Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Page 2

  As an adolescent, too, Yeats was an avid poetry reader. He always had two or three books of poetry lying around his bedroom. One summer he read the entire canon of W. B. Yeats. The next summer, it was Longfellow. And he wrote his own poetry, too. He wouldn’t let us read what he wrote, but we had it from a reliable source that he was good. We were not surprised to learn that a lot of it was about the natural world.

  Ben thought it was partly the poet in Yeats that drew him to birdwatching. These two pursuits, for him, at least, were solitary. They required long periods of time in seeming reflection, quiet, and stillness. They asked for his patience as he waited for something to come — an image, a bird, an inspiration.

  Birds are everywhere in our literature, a part, it seems, of our collective poetic imagination. If writing a beautiful line of poetry fills a poet’s heart with joy, imagine how that same poet’s soul must take flight at the sight of swallows soaring through the evening sky!

  I saw that happen with my son. I’d ask him what the matter was and he’d say, “I need to write. I haven’t written for a while.” He’d get up from the chair and pace around a bit. “Maybe I’ll go birdwatching,” he’d say, reaching for his binoculars. The two activities were linked — writing poetry and birdwatching.

  FROM THE TIME YEATS was three years old until he started high school, we spent our entire summers up North, in Muskoka. My mother was there, and Greg came on weekends. My sister Laurie and her husband lived in London, England until 2003, when they moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and she brought her family to Muskoka for the summers, too. Summertime was when we all reconnected and created a stockpile of family stories.

  We took Yeats to the cottage for the first time when he was two weeks old. I have a photograph of us on the dock under a shade umbrella. Laurie is holding Yeats, and he appears to be glowering at her, closely studying this woman who looks almost like his mother. I’m sitting in a chaise next to them looking very relaxed (exhausted) and happy (delirious). I remember an old family friend who lived in Muskoka year-round dropping by to see Yeats and saying, “Another Muskoka baby. It will never leave his blood.”

  That was how we all felt: steeped in the Canadian Shield.

  Cottage life was in my family’s blood. My father’s family had spent a month every summer at a cottage on a lake in southern Saskatchewan, and my mother spent a month each summer at her grandmother’s cottage on Lake Scugog in Ontario. My parents dreamed of a cottage for their family, so they rented one for a month every summer when I was growing up. Usually it was on Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, where friends of theirs also rented.

  We went to the same place for eight summers. I remember arriving there every year before the July 1 weekend and rushing into the little boathouse with Laurie and Greg to see if the boat was still above water. We rented an old outboard along with the cottage, and half the time this boat would have become swamped with water from spring storms and ended up sunk. Now that we had a cottage on an island and several boats in a boathouse, it was a mystery to me why that old boat spent so much time at the bottom of the lake, but it was hilarious at the time.

  Mom and Dad wanted a cottage of their own, and by the mid-1980s they finally felt they could afford one. In 1986 they bought an island in Lake Rosseau that had a boathouse and an old cottage. The island is called Prospect on the map, but is known locally as “Old Baldy” because half the island is a big round hill of rock. When they bought the cottage, this hill was nearly devoid of vegetation due to a fire many years before. When the island was uninhabited, generations of cottagers had used it for picnics and evening parties and left all kinds of debris. It’s surmised that the fire started with sunlight beating down on a piece of glass. The previous owners told us they’d scoured the hill for bits of broken glass, taking off bushel barrels full. But we’d still find the occasional piece of glass there, half-buried and working its way out of the earth.

  The vegetation grew up quickly until “Old Baldy” was no longer bald. The hill was soon covered in juniper, poplar, sumac, and oak. We took regular hikes to the top, where we had two fine lookouts over the lake. We were on a “height of land,” as my geologist grandfather used to say. From the top of the hill looking south, we could see a couple of small islands with their cottages hidden in the trees, and beyond those, the mainland. On the mainland was the Muskoka Lakes Golf and Country Club, where we parked our cars and picked one another up in the boats. Looking north and east from the top of the hill we could see more islands in the distance, across a large expanse of water. This is where the sun rose. Directly to the west of Baldy was Fairylands Island, which was a much larger island than ours and had nearly a dozen boathouses dotted around its perimeter.

