Home smelled like baking bread and pea soup when the wind was howling, the crowns of great douglas firs waving violently against the rain and the slate-coloured sky.

Home was wisps of wood smoke escaping from the fireplace that heated the house in a comforting but uneven way. If my mother’s childhood was cold, she made up for it with the roaring fires she built and tended.

Home was knowing all the nooks and crannies of the yard. Which stones to turn over to find woodbugs, where the spiderwebs would gather, and where tiny jewel-coloured blackberries could be found creeping out of the salal into the sunlight

It was a place to escape, too, when emotional temperatures rose. Running out barefoot to feed slugs to the chickens, pull apart flowers petal by petal, and climb high up the rough sticky branches of the big fir in the front yard. When I got high enough, the wind would sway me back and forth across the unmoving world below.