Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger

Author:Sarah Leipciger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2020-01-31T17:03:44+00:00

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I don’t know precisely what time it was when we got to the town near our lake, but it was that golden part of the day when the sky would hold the summer sun just under the lip of the horizon very late into the night. We stopped at the market for milk and fruit, potatoes and bread. We bought a chicken and a side of cured pork from the butcher, and then crossed the centre of town and on to a wooded, winding road that brought us to our lake. At the north end of the lake, we turned on to the gravel road, potholed and meandering through a mixed forest of birch and alder, willow and pine, the western faces of the trunks a jewelled orange with the setting sun, small stones pinging the windows. This road took us higher and higher until we reached an even smaller track, so unused it was more like the ghost of a road, which you would be wary of following if you didn’t know where it led.

My grandfather’s koie. He built the cottage himself when my father was a little boy. We’ve sold it now, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, Bear. But I’m sure you would understand. We couldn’t go back there.

But I remember everything about the place. When you came to the end of that rough track there were the first glimpses of the lake in the distance and the purple hills beyond the water, then the trees familiar and the tall grass and wildflowers, and finally the koie itself, that tiny cedar building constructed by my grandfather’s own boat-rough hands. Grass-roofed and A-framed with a crooked iron-pot chimney. You were asleep in the back of the car so we left you there while we unloaded, Tilda running from the koie to the car and back again, getting in our way, throwing her dolls on the single top bunk at the back of the koie. You, your mother and I would sleep on the bottom bunk. It was big enough for the three of us. We’d always thought we wouldn’t have to worry about bunk space until later, when you grew too big to share.

We hadn’t yet made it there that summer; it was our first visit, and your mother began the week as she always did, pulling back the curtains, clearing away from the windowsills the dead, grey spiders, their carcasses like paper, like dust. She wiped the winter settlement from the long wooden table, swept the floors. There was evidence of strangers having used the cottage: an oily candle stub on the windowsill and an unopened can of sardines that wasn’t ours on the counter next to the sink. But we didn’t mind. The koie provided good shelter, with a large wood stove and soft beds. Off-season walkers relied on this refuge. And these visitors hadn’t done any damage, nor had they burned any of the wood we’d left piled neatly next to the stove.

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