I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room, on my mother’s side, on the beige couch with the printed designs, watching the Winnie-the-Pooh halloween special on VHS, and down the hall there was a room which seemingly served little purpose, but we played in there sometimes, and there was a shed in the backyard full of rakes and garden tools, and the basement was full of old rooms and old furniture, and we so rarely went down there.

And I remember sitting in my grandmother’s dining room, on my father’s side, and there were cushions and lace over everything, and pictures from my cousin’s wedding in silver frames, and we’d sit and watch TV in what used to be my aunt’s bedroom, and there was a shed in the backyard for the big garden at the back of the property, and there was a basement full of dust and old carpets and a disused fireplace, and we almost never went down there, except to get bottles of water from the foot of the stairs.

And as a kid I so badly wanted to see these basements. There was a stillness to them, like a dark relic of what had happened to these people around me before my consciousness came into being, and each piece of furniture or old toy or memorabilia was like a vague, bittersweet key into the past, and to these adults, who in my childhood I perceived, perhaps naturally, as paragons of experience -

And I know that my grandparents on my father’s side fled Estonia to escape Soviet persecution, and that, having not yet met each other, they took separate covert rowboats to Sweden, and emigrated to Canada, and that they had such a hard time trusting new people after that, and that my dad was more fluent in English than both of them, and that his schools were all on the same long north-south street, and that there’s a valley by that old house in Toronto where he used to spend time as a child, and there’s a little stream. I never met my grandfather, and as my growing older coincided with my grandmother’s decline in English fluency, I never got to know her well. My mom’s father died when I was four, and I remember we were driving past the Joey’s Only when I found out that my grandmother had sold her house in Ranchlands. I walked past the other house in East York last November, and caught a glimpse of the backyard, as we headed towards the playground at the end of the street, and Tom took my picture in the play-structure, facing south.

Both of those basements are gone to me now, the bed frames and shelves taken to the landfill or the Goodwill, but it could be said that I have my own now. Perhaps I was right about those bittersweet keys, the old belongings giving me faded clues into the past, and perhaps I was looking in the right place for that experience I’d perceived, and on into the future, into how things have since played out, and my house in Toronto has ribbons on the ceiling, and books strewn around, and posters of my friends’ bands, and little reminders of the people and places that are dear to me, and it is I guess my hope that these things of mine will indicate a perspective, and that I can strike out into new places - the gardens under glass, the yard by the cathedral, the playground by the valley.