Digging thepast into
Toronto author’s memoir explores life lessons learned while taming a wild garden
A writer could hardly find more fertile ground for a memoir than Alexandra Risen’s enchanted jungle of a garden.
The one-acre lot, perched on the edge of a ravine and desperately in need of taming, was the reason she and her husband bought their downtown Toronto house.
Little did she know that reclaiming the wild space would also help her unearth her buried past and a childhood that echoed with longing, silence and un-
asked questions.
Years spent digging, pruning and coming to terms with the stubborn physical landscape provide a rich metaphorical framework for her new book, Unearthed: Love, Acceptance, and Other Lessons from an Abandoned Garden.
“The garden was my portal,” says Risen, sipping mint tea made from homegrown spearmint in the soaring pagoda she and her husband Cam restored at the foot of their property.
“But it’s not just about the garden. It’s about relationships with families, with parents and children.” It’s also about the mysteries we carry with us. Risen’s parents, torn from their Ukrainian birthplace by the Nazis during the Second World War, met and married at a displaced persons camp in Europe and later emigrated to Edmonton.
“I grew up with parents who had experienced trauma and they each dealt with it in their own way” ALEXANDRA RISEN AUTHOR
But they never spoke about those dark years, or their feelings, period. There were no photos, documents or memories of their homeland shared with their two daughters.
As a result, there was much that Risen and her older sister Sonia didn’t understand about their father, apipefitter at CN Railway and fixer of all things who barely spoke. Nor did they know what drove their no-nonsense mother, who worked in a chemical factory and whose happiest place was her own Edmonton garden, where she tended the vegetables and fruit that fed the family.
The process of putting it all together began with Risen’s overgrown Toronto property. She, Cam and their young son moved to their new home just after her father died and as her mother’s health began to decline. While emptying their childhood house and moving her to a nursing home, the sisters discovered war documents, birth certificates and photographs and set them aside.
As Risen yanked monstrous knotweed from her yard and poured her soul into the earth, something began to stir. She steeled herself to start sifting through the papers and research her parents’ past.
Outside the pagoda in the dappled sunshine, willows wave their boughs as Risen speaks. Yellow rocket flowers and pink astilbes point skyward, and a fountain in the pond showers water lilies with spray.
The hum of traffic is a reminder that this is the core of the city, though it’s dulled by the wind rustling tall grasses, cattails and the canopy of trees.
Risen, 54, had a career in finance and never planned to write about her life.
Then she took a course on writing about nature a few years ago and began writing a series of short pieces. When she showed drafts to an agent, he said, “You’re writing a memoir.”
She resisted mainly because “I had a lot of unresolved issues with my parents that I did not want to delve into.”
She faces them in the book: “Fighting. Silent meals. Their friends singing melancholy tunes. Their need to stay together.”
Cam encouraged her to finish what she had started for herself and for her son.
What she learned by writing and plumbing her memories still makes her eyes well up.
“I grew up with parents who had experienced trauma and they each dealt with it in their own way, as we all do. I didn’t understand.”
Her pragmatic mother coped by “living forward” — cooking, gardening, working, shutting out the past. Her father “lived inwards,” she adds. Close-lipped and inscrutable.
Writing brought back her father’s attempts to connect — quietly bringing home a puppy for his daughters and in a particularly poignant passage, handing Risen a parting gift as she leaves town to attend university, a tool box he made himself. The book is not a gauzy recollection. It is about the cycle of life, which includes death, loss and the destructive power of nature. And Risen takes an unflinching look at her own behaviour as mother and daughter.
There is also rebirth, hope and unexpected rewards — the ducks who return each year, the deer that appeared just as Risen was uncovering the secrets of their new property, and the first batch of syrup they make from their sugar maple.
Nature’s hold on Risen has not let go. She is currently working on a non-fiction book about the connection between humans and nature.
“Stories always come down to love,” Risen tells her adolescent son in Unearthed. She still believes that. “I started (the book) resentful of my parents and I end up loving them.”