Tiny woods below whose boughs,
Shady fairies weave a house.
Tiny tree tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb.
(“The Flowers”, R. L. Stevenson)
Dear Jean;
In an adolescent psychology class that I was taking last term, I saw a slide show presentation of pictures from a group home for teens. The pictures said a lot about life in a communal setting, and also about the individuals who lived there. Each personality announced itself in the larger than life portraits projected on the wall: defiance and charisma in the toothy smile of the girl with the shock of green hair and the row of rings piercing her eyebrow; intensity in the eyes of the boy who looked out from behind his glasses, mounds of hair held back with a bandana, Che Guevara style; commitment to each other in the embrace of two friends, laughing for the camera, bound together by a feather boa wrapped around their necks.
There were no pictures of the screaming matches, of thefts discovered, accusations made, and confrontations defused. There was no evidence of conflict, of boundaries – pushed and crossed, of dark challenges and threats made in secret by those who feel that they have nothing to lose.
If such a slide show existed of life at the farm on Saltspring, I wonder what it would have revealed. I don’t remember many toothy smiles, only loud and piercing laughter that seemed too extreme to be happy. I remember unchecked chaos around a lunch table that turned every meal into a disgusting episode of hands splashing in soup, of smeared sandwiches and sprawled children across the table. And through it all, the mothers ignored their older children and focused on breastfeeding infants, and on filling glasses of milk to be spilled and cutting fruit to be nibbled, crushed, then dropped to the floor.
To the camera, would I have appeared as the outsider that I worked so hard to be? Would my frustration and defiance have shone through in my eyes, in the curve of my lips or the furrowing of my brow? I hope so.
As I moved through those days on the farm I recognized that there were too many people in this place who frightened me. For the first time since Claire’s birth I contemplated saving myself, I allowed myself the shameful luxury of dreaming of my own escape. Is human nature really so weak that it always directs us, when under siege, to put ourselves first? Over the years I’ve come to judge myself less harshly on that front: I’ve come to believe that one of the emotional gifts that I’ve been given is a sense of inner balance – of seeking out at all cost what I need to keep me sane.
After the daily fiasco that passed for lunch, I would bring Claire to the washstand and pour warm water into a basin from the pot on the back of the stove in the summer kitchen. I would gently scrub the grime and stickiness of the meal from her face and neck, where the soup had dribbled when I tried to direct the spoon to her half opened mouth. I would take her upstairs and we would lie down together. I would tell her of the tales that we shared in the sandbox when we lived in Vancouver and of the stories that I had made up when we lived with Sophie. She would sleep and I would go to the window and look out on the activity in the yard below. The women hoed in the garden, carded the sheep’s wool from next farm over, and carried crates of jars to the kitchen shed for ladling strawberry-rhubarb jam – mundane and unthreatening tasks that made me uncomfortable to watch. They were enacted as a dance with intimate, almost sexual contact in the touching of a cheek or the stroking of a shoulder. And always there was the easy, playful exchange of gentle kisses as the mothers passed each other in the yard.
I both resented and longed for this intimacy. In my pre-adolescent frustration, I would have run screaming had anyone approached me with such tenderness as they showed each other, yet none was offered, and I so longed to trust the comfort of someone’s arm around my shoulder.
It was the Family’s routine to walk down to the beach in the late afternoon most days to swim in the ocean. I was disappointed, after our long trip without any real opportunity to wash, that we had to bathe in the ocean but I was determined to make the best of it. I put on my bathing suit under my clothes before leaving the house and brought some dry shorts and a clean diaper for Claire, and hoped that mom would bring some shampoo and soap with her. For so many hours and days in the car I had dreamed of a simple shower or bath, to regain some faith that the world had not collapsed so completely around me as to withhold the simple basic gift of cleanliness.
What I faced as we came onto the beach was a scene of such unselfconscious abandon and exuberance that it made me startle in disbelief. The mothers were in the water, completely naked and open to the world. They splashed scooping up armfuls of water to pour on the children. They would bend forward into the surf to immerse their heads, then with a powerful thrust, they would swing up, their long wet hair and arching breasts drawing giant, transparent commas of sea water before and above them. I stood on the beach and stared at those naked breasts, some swollen and pendulous with milk, others firm and defiant. I saw the children with their little protruding tummies and Jacob’s small penis, looking so silly and vulnerable. A tidal wave of disappointment crashed over me with the force of all the ocean waves put together. Every cell of my being longed to scream out that all I wanted was to be clean.
