The Beautiful Beaver Valley
THE HOUSE was Mom’s idea.
My childhood Sunday afternoons were spent driving the back roads of apple country, looking for land to buy amongst the seven thousand acres of orchard that filled a valley on the shores of Georgian Bay. Dad worked as a foreman in a local apple packing plant, a job with too much responsibility and too little money, and Mom looked after the four of us kids and, at harvest time, helped my grandfather pick apples. Dad yearned for an orchard of his own, and finally one day, Mom found it.
With a sagging roof and dark windows, the white farmhouse looked abandoned. The front porch hadn’t seen a coat of paint in decades and the yard was covered in brambles. Though there was no “For Sale” sign, she knocked on the door. An elderly bachelor greeted her with apprehension, and later, appraised of her desire, sent her away.
Undeterred, she returned a few days later, this time with some baking and her youngest son in tow. The man’s fear of my mother diminished at the sight of my brother’s cherubic face. He accepted her boterkoek peace offering and let them in.
E.M. lived in four rooms on the main floor. Alone for many years, he’d made a path through the dust from his bedroom to the kitchen, and was disinclined to use the fridge. Food sat on a table in the middle of the dining room, shared with squirrels and mice. Wind blew through the rippled glass windows and the wallpaper curled around the corners of the room. He figured she’d want to tear it down, but she shook her head.
– I’ve got four kids, three boys and a girl. They need space to run.
This was a fix up project, she explained. The house would stay.
My brother found a tiny black rocking chair, and sat down. The old bachelor smiled then, and told Mom it seemed that the chair had a new owner. He sold the house to her, and to my Dad and uncle ten acres of old, gnarly apple trees, seventy acres of swampy pasture and a hardwood bush lot. Their friends thought they’d lost their minds. They named the farm “Carpe Diem” and defiantly erected a homemade sign near the mailbox to announce their intention to seize the day.
Uninhabitable
That September, while we were in school, Mom set to work making the new house livable. She cleaned, painted and patched up holes for six weeks. The squirrels, which had stored nuts in the attic for decades, pouted from the yard outside and began a twenty-five year war for repossession. To this day, when my parents leave on holidays, their descendants try to re-enter through any possible crack, chewing holes in the wood clapboard siding in order to store up the black walnuts they’d gathered from the yard.
The house, it turned out, was once two dwellings. The hardwood flooring in the living room runs north south, in the dining room, east west. The wiring had to be repaired, because when it was originally installed, the family matriarch, convinced electricity was the work of the devil, had snuck downstairs in the middle of the night and attempted to yank it all out. Wires hung dangerously exposed for decades.
In October, we moved from a large red brick home in the village to the farmhouse in the country. My former bedroom was twenty feet long, with transom windows over the doors and a large window onto the yard below. My new bedroom was barely big enough for my bed, and had a sloping ceiling that made it impossible to hang my New Kids on the Block poster anywhere but the back of the door. I could hardly complain though, because all three of my brothers had to share a room, their beds lined up in a row like an orphanage. The stairs creaked and groaned under the weight of our boisterous, young family. Occasionally we felt the swoosh of bats in the dark, which led Dad to sleep with a tennis racket. Despite its quirks, we settled into our new home. My parents were happy. Like the house, their lives brimmed with possibility. We kids fed off their optimism. On Christmas morning, I awoke to see four inches of snow on a tall, skinny pine tree right outside my window. I felt as though it was nature’s present, just for me, a sign I’d be safe in my new home.
Me and my bros circa 1989
Recreational Vehicles
When our neighbor was still a bachelor, before he settled down with the local pharmacist, he showed up one evening with a new toy: a shiny red ATV.
We kids scrambled for a turn racing through the old orchard. Dad was working in construction during the day and pruning the orchard before dark, so we zoomed around him to keep him company. A barn cat that’d taken a shine to Dad followed him from tree to tree. She didn’t care for the noise, and decided she’d be safer on Dad’s shoulders, so he pruned with the creature wrapped around his neck like a furry black stole.
After a few trips around the perimeter of the farm, my brother begged our neighbor to drive. Sensing his confidence, after a cursory lesson he was allowed. My brother’s face radiated with joy as he lurched forward and spun around the yard. It didn’t look too hard. I wanted a turn, too.
However, I quickly found that sitting in the driver’s seat felt quite different from clutching onto the soft middle of our neighbor. My skinny arms clutched the handles and terror filled my chest. But I had to prove that I, too, could dominate this bulk of rubber and steel.
