Mountain and lake landscape (2021)
Lost Lake and its forests occupied such sweet brilliance in Kell’s memories; they smelled of incense and leaf litter and occupied the corners of the cabin like dust motes in sunlight.
BY KIMBERLEY DEWING
IMAGE BY PATSY WISNIEWSKI
The cabin sat alone and quiet. Pitch and timber walls under shifting pine-cast shadows. Forlorn on its foundations, yet familiarity set in its warping windowpanes and creaking front steps. She felt a homecoming here, at Lost Lake. The small cabin, once belonging to eccentric Aunt Liza, smelled of woodsmoke and old linoleum. Besides a canvas tote full of groceries, Kell came only with a backpack. It held essentials: a journal, two favourite pens, two dresses, underwear, socks, menstrual cup, the Aquarian Tarot, twelve feet of twine—one for every month of the year—and a jar of Mourning Dove feathers.
The cabin spoke of long-suffered love, everything threadbare or worn smooth. Aunt Liza’s ghost wearing faded pink latex gloves sudsed Corelle dishes in the sink. In Kell’s mind, she was humming Greensleeves. The tote of groceries sank tiredly onto the grey-yellow countertop and Liza’s ghost faded, barely remembered to begin with.
Kell settled in by chasing moths from the linen cupboard, beating a year’s worth of dust from the rug, and reminding the windows how to breathe. Upon that breath the evening loons’ song came in, asking:
“Kell-a, Kell-a, do you remember me? I remember you.”
At the care home, Aunt Liza sat trapped in her own deteriorating mind, senile at eighty-seven. Arthritis made the scrawled address almost unreadable, but Kell had known which lock would open for this particular key the moment Aunt Liza had slid it into her hand.
In a moment of lucidity, “It calls you,” she had said.
To anyone else, this would have been nonsense, but Kell knew.
Lost Lake and its forests occupied such sweet brilliance in Kell’s memories; they smelled of incense and leaf litter and occupied the corners of the cabin like dust motes in sunlight. Aunt Liza’s voice popping like fires in the hearth as she reminded Kell to always leave milk at the door for the small folk.
That first night she left a shallow bowl of milk at the door, greedily drank in the smell of cooling earth, and retired to a dreaming sleep.
The cabin had missed being lived in. Kell felt she was paying for its neglect in splinters and blistered palms as she tidied and fixed up. The cabin repaid her during the first summer storm. And the next.
She found a good sturdy branch that first week. Some essentials need to be found, not brought. It measured five feet tall, held her weight, and when a month had passed, she wrapped a foot of twine around the place where her hand had begun to wear it smooth. She called it Oakling.
The cabin held secrets. Small hair-and-twig charms hung in rafters. Runes carved in thresholds. Dust from incense tied in cloth tucked behind books. Tiny spells that Aunt Liza had wrought. They called to memories not her own and as old as time. Kell felt she was reading a book she could only decipher out of the corner of her eye.
He remembers the child like he remembers the name of Blue Jay, and Huntsman Spider, and Common Yellow Butterfly. For a time, tiny clever hands wove braids of Cattail and Maiden’s Hair Fern, left in the Oak and Cedar for him to find. The enormity and humility of the offerings charmed him. Large eyes the colour of Blue Heron spy out through the cabin’s windows. They see so much, though they do not see him. But she knows he is there. Her caretaker’s wisdom filters down, much like a lake feeds a brook and nourishes.
One day she no longer leaves things, and the knowing eyes are gone. Just like Blue Jay and Huntsman Spider and Common Yellow Butterfly, she is gone. He does not expect to see her again. All things have their time. He watches them pass and remembers their names.
The first winter settles about the lake with heavy, icy fogs and sleeting rain. It is hard; Kell didn’t chop enough firewood, the pipes freeze and burst. The cabin came with no instructions, and her sepia-toned memories hold no wisdom on overwintering the place. Aunt Liza’s memory is silent as falling snow. Kell hums Greensleeves as she duct-tapes and mops, shivering bitterly. Four feet of twine wrap Oakling. The jar of Mourning Dove feathers gathers dust.
Kell survives, but the cold long lingers in her bones. It makes holding the phone to call her family on Christmas Eve harder than it already would have been.
When spring comes; it is wet and full of hungry insects. Mosquito, Tick, Horsefly. Kell stands upon the rocky shores of Lost Lake, reminding her skin of what the warm sun feels like. The air smells of mud and greenery and a deep nostalgia overtakes her. She remembers this. She can feel her soul relaxing and expanding. There is room in her mind where there once had been only chaos and clutter. It feels like she’s remembering how to breathe deeply, and her heavy heart lightens, a long-tensed muscle relaxing.
