then/again. Michelle Elrick
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following an eight-year-old memory. Wandering, yes, as I reestablish my bearings, yet I have a destination in mind: a particular beer garden surrounded on all sides by centuries-old apartments, home to a walnut tree that extends a generous canopy across dozens of café tables where rock-salted pretzels sit and cold beers sweat in the heat of the afternoon. I remember this place as the point from which I departed eight years ago for a solitary hour and a half, leaving Opa behind under the walnut tree while I shopped, grateful for a bit of time alone. We were in the middle of a holiday in Salzburg and Budapest. Opa was showing me where he came from.
At the upper exit of the tunnel, turn left. This is all I remember about the relationship between the boutiques and the walnut tree in the courtyard. As I weave through archways and cobbled streets diagonally, my memory tells me I need to make my way partly around the Mönchsberg, closer to Mozart’s house and toward the barbershop where Auntie Elfie worked as a young woman. From there, the beer garden shouldn’t be hard to find.
Partway through the old city, I come to a familiar place: a giant fountain, statues of horses. The museum rises cool and modern amid Salzburg’s gothic churches and baroque apartments. I enter to get my historical bearings: Where am I? becomes When am I? Floor by floor, I browse the exhibits until I come to a small room where a timeline wraps the walls like a ribbon, folds and coils through the centre, and ends with today. I read. The history of the place deposits me here, just before noon, where I am beginning to feel thirsty. On my way out I visit the gift shop. There is a six-foot-long poster on display, a reproduction of Johann Michael Sattler’s oil panorama of the city, which he painted between 1826–1829 from drawings he made atop the Hohensalzburg Castle. Close inspection reveals the city clocks and sundials all show four o’clock. I decide to buy it. Not the most practical map, but still remarkably accurate. The panorama tells me where I am, but until the clock strikes four, it says nothing of when.
Getreidegasse clutters as tourists begin their daily shopping. I walk up its gentle slope, toward the dead-end breast of the mountain. Somewhere ahead was Auntie Elfie’s barbershop. I pass the boutiques and find the tunnel, pass through the arched channel and arrive at the walnut tree. It alone remains of all that was here last time. The courtyard is curtained off with scaffolding and plywood fences. The beer garden has become a construction zone and the earth is missing its skin. Walking partway around, I peek through a vertical crack. There isn’t a pretzel in sight. I walk back to the top of the tunnel. Turn left into a stream of people, flowing both directions.
Abbotsford, mid-July
Sound travels up from the foot of the mountain to the rock-terraced garden below the balcony where I sit. A young doe and buck paw cool, red beds in the cedar mulch, then kneel and lie under the Japanese maple. Their ears move like small, articulating satellites: weed whacker, school bell, wind chasing trucks on the byway. I moved through this morning by rote: ate breakfast, stepped out to the balcony, drank tea in the sun. Now, I recline in the heat and listen to the valley while the sun beats down. Abbotsford says “Hush, sit, tan,” and I do, because that is what I have always done here on days like today. I turn my head and press my nose into my shoulder. The scent opens my memory. Flashes of past summer days interrupt the moment, and for a convincing instant I am stretched out on the padded lounger reading Nancy Drew, and then/again spritzing my hair with lemon water to help the sun blanch the colour, and then/again I am watching my sister oil her arms with tanning lotion, flip to her stomach and perform twenty-minute repositions of straps and strings.
It has been two years since my last visit to this 1970s split-level house on St. Moritz Way. I grew up here, yet the house looks completely different since it underwent a full renovation. Somehow it still feels like home in spite of the new layout. It’s home because it once was, and has remained, whether I like it or not, the standard of “home-feeling” against which I’ve measured all other places. The first time I walked through this house, it still belonged to the previous owners. There was a peek-through gap in the staircase leading to the basement that provided a glimpse of a workshop below. I remember crouching on the stairs and looking through, imagining Dad down below, working. After this first encounter, that secret peephole was everything of the house for me. It was the one place where I had engaged my senses—knees pressed into the stiff berber carpet, hands cupped around my sight at the peephole—and my imagination, spying on Dad. The experience lodged in my memory, becoming the first entry in my catalogue of this house.
Here, as with all other places, bodily apprehension makes places count. With each new sensory engagement, “space transforms into place” like a sketch acquiring detail. Arriving anywhere new, my mind combs through its catalogue of past experiences, weighing the new against the remembered. Where there is resonance, I feel at home. Where there is none, I feel estranged. Here, the estrangement is superficial—hardwood instead of carpet, grey stucco instead of white—and the overwhelming feeling of familiarity saturates my experience to the point of inducing habit: tea, book, tan. New becomes known, known becomes home. Between memory and encounter the essence of home emerges over time, developing with each new experience.
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