  Our cottage was on one of the islands across from that sinky-boat cottage on the mainland, beyond the first row of islands and a little bit west. From our dock we could see the old mustard-coloured boathouse with its one little slip. I stood on our dock staring across the lake at that place where, as a child, I used to stand looking out at this place. I was staring at myself across the years.

  Only a couple of years after they bought the island, Dad was diagnosed with colon cancer, and Mom and Dad were divorced. It all seemed to happen at the same time. Dad had only five really good summers at his wonderful island sanctuary, something I still find hard to believe. So much happened in those five years, from a makeover of the boathouse and new landscaping behind the cottage, to my sister’s wedding and the start of my relationship with Ben.

  Laurie and Andy were married in a little church up the lake at Windermere, and their reception was at the golf club across from the island. The cottage was full of guests that Labour Day weekend of 1991. Exactly one year later, when he was fifty-seven, Dad would have his last weekend up North; just weeks after that, I would be pregnant with Yeats.

  Laurie, Greg, Dad, and I sat on the back deck on that final weekend and discussed finances. Dad was leaving us with some money, but it wouldn’t last forever. He suggested we each put a certain amount into a designated investment portfolio and use that money for the cottage. He suggested we divvy up the cottage tasks so no one was left doing all the work.

  As we listened and talked, Dad was busy picking the dead bits out of a potted plant. He was wearing all white and sat in the sunshine, his grey hair sparse but full of light. His fingers were bony and dry, and so were the little branches he was pulling off the plant. It made my heart break to watch him because really that plant was dead, with one tiny scraggly green growth left, and I knew that by the end of our conversation, there would be nothing left at all.

  Dad’s last time at the family cottage, Labour Day weekend, 1992, coincided with the first time my stepchildren came up. It was a changing of the guard. I have a strong memory of Danielle, age two and a half, climbing onto Dad’s lap, looking up at him with her huge brown eyes, and saying, “You are my best friend.”

  Dad said, “Already?” and the rest of us laughed. He was weak with chemo and cancer and had barely three months to live, but he engaged with all three children as best he could. He was clearly thrilled to have this sweet little girl on his lap. He would have been a proud and wonderful grandfather.

  My sister Laurie built a second cottage on the island when everyone started having children, because instead of dividing up our time at the lake as some families do, we decided we wanted to be there together. The new cottage was on the north side of the island, down a hill and in the trees. Unlike the old cottage, which was a bungalow, it had a lower level and a second storey. Mom had a room of her own downstairs. Her desk had a view of the lake through the trees and sometimes she was surprised by Laurie’s son, Thomas, waterskiing past, sending a rooster-tail of spray over the dock. She had a comfortable reading chair and she often slipped away to find some peace and quiet, especially on rainy days when everyone stayed inside.

  We built a new dock, too, off the north side of the island. We used this dock for stargazing, since there were no neighbours with lights to interf
ere with our view of the sky. It was darker and quieter on this side of the island, and the vista was bigger there.

  I’d go to the new dock to watch the sunrise, followed by whichever cats were outside. We all brought our cats to Muskoka. At first, Mom and I were the only ones with cats, Dubleau and Simon. Then Greg got Kibo. The cats had to share the old cottage, and they tolerated one another. Dubleau was old so he died first, though not on the island. Then Simon died one summer. He went under the cottage and never came out. I saw him under there, his eyes reflecting light, looking back at me, but he turned away when I called to him. He was fourteen. For a summer there was only Kibo and she slept in a cupboard most of the time.

