mind.”
The next thing I knew, I was standing in the hallway, far too aware of my job as a teacher in a local high school, an English teacher at that, talking to an attractive girl and telling her as fast as I could get the words out where I worked, who my children were, my wife’s name, the courses I taught, my great love of literature, anything I could think of to assure her she was in no danger, that her mother who was probably due home any minute was in no danger and that it had been lovely seeing the place and thank you very much.
“Which was your bedroom?” she asked when I finished.
“The front one,” I said, “with the balcony.”
“That’s mine!” she screamed. “You have to see it!”
I have no memory of going up the stairs themselves, but anxious as I must have been standing in my old room, I did take the time to look up at the ceiling to see if the singular arrangement of cracks in the lath and plaster still formed the shape of a scimitar that used to occupy my fantasies when I was young. It was. And I looked for the pencilled signature I’d left in my closet before we moved. It was there, too. On the hall landing as we descended, I looked through the red prism of the stained glass and saw once again a hundred crimson versions of the neighbour’s house. I saw everything and nothing: the living room where I watched the news of the sixties flash by in black and white, the dining room fireplace where my sister and I hung our stockings. It was all too much and I was too unprepared. The last thing I did was to follow the girl into the basement where she produced a tool from Lee Valley, a telescoping aluminium pole with a cloth bag at the end.
“You won’t believe how easy it is,” she said.
We left the house through the basement door, the same one I had learned to jimmy open on nights when no one was home and I had forgotten my key. Outside, the air had turned a little cold, a taste of October to come. I could have been ten, sent into the backyard by my mother to pick a dozen for a pie. Someone drew the blinds in the neighbour’s house where I used to babysit. An empty freighter was churning the waters far out in the strait, its propeller like a big bass drum. Under the apple tree, I looked up in a daze, reached high into the branches and chose a big one. I was almost home again before I took a bite.
