Memories (the bittersweet kind) as Inspiration

I spent a good chunk of today transcribing an interview conducted last fall with a lovely woman, a retired psychologist and amateur poet. Throughout our time together, she shared her memories of growing up in Beaurepaire Village, which for all intents and purposes is known today as Beaconsfield. Beaconsfield is a suburb of Montreal and fully built up now, but when she was growing up there in the '50s, it was country. Summers were spent weaving forts from tall grasses, dodging red-winged black birds, swimming in Lac St. Louis and learning to milk a neighbour's cow. Wintertime meant skating on the frozen lake and tobogganing down local hills. This idyllic childhood instilled in her an unshakeable need to be around nature. For years she had a home in NDG and loved it, but only "survived" it because she could escape to the country on weekends. Today she lives further out of the city and her backyard is filled with marshes and racoons and birds and sunsets.

She and her sister moved into the house her parents' built sometime around 1947, and though it was a modest Cape Cod cottage, they lived on about a half-acre of land, on which her Dad tended vegetables and roses and trees of all sorts. Her parents sold the house when she was in her late teens to a couple that kept up the garden, but the house was sold again and a few years ago when the house was on the market, she visited it. She wandered through the house, saying goodbye to each room and later was given a tour of the grounds. "But where are all the flowers? Where are the trees?" she asked the owner. He explained that he had taken a back-ho to the land, clearing it of all the gardens. She told me she knew then it wasn't home anymore.

Not long after, she was giving her first public poetry reading and as it happened the venue was a cafe located on the corner of her old street. She decided to stop by the house beforehand to see what had become of it. But then the house was boarded up, abandoned because of a badly damaged foundation. The address was gone, replaced by a piece of paper stuck to the door, which was half covered by enormous drifts of snow. It was the saddest thing in the world, she told me, but added that it prompted her to go home and write one of her best poems, which she called 'I Wasn't Prepared."

I was very moved by her story and felt privileged then as now to have been on the receiving end of her memories. Hearing the interview again, I got to thinking about what it is about some of our most painful, or at least bittersweet, memories that allow us to produce work that can be so satisfying. I don't think it always works out that way, but there are times when the feelings are so clear and clean that there seems to be nothing between them and the paper or canvas. At those times, it's all you can do to keep up with what needs to come out of you. I'm not sure if it's because in those moments, there's no tolerance for hesitation? The memory is so visual and acute that it's in one place - your head and heart (OK, that's two) and what it needs is to be put somewhere else, figured out, held up to the light for a closer look. It's hard to put it into words, but if you've been there you know exactly what I'm trying to say.

And so, memories of pink stucco houses and gardens, and rose bushes and towering weeping birch, and attics that hold bikes that come down only when there's no snow lining the curb. Rhubarb dipped in sugar and chives yanked and eaten, tanning with water, tin foil and Bain de Soleil. Sore throats painted with blue tincture. TVs with the "works in a drawer" and no remote and one dial phone between seven people.

On Watching Stuff Grow

The last couple of summers I've taken advantage of having a full-sun balcony to grow cherry tomatoes. I like choosing the small plants and then transplanting them to a bigger pot with better dirt. This summer, better dirt - which sounds like an oxymoron - meant mixing in a bag of earth that came with manure already mixed in. What a stroke of genius! For about a buck more, your potting soil comes complete with cow poop. Someone told me that adding crushed eggshells to the mix was also a good idea, so in they go. Pansies, or what's left of them after the squirrels have had their way, a temperamental hibiscus that sprouts both yellow and pink blossoms, a basel plant and a couple of other varieties I can't remember round out my mini-garden. All to say, tending to and watching them (mostly) flourish gives me a great sense of satisfaction. I like the fact that they need my tending to, but not so much that it feels like work. I like that I can water them, deadhead them now and again, and that the rest is out of my hands. It's like watching spring buds burst uncontrollably after a long, grey winter - you wouldn't want to force that genii back in the bottle even if you could. (Have your way with me springtime, work your magic!) Watching the changes that take place in my summer plants slows life down to a pleasant pace. Growing something feels like I'm contributing something good, albeit it on a tiny scale, to the world. At a time when violence, cynicism, rhetoric or celebrity banality feels pervasive - and strangely fascinating at times, I'm sorry to admit - there's something timeless, tender and hopeful about helping something along as it grows.