  Then we got Pippin, a male grey tabby, and Laurie’s family got Jumper, a female orange tabby. As kittens they were best friends, but when Laurie’s family moved from Connecticut to Toronto, their daughter, Lauren, was promised a new kitten. They got Freddy, a male cat who was extremely cute — white with black splotches — but not very smart. Jumper was offended by this addition to her family and took it out on everyone, Pippin included. Then Greg got Smokey, Kibo died, and they got Tigger. Smokey was a Russian Blue and Tigger was orange, and both cats had long, fluffy hair. Smokey was one of those friendly cats who wanted to bring everyone together. He tried and tried to befriend Jumper. He made some headway with Pippin but had to start all over again every summer. Freddy loved all the other cats, but neither Jumper nor Pippin would have anything to do with him, and Tigger was a ’fraidy-cat.

  All these cats on the island drove Ben and Yeats crazy. We stopped putting out our bird feeders because the cats would lie in wait.

  I’d say, “Look, there are three cats lying in the field. They’re so cute.”

  Ben would say, “You mean so dumb.”

  Yeats would say, “Too many cats. I can’t go anywhere where there isn’t a cat.”

  And that was the truth. If we went to the top of the hill, we’d find Jumper sitting at a lookout, watching over the lake. If I carried the washing up to the clothesline, Pippin would crawl out of the juniper bush and rub against my legs. If we sat on the dock watching the stars come out, Smokey would appear from nowhere.

  When I sat on that dew-soaked dock and waited for the sunrise, Jumper and Pippin and Smokey would be sitting a little ways off, also facing east. We were all silent; there were no boats and the lake was still as glass. The cats tipped their noses up to smell the air and a raven swooped down from the forest, silent too except for the whoosh of its wings.

  Some mornings the ravens hopped around on the cottage roof right over my head. Inky-black tricksters. They flew from the roof and put up a squawking racket loud enough to wake the dead. Some mornings they hung out together in the thickest part of a tall hemlock tree down by the water. When I went to fetch the newspaper off the dock, they startled and flew, one by one, out of the tree and around the end of the island. “Caw! Caw! Croak!” Six black giants of the air.

  Most summers we had nesting blue jays on the island. One time, before we had so many cats, Yeats and I sat at the picnic table on the back deck and counted all the jays we could see. Two at the feeder, two hopping around on the roof above the feeder, two in the birch tree beside us, two on the lowest branch of the pine across the field, and two more in another pine close by. That made ten, until another pair flew in, making a dozen. They were all interested in the feeder.

  Blue jays are members of the corvid family, as are crows, ravens, magpies, and other kinds of jays like the Stellar’s jay and the grey jay. The corvids have the largest brain-body ratio of all the bird families, making them seem uncannily smart. “Bird brains,” indeed.

  When we listened carefully we could hear the jays communicating with each other. That morning they weren’t engaged in their raucous Thief! Thief! call, but in their gentle psh psh psh. We could hear the pair in the birch tree talking like this, back and forth, gentle and sweet. Imitating this sound was a good way to call a curious blue jay down from its tree. Make the sound, wait, do it again. The blue jay would hop to a closer branch, cock its head to look at you, and make its psh psh psh sound back at you. You made the sound again; it hopped closer and cocked its head.

  Once I was sitting on the back deck and I started calling down a blue jay. It was advancing slowly, branch by branch, through a pine tree about four metres away. Then I heard the psh psh psh sound behind me and looked over my shoulder. On the cottage roof, perched right at the edge, only an arm’s length away, was a different jay. Its head was cocked to the side, one eye looking right at me.

  MY FAMILY SLEPT IN the old cottage and everyone else in the new one. Greg’s family often stayed down at the boathouse during the summer, but it was even less insulated than the old cottage and was freezing in spring and fall.

  Before my brother had a family, Ben, Yeats, and I slept in the boathouse. We walked down the path at dusk and sat on the dock with our feet in the water and talked over our day while kicking our legs and splashing one another. And then, every morning, Yeats would jump out of bed and rush to the front windows. He was looking for birds, and most mornings he would spot something: a great blue heron, a pair of loons, a merganser with her parade of ducklings. Then we’d spend hours on the path leading from the boathouse to the old cottage. I let Yeats set the pace and it was slow. We looked at every mushroom, every clump of moss. We stroked the moss gently with one finger each. We tipped delicate lady’s slippers up to look closely at the hidden parts of the flowers. We looked for daddy-long-legs. We watched slugs trail their slime across mushrooms. We watched snails inch up the path and sometimes we moved them off into the forest. We had nothing but time and we spent a lot of it immersed in nature, teaching one another what it meant to pay close attention to every little thing.

