On a recent CBC Radio 1 interview, Eleanor Wachtel asked Doris Lessing about her earliest memory.  It happened to be when she was about three.  She mentioned her bristling reaction to being splashed with cold water by her fellow sunbathers.  Her eye was captured by the sight of mobile flesh released from the confines of proper dress in British-dominated Persia.  The dichotomy amused her (a spark for her future writing career), and also gave her comfort, remembering a familial time.  Hmmm.  My earliest memory is less interesting but maybe just as telling.  I remember playing on the stairwell in my family’s apartment in Pasadena, Texas.  My fathered worked nearby as a NASA engineer.  It was 1966, so I was 4.  What I remember was enjoying this large triangle stair where the steps changed direction partway up the staircase.  I would gather my toys there and survey the room from there—the only room actually, as the apartment was very small.  At the top of the stairs, family photos hung on the walls.  Whether crawling up the stairs on hands and feet or walking down, I watched these photos for reassurance.  The stairway and especially the large triangle stair had become my comfort spot.  We never lived in a home with stairs again—in Texas.

Thankfully, my 19^th century home here in Mahone Bay has a staircase.  (In fact, it has three levels of stairs—ask my wife if I am overcompensating after she carries my son’s clothes from the basement laundry to his attic room 3 flights up.)  Over the past ten years living in this house I have recognized the importance of the stairway and the landing for its enhancement of life’s moments.  On regular school mornings, the children lay out the next day’s clothes on the chaise sitting in the landing between the 2^nd and attic floors—a rite established by my protocol-teaching spouse.  When the children were smaller, we also used the landing for story time.  The best times though are holiday mornings, when the children spend agonizing minutes at the top of the stairs, awaiting my camera set-up, so they can bound into the living room and front porch to see what Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny has delivered.       

Having remembered the photos that awaited me outside my bedroom on the stair landing in that first apartment, I decided to provide the same comfort and reassurance to my own children.  Since the main floor is considered a public space, the walls are filled with artwork.  The upper floors are private areas, so I have filled the walls with family photographs.  Now, I just happened to inherit quite a cache of photographs over the last decade.  You see, both of my grandmothers had a penchant for hiding family photos.  One kept them in my grandfather’s old typewriter case and the other devoted a bottom drawer of a hutch.  For the first time, all of these black-and-white photographs jointly grace the walls in a collage of family history.  The timeline ranges from my great-great-great-grandmother Wisenbaker to current black-and-white portraits of my own children.  Observing the physical traits and recounting stories from the past rewards our Canadian solitude with a familial solace.  To coordinate the various black and brown tints collage, we framed each photograph with a similar cream to beige mat board, then finished with lots of different frames all in tones of warm silver—that wonderful cozy mix of gold and silver that recalls a bygone era while mixing with just about any colour you could want in a room.  The hardest part was arranging more than 50 photographs evenly on one wall and floating effortlessly up another to the attic.  It’s our own piece of heaven…