In anger and humiliation I picked Claire up and turned around, retracing the path by which we had come. I reasoned that it was a long beach; I was determined to find someplace else where we could go into the water, away from them. With Claire on my hip, I marched back along the road that followed the shoreline looking for an inlet or some hidden spot where we could be alone to set our own standards of dignity. Not far down the road, around a thicket of blackberry bushes and through a clump of young cedars, I found our haven. The surf was gentle there and some logs had washed up on shore for Claire to sit by. No one ever came to look for us.
From that day on, Claire and I went to our own little beach almost every day. Sometimes Island would join us. He was always so gentle with Claire. He would bring things for her to look at and it never seemed to bother him that she didn’t look at him or reach out to take his gifts. Island didn’t talk much himself; perhaps he understood her better than the rest of us did. He would lift her hand like a small bowl that had no will of its own, and place in it the wild flower, the rock, the salal that he had brought to her, and there it would stay until he replaced it with something else, or until we would take her by the hand to lead her into the surf.
At the beach we found a place to hide away together, but I realized that these few hours alone were still not enough to give me the strength that I needed to keep my balance within this place that I resented with such vehemence. The Family’s communal ways were bending me too far. I had to believe that the world as I had known it still existed. I longed for books, the accessories of civilization, indoor plumbing. I didn’t want to forget what it was like to live in the world of conversation and kind words, of bath salts and real beds with sheets. I was crying out for some support to help me create a barrier of perspective.
As I saw it, the only thing of value that the Family offered me was freedom, and I became determined that I would use that very freedom to find my way. It was an escape that I dreamt of, not a rescue. Yet I knew implicitly that I would come back to Claire when I had found a source that would feed me with enough inner strength to shield us, but I would go out into the world someday. It would be a quest, a truly noble quest; and I reasoned that as the universe is always prepared to help with noble quests, mine would be successful too.
I’m not sure what made me choose that particular Sunday to go on my walkabout; I’m surprised that I even know that it was a Sunday, except I remember that it was the day after the big market day and everyone was home on the farm, meaning that there were even more activities and more occasions for me to feel like the angry outsider that I was. I stomped upstairs with Claire after lunch, glad to get away from them all. She fell asleep easily and I went over to my window. But this time, I didn’t look down into the yard. I gazed instead over the treetops, beyond the farm, and dreamed of being anywhere but in this prison. As I sat there in the airless loft, surrounded by the disarray of bedding and discarded clothing, looking out to another world that I could barely believe still existed, something powerful within me stirred – like a whimper that grew, through a cry, to become a silent scream of frustration, it summoned me and demanded that I follow it away from this place.
I stood up from my window, kissed Claire on the head and went out through the back door and marched to the road, blind to everything around me but the path beneath my feet that might lead me to places other than this.
. . .
This country road that I follow is the conduit for my salvation. It is defined by each curve and hill; each bend reveals a new vista of possibilities. It rises up and turns to the left like a question mark that I’m committed to follow. I don’t care how far it is, I will walk until I find a place to be washed, in body and spirit.
I know that no one in the Family will notice that I’m gone until Claire needs attention; her sleeping defines my freedom. As I step, stride, pick up some pebbles and toss them one by one with determination I imagine that this is my freedom walk; like the civil rights activists that I had heard so much about, I will march for my freedom.
I walk in a dimension where time and distance lose all relevance – past bushes, along the shoreline, beyond the abandoned shed, beside a field of grazing sheep. I come around a bend and there it is: a cedar cottage, surrounded by a low rock wall of the kind that I imagine Peter Rabbit would have encountered, complete with brambles and bushes of delicate pink roses in full bloom. Images of Hanzel and Gretel peek in from dark corners of my brain but my need is so much greater than anything that caution could discourage.