I released the clutch, jerked forward and revved the engine, shooting off down the gravel lane, headed straight for the road. I was driving faster than I wanted, but I couldn’t figure out how to slow down. In the distance I heard our mild-mannered neighbor yelling, “Turn!” so I yanked the handle and tried to steer back into the yard. I overcompensated and the machine swiveled on two wheels. Knowing I’d lost control, somehow I leapt off the sweaty vinyl seat and the machine careened into the marshy ditch.
Fearing I was about to get yelled at, I attempted to right it. My brother ran to help, but it was no use. Smoke or steam wafted up from the underbelly of the machine and I knew I was in deep trouble. But, to my surprise, nobody scolded me. I was worried it might have been one of those occasions where my parents quietly stewed before building up to a thunderous reproach, but nothing happened. Our neighbor stared at his hissing ATV and my parents stared at me.
My brother said, “That’s what you get for letting her drive.”
The Stuff of Life
Mom has an eye for beautiful things. Years of garage sales, auctions and bartering have led to an accumulation of antiques and collectibles. Since the four of us have our own homes, each time she calls to tell me of a new acquisition, I silently panic. When my parents are old, I will be responsible for helping them move. Watching my aunts disperse a lifetime’s worth of my grandmother’s possessions felt like reading a script for a part I would called to play in the future. I’m the oldest, the only daughter; I know what role the universe has assigned me.
One summer evening while watching the sunset from the porch, I gently suggest downsizing. I wonder aloud if a newer house might be better for Dad’s breathing. He wheezes every morning. Allergies, asthma, plaster walls and a damp basement have wreaked havoc on his lungs.
She looks horrified at my insinuations that the house,herhouse, is a liability.
– It’s just that I can’t stop sneezing, Mom. When I lie down, it’s hard to breathe because my nose is running.
I get the feeling I’ve offended her. The next time I visit she tells me she’s bought new pillows.
– They’rehypoallergenic, she says. As though this purchase settles the question of whether or not a move will ever be necessary. As though a new pillow absolves her of responsibility for Dad’s lungs or my sinuses.
I take an anti-histamine before bed and in the morning, switch tactics.
– Dad, have you ever considered becoming a snowbird? I hear Arizona has clean, dry air…
I reason it’s better to actively make choices than be forced to leave your home. I tell them to at leastthinkabout where else they might want to live. Mom sniffs and goes down to fetch the laundry from the basement. Another critter has wormed its way through the stone foundation. She yells for my Dad to come “deal with it.” He smiles and I think, they’ll never leave.Someday I’ll have to haul boxes away and pray there isn’t a nest of snakes in any of them. I imagine a ball of slithery skin hiding amongst old family albums and mason jars.
2018
Sightings
Carpe Diem has been in over half a dozen magazines in the decades since Mom first began to fix up the house and gardens. The first time I became aware of the house as a landmark I was teenager wandering around an art gallery with a boyfriend. I found myself staring at a familiar yellow house with a laundry line running through the back yard.
– That’s my house, I said, incredulous.
– Really? He was bored, probably wondering why we were in an art gallery
and not making out somewhere.
Ever since Mom scraped off the old paint and painted the siding, artists have set their easels on the lawn to capture the home she has brought back from dilapidation. There are several original paintings hanging in the house today, from the old barn, the driving shed and the house to innumerable sketches of her fanciful garden vignettes.
From the first brambles Mom ripped out in ’89, she’s covered almost two acres in perennials. She’s planted over fifty trees, including twenty maples that border the laneway, a rose garden and many other original botanical vignettes. In the spring, the property is an explosion of tulips and irises, followed by peonies, lilies, poppies …
Wedding parties come for photos and Mom makes whimsical arrangements for those desirous of some local color. When her father died, she was only thirty-one. She went to his abandoned garden and dug up one of each perennial, moving each tender bulb from his plot to hers.
But last year, she built a rock wall to divide the garden in two. She’s decided to let a full acre of manicured beds go to seed, ignoring the weeds and allowing the wild plants to take over again.
– It’s too much now, she says.
She’s become enamored with playing pickle ball with the seniors at the community center on weekday mornings.She’sbecome a senior, without warning me first.
– Where am I going to find time for my grandkids if I have to take care of all this?
These Four Walls
The farmhouse has a large footprint, but not all of it was usable when we first moved in. The entire back section of the home was a “summer kitchen” – a large clapboard room where a stove once sat, surrounded by large windows. Above it, an un-insulated attic.