  All those hours on the path. The qualities one needed for successful birdwatching were apparent in Yeats from the start.

  “Mom,” he’d say. “We don’t have to rush.”

  As Yeats grew older, we stepped off the path and into the forest. We saw a thousand mushrooms, all shapes, sizes, colours.

  I said, “Look, it’s a trail of treasure.” I pointed to a cluster of tiny yellow mushrooms followed by two giant white ones pushing their way up through the fallen pine needles.

  “And look at these,” Yeats said, sweeping his arm past a long line of reddish-brown and slightly slimy mushrooms that led to a large cluster of perfect white toadstools covered in red nubbles.

  We followed the mushrooms to the end of the forest and when we stepped out into the clear, Yeats stopped me with a hand gesture. He’d spotted a merlin, a small grey falcon. It was sitting at the top of a dead tree at the crest of the hill. We stood perfectly still and watched, afraid we would startle it.

  I remember a scudding cloud covering the sun, the breeze picking up, and I heard Yeats sighing with pleasure next to me. Then I heard his sharp intake of breath when the bird left its perch and flew, circling, circling.

  I didn’t know, of course, that Yeats’s early and insistent interest in birds would persist throughout his childhood and into his teens. I didn’t know that I’d be driving hundreds of kilometres to see migrating warblers in southern Ontario or planning a trip to Tofino on Vancouver Island to paddle with the eagles.

  We never know what kinds of trips our children will take us on, but one thing I’ve learned over these twenty years is to trust my son’s instincts and to encourage his interests. I listened to him, he listened to me (mostly), and it wasn’t a stretch to say that birding helped us to maintain the closeness we’d had since he was a little boy.

  TWO

  WE MOVED INTO OUR Riverdale house six weeks before Yeats was due. I was still officially the manager at Book City on Danforth Avenue, but for those last weeks I did my final round of buying from home. The publishers’ representatives came to visit me and we sat in the sparsely furnished living room, chatting about books and babies, and then I hauled the catalogues two blocks to the shop.

  The house had a
tiny backyard surrounded by big trees, full of squirrels and raccoons. Full of birds. We’d always had a bird feeder, except when we became temporarily frustrated by wily squirrels.

  We called our kitchen window “Cat TV” because we’d also always had a cat. Cat TV was where we (and the cat) sat to watch birds and squirrels and, sometimes, other cats. It was a good introduction to Toronto backyard birds: black-capped chickadees, blue jays, house sparrows and house finches, white-breasted nuthatches, northern cardinals, dark-eyed juncos. I grappled with the morality of having an outdoor cat because cats are hunters, but modern life is full of such contradictions and although I couldn’t justify this one I also couldn’t seem to rectify it. Pippin would have killed me if I didn’t let him outside. It’s a complicated world we live in and I allowed myself some comfort in the knowledge that our cat actually spent most of his life sound asleep on the third floor of the house.

  I bought the house with money I had inherited from my father. It was semi-detached and one hundred years old. We didn’t have much stuff when we moved in, which meant we had extra room for the children to play in, and over the years we created a warm, welcoming environment. A friend once said to me, “Your house is so serene. I always feel relaxed when I’m here.” She looked around. “How do you do it?” She wasn’t there when all the kids were! I’d grown up in a very quiet household and I remember visiting friends in their homes and envying them the busy ruckus and racket of older brothers or singing fathers. Now I had both of those worlds — a ruckus when all the children were with us (although Ben didn’t do too much singing at any time), and quiet when it was just the three of us. I’d never lived in the same place for more than six years, and that was when I was a child. I moved into the house in Riverdale with the hope that we’d stay put and it would be as stable an environment as I could make it for the family. I was tired of moving and I was going to be a stay-at-home mom.