In the yard, a woman on hands and knees reaches under a bush with a small spade in her gloved hand. Her straw hat covers her face; the steel grey braid of hair curves along her shoulder blade and falls to her side beneath her breast. A spaniel supervises her work and at times tries to coax her away from her tools by offering her a ball or a branch. The long curly hair on his ears reminds me of the hair along the back of Bill’s neck, the small wisps at the hairline that never seem to grow long enough to stay in his ponytail.
I approach her quietly; I have found my shrine. I don’t worry that she will find me strange, or that she’ll deny my request; I have been called here to find comfort and I know that this is a place of peace. I stand within its embrace and breathe in its fragrance.
I walk up the path that leads to the flowerbed where she is working. The spaniel has come to me with a stick in his mouth, hoping for a playmate. I lower my hand and run my fingers through the soft curls just under the floppy ears. He sniffs my arm and sits to better appreciate my attention. I wait for the woman to notice me but she keeps on digging, absorbed in her work.
I’m startled by a voice behind me, a gentle man’s voice infused with a chuckle. “Well, hello,” the voice says to me. Then, to the lady of the roses he asks: “Dorrie, who is our guest?” She turns her face to the man and blinks in mild confusion at my presence. She pulls herself away from her work and sits back on her heels, her small shovel coming to rest on her knee. She looks at me and laughs out loud. I recognize in her spontaneity that she’s laughing at herself for not noticing me .
“My, my,” she says, chuckling as she brushes a clump of dirt from her glove. “I certainly hope that you’re not coming to rob us. Neither Toby nor I would make very good watch dogs, would we, my Dear?” She chuckles as the shakes her head. “How do you do?” she goes on, without rising, but extending a dusty hand from which she has removed her glove. “My name is Dorrie, and that old ruffian behind you is John Ross.” I move forward to take her hand then turn to nod at the man as she laughs: “Oh yes, my dear, that’s right, just like the villain in “Dallas”, but my J.R. is much sweeter.” She rises, gathering her other tools and asks: “And what is your name, Dear?”
“I’m Starla. You have a lovely garden,” I say, allowing myself to sink into the gentle pleasure of a dog’s head against my thigh and the lush grass beneath my feet. I want to lie down beneath her rose bushes and live there – within that garden – forever.
“Why thank you, Dear. What a lovely name you have.” She waits – I suppose for an explanation of my name or the reason for my visit, but I’m absorbed in the wonder of this place. Dorrie asks where I live. I kneel down to better reach the spots under those beautiful spaniel ears. I don’t want to say that I come from the farm, as if acknowledging that I “live” with the Family would make it so, and would make me one of them in the eyes of these people.
“My mom lives at the farm down the road, and my little sister and I are visiting her,” I admit as a compromise explanation that I can live with. “Everyone there is going to the beach to swim,” I add, “ but it’s been such a long time since I’ve had a proper bath, and they don’t have one on the farm. Could I have a bath here, please?” My direct approach comes politely, but with a firmness born of certainty: I am a pilgrim seeking permission to pray at the chapel of clean towels and indoor plumbing. I bury my face in the wonderful softness of the dog’s neck and await their reply.
Dorrie rises and comes to me; she puts a hand on my shoulder and gently pats her consent: “Well yes, of course, my Dear,” she says. “You will be our guest and you can take all the time you want to clean up. Then we will have lemonade and cookies on the porch.” I stand, relieved and welcomed, and I realize how birdlike she is in her tiny frame and her crisp movements.
Dorrie leads me into the cottage where beauty and serenity flow from the garden, through the windows into every room. In the sitting room (as they call it) old tapestry covered chairs and a couch are surrounded by wood paneled walls of books and framed photographs. Delicate paintings of wild flowers and garden scenes, some bearing small stickers with a number, line the tops of shelves and the windowsills. I notice the lacy curtains rippling in the afternoon breeze.
Toby, the spaniel, follows us into the small bathroom. It enchants me. An old fashioned tub is raised on cast iron feet with a magnificent lacy shower curtain rising from its depths to a hoop around the elevated spout. A small wooden ledge just above the tub holds bath oil and a candle. Rods of luscious towels with matching hand towels and face cloths line the paneled wall that someone has painted a warm peach colour and edged with delicate stencil work. The small old-fashioned sink wears a skirt of eyelet lace to match the one from the shower. An antique mirror with swirls and acorns carved deep into its dark wood reflects it all back to me.