In the years before my parents had the money to make these rooms livable, the six of us were tightly crammed into four small rooms, the central space a square dining room surrounded by eight heavy wooden doors. With green wallpaper and dark paneled walls, this was where we shared our meals. The oak table, still there today, darkly stained by layers of wax and grime, expands to seat about twenty people, plus babies on laps. A rotary telephone used to sit in one corner, and Dad would talk to my uncle every night while we ate dessert, planning out the next day’s work. Afterwards, we’d discuss scandals, secrets and the behavior of the misfits at school.
– Why did the opera singer commit suicide?
– She had cancer.
– When are we getting a pool like the neighbors?
– Never. Pools are expensive. Go jump in the lake. Besides, they’re going into debt for that thing.
And, after any revelation, big or small, no matter what controversy we dissected or debated, inevitably Dad would not leave the table without a warning to all of us:
– This conversation stays within these four walls.
After the renovations, his warning seemed less serious, less literal. A code of honor we were no longer absolutely bound to. We went from a dark intimate room, to a bright open-concept space. Only three of the original doors remain, but years of caution have made secret-keeping a lifelong habit.
These four walls…
Love
I brought a handful boyfriends home to meet my family, but he was the first to drop in at the farm without me. We’d met out west and he was in Ontario for a meeting.
– Maybe I’ll say hello to your parents while I’m in town, he said.
Nonchalant. Gutsy.
A businessman cum-theology student, he was exactly the kind of person I wanted to marry – a philosopher with gumption, someone with heart and ambition.
He showed up one evening at dusk. Dad and the boys were greasing a gun in the backyard. (They insisted there was a rabid skunk in the shed.) Mom was weeding the garden and approached him with a spade.
– She never told us you had an earring.
We married a year later. Over two hundred guests milled about drinking flat beer and homemade wine in the garden, mostly family members but also a tightly wound French aristocrat, an exchange student I’d met on the Seabus and a Ph. D who’d tried to cut in front of me in line at Kinko’s, and later morphed into a friend. Most of the old apple trees have been replaced with dwarf varieties but one old Red Astrachan was lit up with small white lights. Their soft glow lit an improvised stage where the kids sang songs and the grown-ups proposed toast after toast to the future.
Wedding Tree
Siblings Now
This past Thanksgiving, the family gathered once again in the garden and waited as Dad hooked up a tractor and wagon for a tour of the orchard. From the house we followed the garden path through the woods to “Bunny’s Hollow”– a grove of chestnut trees and raspberry bushes that used to be the farm dump. In ’89, my brothers and I uncovered antique prams, wooden chests full of black and white photographs, wheat mills and all kinds of other treasures of dubious value. We spent hours combing through the debris, rushing back to Mom with spectacles, glass medicine jars and cast iron milk jugs.
The orchard today begins at the road, but twenty-five years ago the fields were barren and brown. Drainage tiles were installed, enormous black bolts of plastic that sat waiting to be buried underground, the foundation that would make an orchard feasible.
After the clay soil was tilled, dozens of people came to help plant the first rootstock. My brothers and I passed out sucker branches while the adults planted or grafted, shuffling low to the ground, dipping the tender shoots in powder and tucking them firmly in the soil.
Once the roots were established, someone would cut a one-inch “T” into the tender bark, grafting in the variety and wrapping the wound with elastic. The deer ate some of the baby trees, so Dad enlisted our help scattering human hair and tiny bars of hotel soap throughout the orchard. When his deterrents failed, and the whole enterprise was at risk, he allowed hunters to set up blinds in the fencerow, and the new orchard was saved.
Today, some of those first generation trees have already been cut down to make room for newer varieties, grown on stakes like grapes for higher yields. I can still see the fields as they were in the beginning, with killdeer running wildly across the horizon, laughing teenagers smacking one another flirtatiously with bundles of sticks. I close my eyes and there’s my Dad and uncle as young men, proudly surveying their dreams taking shape.
Thanksgiving
The wagon rumbles up hill and from this vantage point the entire valley and the lake come into view. The wooden apple bins with our family’s name stamped on the side are stacked like giant blocks. Behind them is where blackberries grow in July. It’s also where Dad would make me train as a teenager, when I ran cross-country.
– Run up the hill in rubber boots, he advised. On race day, you’ll feel like you’re flying in your running shoes.
Dad cuts the engine and we scramble down to pick a bushel of Northern Spy. These “baking apples” don’t get their color until late in the season, but their sweet aroma seeps into the air, and we are bathed in their delicate perfume.
A second valley and we’re almost at the next concession. Twenty acres from the original hundred were sold to finance the first rootstock and now two luxury homes hide amidst the bush lots. You can’t see them from the side road, but they’re stunning. I’ve never met the people who live there. They’re “city folks”, like I am now, too, and I wonder what they think of their orchard view, the rows of trees we’ve nurtured for a generation.
