The House with the Silver Maple

by Margaret

Created on July 08, 2026 at 00:20

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Date: October 01, 2025
Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada

Description

How I desided start my Memories... There is a particular kind of silence that comes only after the first cold morning of autumn. Not the silence of winter, when snow softens every sound, nor the bright stillness of summer before the neighbourhood wakes. This silence carries the faint rustle of dry leaves and the distant chatter of geese flying south. It smells of damp earth, cedar mulch, and the promise that another season has quietly slipped away. I noticed it before I noticed the tea had gone cold. The silver maple behind the house had begun letting go of its leaves during the night. They lay scattered across the grass in shades of pale gold and soft amber, collecting around the legs of the old garden bench David had built after his retirement. He insisted cedar would last longer. I insisted it didn't need to be quite so heavy. He smiled without looking up from his tools. "If it's heavy," he said, "it means the grandchildren won't tip it over." He was right, as he usually was about practical things. The bench had weathered twelve Canadian winters since then. The wood had turned a quiet silver-grey, and if you looked closely, you could still find tiny marks where Noah had once tried to carve his initials with a plastic camping knife. Beside the bench stood a small round cedar table. It wasn't elegant. Its legs weren't perfectly even. One edge of the tabletop had a knot that David refused to sand away because, in his words, "Trees are allowed to keep a few imperfections." The knot always made me smile. This morning the table held a blue stoneware teapot wrapped in a quilted tea cosy, my favourite cream-coloured mug, my mother's green recipe notebook, two family photo albums, and a brand-new lined notebook whose first page was still blank. That blank page had been waiting for me all week. Perhaps all year. Perhaps much longer than that. ... to be continue ;-)