Dorrie gives me a towel and face cloth and shows me how to work the shower taps. I’m so grateful to be here; I tremble with anticipation, yet become shy as I recognize my boldness. I thank her trying to convey what this kindness means to me. Dorrie smiles and tells me to let her know if I need anything else as she lifts a basket of soaps and shampoos from a corner by the tub, onto the back of the toilet. She whisks Toby away with a gentle pat on his rump and closes the door behind her.
. . .
I’ll never be able to gauge how much Dorrie and John Ross’s friendship has changed my life. Every visit with them was a balm with which I soothed my battered soul and its power went beyond restoration, to lay the foundation for so many of the things that still feed me in my life: literature, classical music, art and teaching.
Dorrie and John Ross had come to Saltspring to live full time, three years earlier when John Ross retired as a superintendent of education in Vancouver. Dorrie had worked in the university library and was now volunteering at the library in Ganges for several hours a week. This had been their summer home for years and it maintained its magical quality for them in their retirement.
I would visit Dorrie and John Ross about every other day while Claire napped after lunch, leaving them only when politeness and fear of overstaying my welcome pushed me out the door and back down the road to the farm. I would take Toby for a walk or play ball with him in the garden. Sometimes, he and I would sit in the shade on the glider swing, reading one of the books that Dorrie brought for me from the library or had found within her own collection.
She introduced me to Anne Frank’s diaries, to Piggy and all of the children from Lord of the Flies, to Adam Farmer and other characters of Robert Cormier. I had loved my work in the school library at Centennial Park, but I had changed so much since leaving Scarborough – had it really only been a few weeks? I felt so much older and unwilling to accept the “kid” stories: Stuart Little and even Anne of Green Gables. I needed to know about real people, young people who were suffering, who were threatened.
Reading was not an escape for me; I was searching desperately to understand my life, to define my struggle. Dorrie seemed to understand the parameters of my literary needs and kept feeding me. As I read in the garden, I could hear music coming from the radio or the stereo, music like I’d never heard before: piano, flute or oboe layered over magnificent orchestral arrangements, creating a tapestry of sound. I couldn’t distinguish one piece, one composer, one style of classical music from another, I just accepted it as the perfect incidental music for my journey into a world of searching, instilling a peace and a sense of safety that allowed the words I was reading to teach me of myself.
During each visit Dorrie would work in the garden or at her paintings. They were her flower scenes that I had noticed on that first day, transferred through oil paints onto the small canvasses that lined the walls and windowsills. Sometimes the collection in the sitting room was large, growing four or five paintings at a time as she worked on a series of them simultaneously. Then an art dealer from Victoria would come and the collection would be pared down to just a few pieces, leaving more space to notice the exquisitely framed photographs, more subtle in their placement on the walls.
Shady fairies weave a house.
Tiny tree tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb.
(“The Flowers”, R. L. Stevenson)
Dear Jean;
In an adolescent psychology class that I was taking last term, I saw a slide show presentation of pictures from a group home for teens. The pictures said a lot about life in a communal setting, and also about the individuals who lived there. Each personality announced itself in the larger than life portraits projected on the wall: defiance and charisma in the toothy smile of the girl with the shock of green hair and the row of rings piercing her eyebrow; intensity in the eyes of the boy who looked out from behind his glasses, mounds of hair held back with a bandana, Che Guevara style; commitment to each other in the embrace of two friends, laughing for the camera, bound together by a feather boa wrapped around their necks.
There were no pictures of the screaming matches, of thefts discovered, accusations made, and confrontations defused. There was no evidence of conflict, of boundaries – pushed and crossed, of dark challenges and threats made in secret by those who feel that they have nothing to lose.
If such a slide show existed of life at the farm on Saltspring, I wonder what it would have revealed. I don’t remember many toothy smiles, only loud and piercing laughter that seemed too extreme to be happy. I remember unchecked chaos around a lunch table that turned every meal into a disgusting episode of hands splashing in soup, of smeared sandwiches and sprawled children across the table. And through it all, the mothers ignored their older children and focused on breastfeeding infants, and on filling glasses of milk to be spilled and cutting fruit to be nibbled, crushed, then dropped to the floor.
