Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

Enzo began a journal, after Labour Day weekend came and went, after Katie chirped through Cheerios and scrambled eggs, onto the school bus.

8 September: The man who lent her the cabin then still lives in the same house in Victoria; she called him, asked if she could use it again. Was happy he remembered her. He works in broadcasting now, calls himself Elmer again.

Perhaps, right now, Azalea sits at the wooden table, writes by kerosene lamp, for (I imagine) it’s a heavy overcast day. She listens, awed by how happy she is, to the surf on the stones outside the window. Yesterday, kayaking, she saw orcas.

It was his first journal entry, ever. Suddenly, he was like Azalea. And Karen too, he’d bet twenty bucks; he suddenly remembered the two women talking: how soothing they found their journals. Azalea gone, no longer reminding him where his car keys were, his memory quickened. Funny how that worked.

Why is this the only place I can talk about God, even to myself—far from any neighbours, not even a road, only a kayak to go coastwise around to the village? Because my life here is so potentially dangerous I need one. As are all our lives, every day, but we hide behind machines so we don’t have to look. Dangerous, yet beautiful, and most importantly what seemed necessary: the right to make a small home out of small things. Wash each night one cup one spoon one pan.

My computer is an appliance that doesn’t wash dishes or clothes; instead, it rinses my soul. I wonder whether Enzo has booted up my journal at home—it’s not password protected. If he was away, and he kept one, would I be able to resist? It terrifies me to be possibly so exposed, even to my husband. Enough complaints in there about him to be sure, gentle as he is. And perhaps better there than spoken aloud always—for I’m no paragon myself. Yet part of me is relieved by the possibility: at last he’d know all.

I remember the night Karen and I traded journals, read our way through one another’s lives and minds by lamplight. It was the next morning we decided we could buy land together.

By early October, Azalea still wasn’t home, although she’d called twice more from the village, so Enzo knew at least she was alive. He worried alone now over the list of possible calamities as they usually did together at the beginning of each cold season: chimney fires, power failures, frozen pipes. So much for calling themselves suburban; they were still technically in the country, at the edge of the little town north of Toronto. The faceless minivan shame of living in suburbia, without even the town services that made it worthwhile. Continuing with his snooping, he read an entry near the end of Azalea’s first year’s diary:

Reading back through the whole year on New Year’s Day it strikes me this journal literally saved my life. Must remember to tell that to the next suicidal person I talk to. For, sigh, there will be one as surely as there will be another winter. And Karen? I hope she’s well. I haven’t seen her in months. She didn’t seem well when we saw her last.

Karen again.

Enzo felt terribly guilty for reading, but couldn’t stop. Reading her journals was like eating soup made out of Azalea.

I remember fifteen years ago a squatter friend telling Karen she was bourgeois to want a house. She said: “I want to rest. I want to retreat from this life. It’s too harsh. I want my son to have a roof.”

I can hear her saying it, clear as day, just as I can hear his scornful reply: “Cop-out.”

And Karen never got her house, least not when I still knew her.

Our Toronto apartment had a working fireplace. I remember one winter night I went to Alexandra Park and collected deadfall. It felt peaceful, a country thing, akin to our old life on the islands, gathering rosehips. I remember a passing man stopped, stared at me with pity and scorn, thought I was so poor I couldn’t afford twelve-ninety-eight for a fire-log, wrapped in plastic, printed in four toxic colours, from the corner store. Leave the deadfall to rot until the parks department guys came in their green trucks to clear it away. I was so offended. Yet it couldn’t have been the first time I suffered the disapproving stranger’s gaze: surely, before, I just didn’t notice, too scornful myself, a reverse contempt that suddenly, that snowy night, was no longer there to protect me. A fallen shield.

I’ll go home next week. But who is home?

They lost touch with Karen. Azalea was busy with the baby, with part-time classes, with starting a daycare centre in their village. Karen frightened them, each year poorer and more unkempt, skidding from restaurant work to welfare. But they didn’t say it, even to themselves: we are walking away from her, hand in hand. Not looking back.

Enzo fantasized he’d find Karen. A coming-home present for Azalea, so she’d stay. He knew real life didn’t work that way. And saw it then: he’d find Karen, give her the spare room, and still Azalea wouldn’t come. A shuddering laughing thought.

Thanksgiving morning.

Coasting in a borrowed kayak I found the cabin last night; my memory hadn’t failed me. It is still here, not fallen down. Someone has come, one year or another to make repairs. More importantly there’s kerosene in the lamps, stacked wood outside.

Someone has been here recently: strings of wild rosehips hang in the window, drying. Yet they’ve gone again: the ocean-facing windows are shuttered.

There’s a journal lying open on the table—I wonder whose it is? I’m writing in it but haven’t read it yet. If overly secretive, they wouldn’t have left it here lying open. I will read it tomorrow, a Thanksgiving present to myself.

I look out the window, see a witch’s moon, a crescent horned moon. My mother would have liked it, in the years before. It reminds me of the moons on that skirt her friend gave her. Stole it out of the household money Enzo gave her for groceries: fifteen dollars a week until there was enough; she didn’t dare tell him she wanted to buy a hundred-dollar skirt for my mother. She told me, though; I think I was twelve. She wasn’t working then; new motherhood had already burned through all her savings. Funny how I remember these details; surely these people have forgotten me entirely, and yet when I was a child they were so important.

I lived here when I was very small, when my mother was still happy. Used to watch her chop kindling while I strung rosehips for a useful game. Her friend took care of me when it was my mother’s turn in the kayak. What was her name? Oddly I remember her husband’s name but not hers.

A flowering bush.

Rhododendron?

My mother was happy here. Here she had a friend.

It is only here that the moon is my namesake. Writing helps.

In a boxcar in the decommissioned railway lands south of Richmond Street a woman sat wrapped in blankets. Reflexively she rummaged through her belongings for the little packet to see how much was left. Promised herself again that tomorrow she would find a detox program, check in.

She wore three layers of skirts, the bottom skirt a hippie treasure, an expensive item given her years before by a friend: midnight blue silk with stars and crescent moons printed in gold. The stars and moons were nearly washed away.

The woman never wore this skirt on the outside, but only as the bottom layer, next to her skin. She felt that as long as she never wore it on the outside, the street layer, she wouldn’t be murdered. Never reveal your true name.