Read Online Mnemonic by Theresa Kishkan - Free Book Online Page B

Valuable Indian Relics.” The article goes on to say:
    The government might take a leaf out of the book of the universities of the United States. Several of these have collectors constantly in the field collecting and cataloguing relics and collating their histories. The province could do likewise and appoint some one [sic] to conserve what rightfully belongs to us. 19
    Of course, the matter of ownership goes uncommented upon. Newcombe continued to do some collecting as well as writing and publishing on historical and zoological topics.
    Memory provides a curious and unreliable template. In an attempt to fit a house into a specific memory, I found another house, its gracious rooms and verandah given over to the healing of men released from prison and trying to find their way back into the world. I discovered that another house I had known in my childhood and had believed then to have stood in Thunderbird Park since the beginnings of time (whatever that meant to me then) contains a series of paradoxes, both territorial and cultural. Nothing is as permanent as change and the shifting boundaries of how we remember the past. A house is more than those who live in it, its secrets encoded in its architecture and domestic history long after its residents depart this earth.
    That child on her small blue bicycle explored the fringes of a time and place on the cusp of change, though she didn’t know it then. Stepping into the home of a missionary, it didn’t occur to her that the masks on the wall and the rattles used by a shaman somewhere on the coast of the province had been gathered improperly. She had no idea the place where she lived had been colonized so thoroughly that even the namesake plant of her own playground at Clover Point had been supplanted by invader species. Yet she grew up with such clear maps in her mind of that beloved terrain — the snowberry bushes of Lover’s Lane hung with the treacherous nests of wasps, the location of the beautiful fawn lilies on Moss Rocks that turned their faces to the world after pollination, a small park where curls of cedar drifted to the ground to be collected by children — that as an adult, sleeping far from those familiar streets, her dreams were often filled with their houses and their trees, the waves washing onto the shores of Ross Bay a distant sacred music.

Olea europaea
    Young Woman with Eros on her Shoulder

    Full noon, July . . .
    If the olive groves didn’t exist
    I would have invented them . . .
    â€” Odysseas Elytis, Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems
    I’d treated myself to a cabin on the ferry from Brindisi to Piraeus. My journal tells me it cost about thirty dollars, which was expensive in 1976; but I’d come from Madrid by train across southern France and hadn’t slept for three days or nights. (One day I will tell the story of being alone in Madrid without luggage, which had been lost en route from Canada. It was my first trip, I was twenty-one years old, and I still don’t understand why I didn’t turn around and go home.) The compartments were full and the seats cramped. I’d doze off for a few minutes and then someone would inadvertently elbow me as he or she reached up for baggage or else rearranged clothing or rummaged in a basket for a leg of chicken or bottle of wine. I kept pinching myself to remind myself I was in Europe — that, and everything else kept me awake.
    The cabin was plain but comfortable and after leaving the party of Greeks I’d met on the train from Rome to Brindisi — a group of guys heading home from jobs in England to a family wedding in Athens — I crawled between clean sheets and slept. Waking, I stepped outside my cabin just as the ferry was passing through the canal cutting across the Isthmus of Corinth.
    I’d never seen a blue like that of the water and sky. Every adjective was called into being; and every one found wanting. Above the city of Corinth, on