To the camera, would I have appeared as the outsider that I worked so hard to be? Would my frustration and defiance have shone through in my eyes, in the curve of my lips or the furrowing of my brow? I hope so.
As I moved through those days on the farm I recognized that there were too many people in this place who frightened me. For the first time since Claire’s birth I contemplated saving myself, I allowed myself the shameful luxury of dreaming of my own escape. Is human nature really so weak that it always directs us, when under siege, to put ourselves first? Over the years I’ve come to judge myself less harshly on that front: I’ve come to believe that one of the emotional gifts that I’ve been given is a sense of inner balance – of seeking out at all cost what I need to keep me sane.
After the daily fiasco that passed for lunch, I would bring Claire to the washstand and pour warm water into a basin from the pot on the back of the stove in the summer kitchen. I would gently scrub the grime and stickiness of the meal from her face and neck, where the soup had dribbled when I tried to direct the spoon to her half opened mouth. I would take her upstairs and we would lie down together. I would tell her of the tales that we shared in the sandbox when we lived in Vancouver and of the stories that I had made up when we lived with Sophie. She would sleep and I would go to the window and look out on the activity in the yard below. The women hoed in the garden, carded the sheep’s wool from next farm over, and carried crates of jars to the kitchen shed for ladling strawberry-rhubarb jam – mundane and unthreatening tasks that made me uncomfortable to watch. They were enacted as a dance with intimate, almost sexual contact in the touching of a cheek or the stroking of a shoulder. And always there was the easy, playful exchange of gentle kisses as the mothers passed each other in the yard.
I both resented and longed for this intimacy. In my pre-adolescent frustration, I would have run screaming had anyone approached me with such tenderness as they showed each other, yet none was offered, and I so longed to trust the comfort of someone’s arm around my shoulder.
It was the Family’s routine to walk down to the beach in the late afternoon most days to swim in the ocean. I was disappointed, after our long trip without any real opportunity to wash, that we had to bathe in the ocean but I was determined to make the best of it. I put on my bathing suit under my clothes before leaving the house and brought some dry shorts and a clean diaper for Claire, and hoped that mom would bring some shampoo and soap with her. For so many hours and days in the car I had dreamed of a simple shower or bath, to regain some faith that the world had not collapsed so completely around me as to withhold the simple basic gift of cleanliness.
What I faced as we came onto the beach was a scene of such unselfconscious abandon and exuberance that it made me startle in disbelief. The mothers were in the water, completely naked and open to the world. They splashed scooping up armfuls of water to pour on the children. They would bend forward into the surf to immerse their heads, then with a powerful thrust, they would swing up, their long wet hair and arching breasts drawing giant, transparent commas of sea water before and above them. I stood on the beach and stared at those naked breasts, some swollen and pendulous with milk, others firm and defiant. I saw the children with their little protruding tummies and Jacob’s small penis, looking so silly and vulnerable. A tidal wave of disappointment crashed over me with the force of all the ocean waves put together. Every cell of my being longed to scream out that all I wanted was to be clean.
In anger and humiliation I picked Claire up and turned around, retracing the path by which we had come. I reasoned that it was a long beach; I was determined to find someplace else where we could go into the water, away from them. With Claire on my hip, I marched back along the road that followed the shoreline looking for an inlet or some hidden spot where we could be alone to set our own standards of dignity. Not far down the road, around a thicket of blackberry bushes and through a clump of young cedars, I found our haven. The surf was gentle there and some logs had washed up on shore for Claire to sit by. No one ever came to look for us.
From that day on, Claire and I went to our own little beach almost every day. Sometimes Island would join us. He was always so gentle with Claire. He would bring things for her to look at and it never seemed to bother him that she didn’t look at him or reach out to take his gifts. Island didn’t talk much himself; perhaps he understood her better than the rest of us did. He would lift her hand like a small bowl that had no will of its own, and place in it the wild flower, the rock, the salal that he had brought to her, and there it would stay until he replaced it with something else, or until we would take her by the hand to lead her into the surf.
