The View from Castle Rock

had told me about the lump when it first appeared.
    Oh, she says, they must not have seen it.

    So this is the first time.
    Such frights will come and go.
    Then there’ll be one that won’t. One that won’t go.
    But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects.

    Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even a casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.

    On our way home from the city hospital I say to my husband, “Do you think they put any oil in that lamp?”
    He knows at once what I am talking about. He says that he has wondered the same thing.

Epilogue. Messenger
    My father wrote that the countryside created by the efforts of the pioneers had changed very little in his time. The farms were still the size that had been manageable in that time and the woodlots were in the same places and the fences, though repaired many times, were still where they used to be. So were the great bank barns-not the first barns but buildings created around the end of the nineteenth century, chiefly for the storage of hay and the shelter of livestock through the winters. And many of the houses-brick houses succeeding the first log structures-had been there since sometime in the eighteen-seventies or eighties. Cousins of ours had in fact retained the log house built by the first Laidlaw boys in Morris Township, simply building additions to it at different times. The inside of this house was baffling and delightful, with so many turns and odd little sets of steps.
    Now that house is gone, the barns have been pulled down (also the original cow byre built of logs). The same thing has happened to the house my father was born in, and to the house my grandmother lived in as a child, to all the barns and sheds. The land the buildings stood on can be identified perhaps by a slight rise in the ground, or by a clump of lilacs-otherwise it has become just a patch of field.
    In the early days in Huron County there was a great trade in apples-hundreds of thousands of bushels shipped out, so I’ve been told, or sold to the evaporator in Clinton. That trade died off many years ago when the orchards in British Columbia went into operation, with their advantage of a longer growing season. Now there might be one or two trees left, with their scabby little apples. And those everlasting lilac bushes. These the only survivors of the lost farmstead, with not another sign that people have ever lived here. Fences have been pulled down wherever there are crops instead of livestock. And of course just in the recent decade the low barns as long as city blocks, as forbidding and secretive as penitentiaries, have appeared, with the livestock housed inside of them, never to be seen-chickens and turkeys and hogs raised in the efficient and profitable modern way.
    The removal of so many of the fences, and of orchards and houses and barns seems to me to have had the effect of making the countryside look smaller, instead of larger-the way the space once occupied by a house looks astonishingly small, once you see only the foundation. All those
posts
and wires and hedges and windbreaks, those rows of shade trees, those varied uses of plots of land, those particular colonies of occupied houses and barns and useful outbuildings every quarter of a mile or so-all that arrangement and shelter for lives that were known and secret. It made every fence corner or twist of a creek seem remarkable.
    As if you could see more then, though now you can see farther.

    In the summer of 2004 I visited Joliet, looking for some trace of the life of William Laidlaw, my great-great-grandfather, who died there. We drove from Ontario through Michigan along what was once the Chicago Turnpike and before that the route of La Salle and many generations of First Nations travellers, and is now Highway 12, passing through the old towns of Coldwater and Sturgis and White Pigeon. The oak trees were magnificent. White oak, red oak, burr oak, their limbs arching over the town streets and stretches of the country roads. Also great walnut trees, maples, of course, all the luxuriance of the Carolinian zone which is just slightly unfamiliar to me, being south of the region that I know. Poison ivy here grows three