We say little, my brothers and I, but a wistful nostalgia settles over us as we survey the land, memories tucked into every acre.
–Do you remember when you crashed the dirt bike over there? My brothers ask me.
I do. I still hate motorcycles and their confusing brake system. Though I was relegated to permanent passenger status after multiple accidents, I confess I didn’t mind riding behind my confident brothers. In the summer months, we picked strawberries, weeded tomato beds and pruned apple trees side by side, all day long. We witnessed our parents’ angst over meager crops, and also celebrated their triumphs. Now, we have our own lives and problems.
As kids growing up on the farm, the central conflict of our childhood was of the man-versus-nature variety. Our individual struggles now have little relation to hail or frost or floods. Today, a capricious spring of sunshine and snow hardly registers as a crisis. Our loyalties have shifted, from topping up each other’s bushels at the end of the day, to caring for our own families.
Only one brother became a farmer, joining his wife in the dairy business. Another’s a scientist. And the little boy in the wooden rocking chair went into marketing, putting his childhood persuasive powers to good use. Being here with them, with the familiar breeze blowing through the trees, is bittersweet. The memories are as sharp as pruning shears, but the impossibility of recapturing our childhood breaks my heart.
There is no one to take over the orchard.
Wagon ride
A few years ago Mom and Dad started getting unsolicited offers on the house. People would drive by slowly, turn in the lane and ask if they were considering. Agents in shiny cars would descend on behalf of prospective buyers. When this place is gone, another connection to my brothers will be severed forever. I swallow a lump in my throat and hold my children closely as the wagon rumbles on past old tree forts, grapevine ladders and creeks we’ve all fallen into more than once.
Later, I’ll call my brothers and invite my nieces and nephews over for a giant sleepover.
– Just one night, I say.
I’ll count the sleeping bags lined up on the living room floor and tiptoe through the explosion of clothes and toys. And when I fall asleep, to the sound of cousins laughing, I’ll cherish the echo of my brother’s voices.
Carpe Diem
For Tomorrow
Right away, I’m worried.
They only call on Sunday nights, because it used to be cheaper to call on Sunday nights, and even though it’s 2018 and you can call whenever you want, old habits die hard. A phone call midweek can only mean bad news.
– We put the farm up for sale today.
I’m speechless.
After a few seconds that feels like an eternity, I start to ask questions. Which agent did they go with? Will they sell the entire farm, or just the seventy-seven acres behind the house? Where will they move to?
My Dad’s voice cracks a little.
– It was a great place to raise you kids, he says. But…
– Dad, it’s great. I’m happy for you. Congratulations.
It’s what I’d hoped for, I think. Even over the phone, I can hear the familiar rasp in his voice, the evidence his lung capacity has shrunk. I’d rather have my Dad as long as possible than keep a house for nostalgia’s sake. Robert Bateman, the famous Canadian painter once said, “I’m a conservative, I want to conserve”. I echo the sentiment. I wish I could hold onto my childhood home forever, but really, it’s my Dad I want to conserve. It’s the best decision, but after I’ve said goodnight, I hang up and cry.
It’s just a house, some rolling fields and trees along a fencerow, but I’m not ready for this. As long as its there, part of me is still a kid, and my parents are still vigorous, bright eyed adults, refereeing a ball game behind the barn or chasing down a runaway horse. Saying goodbye to hunting for poofballs in the woods or wild rampions in the valley will be hard. I’m attached by a long cord of memory.
In the nineteen thirties the government of Canada expropriated a craggy elevation of land between Meaford and Owen Sound, the “Irish Block”, for the 4thDivision Land Training Centre. The McNally family was forced to pick up and resettle on our farm. Before that, it belonged to the Wrights and before that it was Crown Land, the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat First Nations. We borrowed it, and now another family will borrow it. The mistake was believing it could be forever.
I doubt the new owners will keep the house, and I can’t blame them. It’s draughty and taking the steep steps downstairs to the bathroom in the middle of the night is treacherous. I know that the farmhouse, even after three decades of loving restoration, will likely fall victim to the bulldozer. But Carpe Diem is only the beginning of an ancient dictum. The second clause is implicit, and perhaps too morbid to post on a sign at the end of the laneway.
For tomorrow we may die, but for now a “SOLD” sign and moving trailer means choosing life. I promise myself to take lots of pictures. I’ll find ways to say goodbye, to make peace with the end of this chapter. And yet, I do not mourn as one without hope. Carpe Diem was home for many years, and our family grew and flourished there, but, like Mom’s perennials, we have strong roots, and can start over anywhere.