At the beach we found a place to hide away together, but I realized that these few hours alone were still not enough to give me the strength that I needed to keep my balance within this place that I resented with such vehemence. The Family’s communal ways were bending me too far. I had to believe that the world as I had known it still existed. I longed for books, the accessories of civilization, indoor plumbing. I didn’t want to forget what it was like to live in the world of conversation and kind words, of bath salts and real beds with sheets. I was crying out for some support to help me create a barrier of perspective.
As I saw it, the only thing of value that the Family offered me was freedom, and I became determined that I would use that very freedom to find my way. It was an escape that I dreamt of, not a rescue. Yet I knew implicitly that I would come back to Claire when I had found a source that would feed me with enough inner strength to shield us, but I would go out into the world someday. It would be a quest, a truly noble quest; and I reasoned that as the universe is always prepared to help with noble quests, mine would be successful too.
I’m not sure what made me choose that particular Sunday to go on my walkabout; I’m surprised that I even know that it was a Sunday, except I remember that it was the day after the big market day and everyone was home on the farm, meaning that there were even more activities and more occasions for me to feel like the angry outsider that I was. I stomped upstairs with Claire after lunch, glad to get away from them all. She fell asleep easily and I went over to my window. But this time, I didn’t look down into the yard. I gazed instead over the treetops, beyond the farm, and dreamed of being anywhere but in this prison. As I sat there in the airless loft, surrounded by the disarray of bedding and discarded clothing, looking out to another world that I could barely believe still existed, something powerful within me stirred – like a whimper that grew, through a cry, to become a silent scream of frustration, it summoned me and demanded that I follow it away from this place.
I stood up from my window, kissed Claire on the head and went out through the back door and marched to the road, blind to everything around me but the path beneath my feet that might lead me to places other than this.
. . .
This country road that I follow is the conduit for my salvation. It is defined by each curve and hill; each bend reveals a new vista of possibilities. It rises up and turns to the left like a question mark that I’m committed to follow. I don’t care how far it is, I will walk until I find a place to be washed, in body and spirit.
I know that no one in the Family will notice that I’m gone until Claire needs attention; her sleeping defines my freedom. As I step, stride, pick up some pebbles and toss them one by one with determination I imagine that this is my freedom walk; like the civil rights activists that I had heard so much about, I will march for my freedom.
I walk in a dimension where time and distance lose all relevance – past bushes, along the shoreline, beyond the abandoned shed, beside a field of grazing sheep. I come around a bend and there it is: a cedar cottage, surrounded by a low rock wall of the kind that I imagine Peter Rabbit would have encountered, complete with brambles and bushes of delicate pink roses in full bloom. Images of Hanzel and Gretel peek in from dark corners of my brain but my need is so much greater than anything that caution could discourage.
In the yard, a woman on hands and knees reaches under a bush with a small spade in her gloved hand. Her straw hat covers her face; the steel grey braid of hair curves along her shoulder blade and falls to her side beneath her breast. A spaniel supervises her work and at times tries to coax her away from her tools by offering her a ball or a branch. The long curly hair on his ears reminds me of the hair along the back of Bill’s neck, the small wisps at the hairline that never seem to grow long enough to stay in his ponytail.
I approach her quietly; I have found my shrine. I don’t worry that she will find me strange, or that she’ll deny my request; I have been called here to find comfort and I know that this is a place of peace. I stand within its embrace and breathe in its fragrance.
I walk up the path that leads to the flowerbed where she is working. The spaniel has come to me with a stick in his mouth, hoping for a playmate. I lower my hand and run my fingers through the soft curls just under the floppy ears. He sniffs my arm and sits to better appreciate my attention. I wait for the woman to notice me but she keeps on digging, absorbed in her work.
I’m startled by a voice behind me, a gentle man’s voice infused with a chuckle. “Well, hello,” the voice says to me. Then, to the lady of the roses he asks: “Dorrie, who is our guest?” She turns her face to the man and blinks in mild confusion at my presence. She pulls herself away from her work and sits back on her heels, her small shovel coming to rest on her knee. She looks at me and laughs out loud. I recognize in her spontaneity that she’s laughing at herself for not noticing me .
