I wasn’t expecting an email from my father. After all, I was thirty-eight years old and hadn’t seen the man in thirty years. I had just biked home through Pacific Spirit Park after teaching a class at the university. The paths in the park are carefully maintained and marked, unlike the wild country trails and pathways I knew in my early childhood. It’s part of what drew me to civil engineering, my interest in the paths we create as opposed to paths which are prescribed. My husband was picking up the boys from school and I’d decided to use my last bit of time at home to plod through a backlog of work correspondence.

My father asked in his email if I remembered when I lived with him at The Mists, or the magic of the North Atlantic landscape which I’d been away from for so long. You were very young, he wrote, so you probably don’t remember much from your early childhood. It was a long time ago. We all move on and I can see you have done so very nicely. Congratulations on your great job! I’m so proud of you.

One fact I’ve learned as an adult is to never assume my children won’t remember what happens. And not to assume adults can control which parts children remember. Childhood memories are like photos that have tumbled out of an album, snapshots that don’t provide the complete picture. But we remember stories we’ve been told, and stories we’ve overheard. We take this information and the episodic memories we have and string together a story. Even as adults we try to complete the childhood story. We never stop trying to find the ending.

We moved to the North Mountain the summer I was four and my mother was pregnant with my little sister, Morgaine. They had bought one hundred acres of land near Lupin Cove. My father made the house himself and we lived in a tent pitched in a meadow surrounded by forest while he built it. My mother told me this. I remember the tent was green and there was a path through the meadow to the house. I loved this path that cut through the tall grasses. In the meadow, purple vetch threaded up through the grass stems and touched my mother’s round belly. The grasses grew so high they were taller than me, but I could look up and see how they touched my mother’s breasts. I drew pictures on her stomach with icing coloured with beet and carrot juice. Then she’d let me lick it off. The acreage was mostly forest, except for the clearing around a large, rickety barn. They put a sandbox in the clearing where I played with my pail and shovel.

There was also a path through the woods. It was a twisting path my father had cut through the pines to the clifftop jutting out from the trees over the Bay of Fundy. He called the path “the labyrinth of life.” It snaked through the forest to the perilous brink of the cliff. The path was difficult and winding, with sharp turns where you had to slow down. My father said this was the main purpose of his pathway — everyone was forced to stop hurrying and consider their journey as it unfolded. People needed to be open to sudden turns and trust the way ahead. Being in the moment would take over and time would lose meaning.