You me, you me, and the weather,
You me, you me, and the storm,

You Me And The Weather by Hawksley Workman

The things I remember of my childhood home were the backyard, the pine needles, stubbing my toes on the hearth, and at other times perching there on those auburn bricks at the centre of the house, under the crackling warmth of the wood stove.

Golden autumn days were invaded by a descending blackness, but against this exterior weather came the rising warmth of the stove being lit daily, a fire nurtured there by my mother. On rainy days, with water lashing the glass of the window, the house was cozy and warm.

I remember my mom splitting wood, and stacking it. It seemed like she was forever chopping, with a big scary axe that she’d swing high above her head and let fall with brutal momentum to strike the rounds into halves, and the halves into quarters and eighths. She wore a checked lumberjack shirt, pockets full of wood chips, and got calluses on her hands. She had opinions on the right way to stack wood.

The spiders loved that house. They still do, I suppose. They live underneath in the dirt-floored crawlspace (of doom) and invade each autumn when temperatures drop. My sister and I were tasked to bring in of wood whenever we returned, to feed the ever hungry fire. I’d pull logs from the stack that covered the wall of the garage, letting them fall to the ground and jumping back so they didn’t squash my toes. I hoped that the spiders and earwigs would be knocked off by this rough treatment before I lifted them inside.

When a south-east gale battered our shore, my mom liked to get out in it, to slam shut the heavy door and strike out into the inky blackness to be slapped about by winds and blowing rain. She liked to find herself in the wrath of that roiling storm out on a sandbar next to the waves, wrapped up in a plastic coat, with some scratchy woollens underneath. From her I learned to love the uncaring nature of weather, the joy of being pressed up against it, the desire to immerse myself in it; not long enough to get hypothermia, just long enough to feel pleasantly a part of the wildness of the coast.