Mnemonic
for days my calves were too swollen to move them much. Rather than fear, I remember extreme impatience that I had to pass the days inside when the whole world went on without me.
    Near our home on Eberts Street was Clover Point, a peninsula jutting out into the Juan de Fuca Strait. A road perambulates around its circumference and in a grassy area in the middle we once stood with hundreds of others, hundreds more on the ocean side of the road, watching the Queen being driven by slowly, her gloved hand waving, first to one side, then the other. In my family, it was insisted that she waved specifically at my younger brother, but there is no way of proving this. In those years, he was skinny and all nose, and I don’t imagine he stood out of the crowd to inspire special notice. Certainly we didn’t present flowers. I remember standing in that grassy place with my family, feeling strange in my Sunday dress and coat.
    We often walked down to Clover Point on a Saturday morning to collect bark in grocery bags for the wood-burning kitchen stove in our house. Our mother organized these outings, in any weather, insisting that we wear our oldest clothing — patched dungarees and faded kangaroo jackets. We’d walk the beaches, choosing pieces that would fit in our stove, and we’d trudge home with the heavy bags of damp bark. It was piled on the back porch to dry, within easy reach of the kitchen.

    Charles Newcombe, doctor, natural historian and anthropologist, was commissioned by Kew to collect Aboriginal artefacts from British Colombia. The objects, including fish nets and hooks, ropes, garments, baskets, woodworking tools and gambling sticks, reflect the daily life and industries of the Aboriginal peoples and hint at their extensive knowledge of the natural environment and its resources.
    â€” From the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Web site
    I’d seen the photograph of the Newcombe house in Exploring Victoria’s Architecture , and I wanted to try to recover that moment in my childhood when I might have been a degree closer to the history I have always gravitated towards. John and I drove west on Dallas Road, past Cook Street, past Beacon Hill Park and Finlayson Point, past Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway (where Douglas Street meets Dallas Road). And then I recognized the house from its photograph.
    We parked our car and stood on the other side of the road. I was gesticulating with my hands in my usual excitable fashion and my husband said, “Someone is waving to you.” And sure enough, two men in the glassed-in verandah were smiling and waving. An elderly woman waiting at the bus stop beside where we stood said, “It’s a halfway house, you know.”
    I didn’t know. I asked her if she knew it had been built for Dr. Charles F. Newcombe, a man indirectly responsible for the Royal British Columbia Museum. “No,” she said, “how interesting. The neighbourhood has changed, of course.”
    As had the house. That verandah hadn’t always been glassed-in, though the balusters, generous eaves, and angled bay windows hadn’t been altered. I was reminded of eighteenth-century houses, Italianate in design, that I’d seen in leafy boroughs of London. A huge tree, with a crown of at least fifteen metres, spread over the front yard of the Newcombe house. It was February the first time we parked opposite the house, and though a few snowdrops and crocuses were in bloom in some of the protected gardens, it was still winter and not even local forsythias were in bud. So I was surprised to see that this tree was fully in leaf. But it wasn’t a conifer or any broadleaf evergreen that I recognized. It had vaguely elliptical leaves, glossy on top and slightly downy on the undersides. It was very lovely. Was it some kind of eucalyptus? It had no odour. I pinched off a small branch so I could try to identify it at a later point, placing it in my copy of Exploring
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