“My, my,” she says, chuckling as she brushes a clump of dirt from her glove. “I certainly hope that you’re not coming to rob us. Neither Toby nor I would make very good watch dogs, would we, my Dear?” She chuckles as the shakes her head. “How do you do?” she goes on, without rising, but extending a dusty hand from which she has removed her glove. “My name is Dorrie, and that old ruffian behind you is John Ross.” I move forward to take her hand then turn to nod at the man as she laughs: “Oh yes, my dear, that’s right, just like the villain in “Dallas”, but my J.R. is much sweeter.” She rises, gathering her other tools and asks: “And what is your name, Dear?”
“I’m Starla. You have a lovely garden,” I say, allowing myself to sink into the gentle pleasure of a dog’s head against my thigh and the lush grass beneath my feet. I want to lie down beneath her rose bushes and live there – within that garden – forever.
“Why thank you, Dear. What a lovely name you have.” She waits – I suppose for an explanation of my name or the reason for my visit, but I’m absorbed in the wonder of this place. Dorrie asks where I live. I kneel down to better reach the spots under those beautiful spaniel ears. I don’t want to say that I come from the farm, as if acknowledging that I “live” with the Family would make it so, and would make me one of them in the eyes of these people.
“My mom lives at the farm down the road, and my little sister and I are visiting her,” I admit as a compromise explanation that I can live with. “Everyone there is going to the beach to swim,” I add, “ but it’s been such a long time since I’ve had a proper bath, and they don’t have one on the farm. Could I have a bath here, please?” My direct approach comes politely, but with a firmness born of certainty: I am a pilgrim seeking permission to pray at the chapel of clean towels and indoor plumbing. I bury my face in the wonderful softness of the dog’s neck and await their reply.
Dorrie rises and comes to me; she puts a hand on my shoulder and gently pats her consent: “Well yes, of course, my Dear,” she says. “You will be our guest and you can take all the time you want to clean up. Then we will have lemonade and cookies on the porch.” I stand, relieved and welcomed, and I realize how birdlike she is in her tiny frame and her crisp movements.
Dorrie leads me into the cottage where beauty and serenity flow from the garden, through the windows into every room. In the sitting room (as they call it) old tapestry covered chairs and a couch are surrounded by wood paneled walls of books and framed photographs. Delicate paintings of wild flowers and garden scenes, some bearing small stickers with a number, line the tops of shelves and the windowsills. I notice the lacy curtains rippling in the afternoon breeze.
Toby, the spaniel, follows us into the small bathroom. It enchants me. An old fashioned tub is raised on cast iron feet with a magnificent lacy shower curtain rising from its depths to a hoop around the elevated spout. A small wooden ledge just above the tub holds bath oil and a candle. Rods of luscious towels with matching hand towels and face cloths line the paneled wall that someone has painted a warm peach colour and edged with delicate stencil work. The small old-fashioned sink wears a skirt of eyelet lace to match the one from the shower. An antique mirror with swirls and acorns carved deep into its dark wood reflects it all back to me.
Dorrie gives me a towel and face cloth and shows me how to work the shower taps. I’m so grateful to be here; I tremble with anticipation, yet become shy as I recognize my boldness. I thank her trying to convey what this kindness means to me. Dorrie smiles and tells me to let her know if I need anything else as she lifts a basket of soaps and shampoos from a corner by the tub, onto the back of the toilet. She whisks Toby away with a gentle pat on his rump and closes the door behind her.
. . .
I’ll never be able to gauge how much Dorrie and John Ross’s friendship has changed my life. Every visit with them was a balm with which I soothed my battered soul and its power went beyond restoration, to lay the foundation for so many of the things that still feed me in my life: literature, classical music, art and teaching.
Dorrie and John Ross had come to Saltspring to live full time, three years earlier when John Ross retired as a superintendent of education in Vancouver. Dorrie had worked in the university library and was now volunteering at the library in Ganges for several hours a week. This had been their summer home for years and it maintained its magical quality for them in their retirement.
I would visit Dorrie and John Ross about every other day while Claire napped after lunch, leaving them only when politeness and fear of overstaying my welcome pushed me out the door and back down the road to the farm. I would take Toby for a walk or play ball with him in the garden. Sometimes, he and I would sit in the shade on the glider swing, reading one of the books that Dorrie brought for me from the library or had found within her own collection.
