The house Ocean had shoddily built on the commune had four stories. The woodstove and kitchen were in the cellar, from which a spiral staircase led to the first floor, where the living room was, and then the second floor, with our mother’s workroom and a library. The third floor was where I slept, and the fourth floor, a loft, was where they had their bedroom with a balcony. It was in this room my mother gave birth to my sister. My father was determined she’d have a homebirth and apologized to me that I was born in the hospital and not on the land as Morgaine was.

We buried the placenta together in the field. The maroon flesh quivered as my father placed it in the hole we’d dug. It was covered in a grid of arteries, the cord attached in the centre, an alien topography, a map to the secret of life. The organ glistened as the sun fell on it before we covered it in handfuls of earth. A woman’s body is miraculous, Ocean said. He patted my tummy as he said I too would one day create a miracle.

Morgaine slept with my parents for the first two years, constantly breastfeeding. The baby, as we still called her then, started waking up crying when they would burn incense and massage each other.

This is when they moved her into my room. Morgaine continued to wake up in the night and would crawl into bed with me. Sometimes I wonder if I remember correctly. We never had normal bedtimes, sometimes rising and setting with the sun and just as often staying up late into the night for Solstice or other High Holy Days, as my father called them.

By day Morgaine was a chatterbox. At night she was quiet as we listened to coyote howls, the wind rushing through the trees. Then to the sounds of chanting and drumming once my parents started having people come and build on the other parts of the land to join the Community. My mother would put us to bed, but if we got up and ran outside, my father would tell her to let us be. We would watch the vesper bats dart through the twilight. We helped our father build bat houses.

One day we heard the crows screaming in the trees, two of their babies on the ground below a nest. Ocean left the dead one to nature and took the injured fledgling to the barn where he fixed its damaged wing. When it was able to fly, he released it for the crow family in the trees to reclaim. But the bird had imprinted on my father by then and would soar down when he’d throw some scraps. It would perch on his arm.

Ocean came home with a large tattoo of a crow on his forearm. “A murder of crows, Eve, although that word masks their wisdom, their humour, their loyalty and kindness,” he said as he showed me, black ink on red and puffy skin.