She eventually returns to the cabin and opens the windows, the door. She beats dust from the rug, hangs laundry on the line. When everything has been doused and charged in sunlight, she wraps another foot of twine around Oakling. She does so with great affection, like helping a child to dress. She feels Oakling’s now familiar weight in her palm and together they go out into the woods, a long-awaited gift tucked into her pack.
The glass glimmers and catches his eye. Draws his curiosity. It stands out. It is not a thing that belongs here. It is other. But it is beautiful—and no doubt, left for him. Set as it was upon the Nurse Tree, cradled by her children. Delight blooms in his chest, twenty-one sweet and soft Mourning Doves’ feathers are tucked into the glass vessel. Each one, thoughtful. The jar is warm to the touch, a memory of the hand that left it. No longer tiny, but just as clever. A recognition hums electric as his fingertips slide across the smooth surface to mirror her own last grip. It is an apology. Twenty-one apologies.
High summer kisses freckles across her knees, elbows and shoulders. She had been a girl of ten the last time she saw midsummer here.
The clearing has seen a year of neglect, the same as the cabin. The fire pit at its centre is overgrown with Bittersweet and Wild Cucumber. Aunt Liza had carefully kept up the clearing, ringing the pit with sand gathered by the pail from the shore. Pruning back overeager boughs, and digging out old ashes to make way for new.
At ten years old Kell was all knobby knees and too-long limbs. Just as freckled, she watched in awe as Liza coaxed a fire to life. Now thirty-one, she furrows her brow as she clears the vines from the pit, places the logs of Pine and Birch she had brought, and arranges newspapers to kindle.
“We light a fire to celebrate the longest day of the year; for now, the balance tips,” Liza’s ghost whispers, a breeze passing.
Kell snaps a match across its book, giving birth to fire as the sun is swallowed. Liza’s ghost spins and leaps around the blaze, dress flaring up around her calves. Young Kell laughs and shouts and twirls.
The solstice sparks and sizzles and fills Kell’s hair with woodsmoke. The clearing is alive with great shifting shadows, awash in the heat of the fire. Spirits join her as she paces ‘round the fire widdershins. The night is dark and full of wonder. Her heart is bright and full of life.
After midsummer, she finds the first Gift. A Robin’s egg, blue and speckled, nestled in a cloud of mosses. It’s set carefully on the dark rotting railing of the cabin’s front porch. The sight of it raises every hair on the back of her neck, a symphony of goosebumps prickles her skin. Kell, nevertheless, accepts it, as one must, and rehomes it on the bookshelf. Next to the dead butterfly, a scrap of old wasps’ nest, and a sliver of mottled quartz that refracts the afternoon’s light.
When she wraps Oakling for the eleventh time, most of his length covered in twine, she finds the second Gift.
Old antlers twined in Ivy, left at her door. A crown of green and horn.
When the last of the twine is bound around Oakling, Kell decides to respond.
He finds the Oak branch standing upright, worn end thrust into the softened and decaying heart of the nurse tree. Its bark is worn away, length twined in jute. The coarse fibre smells of fragrant ash. It is neither a thing that belongs here, nor a thing that does not. It is more than Oak’s branch. It is a promise.
The girl’s—no—the woman’s footsteps have left echoes, mossy depressions, and scuffed loam. Her return to his forest was unexpected. Now, he is sure that she has left once more. This final Gift, an Oakling with twelve feet of memories bound lovingly around.
A parting promise. Her life, like all life, is here and gone again between the beats of Baskettail Dragonfly’s wings. But between one and the next downstroke she shall return to leave him gifts again. To beat dust from rugs and dance about midsummer’s flame.
The little pine-and-pitch cabin lays quiet once more, no more smoke curls from its stone chimney. Huntsman Spider weaves her web, Blue Jay’s cry rises between boughs, and Common Yellow Butterfly emerges from his cocoon. Eyes the colour of Blue Heron haunt his woods.
A jar of Mourning Dove feathers sits in company with the twine-wound branch. As the sun sets, the Loons’ call:
“Kell-a, Kell-a, will you remember us? We will remember you.”
Kimberley Dewing is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her favourite mediums are watercolour paints and vibrant words. She paints interesting local plants and writes anything from code to poetry and prose. Find all of her work at kimberleydewing.com.
Image: Patsy Wisniewski, Mountain and lake landscape, acrylic on canvas, 2021.
Edited for publication by Jessa Marchenkowsky, as part of the Creative Book Publishing Program.
HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Humber’s Office of Research & Innovation.