She introduced me to Anne Frank’s diaries, to Piggy and all of the children from Lord of the Flies, to Adam Farmer and other characters of Robert Cormier. I had loved my work in the school library at Centennial Park, but I had changed so much since leaving Scarborough – had it really only been a few weeks? I felt so much older and unwilling to accept the “kid” stories: Stuart Little and even Anne of Green Gables. I needed to know about real people, young people who were suffering, who were threatened.
Reading was not an escape for me; I was searching desperately to understand my life, to define my struggle. Dorrie seemed to understand the parameters of my literary needs and kept feeding me. As I read in the garden, I could hear music coming from the radio or the stereo, music like I’d never heard before: piano, flute or oboe layered over magnificent orchestral arrangements, creating a tapestry of sound. I couldn’t distinguish one piece, one composer, one style of classical music from another, I just accepted it as the perfect incidental music for my journey into a world of searching, instilling a peace and a sense of safety that allowed the words I was reading to teach me of myself.
During each visit Dorrie would work in the garden or at her paintings. They were her flower scenes that I had noticed on that first day, transferred through oil paints onto the small canvasses that lined the walls and windowsills. Sometimes the collection in the sitting room was large, growing four or five paintings at a time as she worked on a series of them simultaneously. Then an art dealer from Victoria would come and the collection would be pared down to just a few pieces, leaving more space to notice the exquisitely framed photographs, more subtle in their placement on the walls.
John Ross would often spend his days on the beach or elsewhere on the Island with his cameras, organizing driftwood and shore rocks, creating his haunting images of nature, washed with photographic greys. On days when he was at home in the afternoon, he would work in the wood shop where he made the frames for their work. Each frame in itself was a work of art, carefully designed and shaped, carved and stained to perfectly compliment the picture within.
I loved spending time inside their house on the few days when it was too misty or rainy to read outside. The comfort of the cottage wrapped itself around me, like a great shawl around my shoulders, and clinging to its warmth I would find another wall to examine, discovering what there was in art, beyond beauty, that attracted me.
We would take tea on the porch later in the afternoon, after I had my shower and was feeling worthy, in appearance anyway, of this lovely setting. We would look at Dorrie’s art books; she introduced me to Georgia O’Keefe and Emily Carr – the two women, Dorrie said, with whom she would most like to share her porch for an afternoon (a gathering to which she assured me that I would be invited.) She taught me to listen to my reactions to a work of art before looking at it too deeply; first reactions hold many clues and secrets, she said. I was glad that these were books of reproductions that I could touch, to lay my palm on each plate and absorb the intensity of the colour work.
The porch, the house and the garden were my sanctuary, and I treasured each visit. Dorrie and John Ross, and their home restored a balance in me that had been askew for many years. I don’t ever remember being so sure of myself as I was in their presence. They were like archeologists, slowly brushing away the dirt from around a precious object, buried in the sands of confusion and circumstances, bringing me into daylight. My time with them gave me the strength that I needed to come back to Claire each day.
When I would return to the farm, I would hide the book that Dorrie had given me to read, not ever understanding the need for such secrecy yet knowing beyond any doubt that it was necessary. The farm was an environment of mutual disinterest and distrust: they of me, and I of them.
I felt that we were under siege, Claire and I. Until this episode of our lives, I had spent so much of my time protecting her, guiding her, clearing a path before her so that she might walk in her own way. But since we had left Sophie’s, Claire hadn’t shown any signs of the fight that had always been an essential part of her. (I think that I would have rejoiced at the onset of one of her old tantrums.) I felt a drive to develop the strength that I possessed to make up for the fact that Claire had let go. Yet precisely because of her weakness, I knew that we would continue to be dependant on the Family for our basic needs, requiring a humiliating degree of compromise and acceptance on my part for her sake.
I still struggle with the memory of the push and pull of dependency and rebellion, and where they led me during those months on the farm. I wanted to protect Claire, I wanted to grow, I wanted to fight and I wanted to leave. None of these was in my power when I needed them to be. You, Jean, so many years later, are giving me the tools I need to examine each of these desires and to understand their repercussions.
Thank you,
Starla.
